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  • Quichotte

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Salman Rushdie
  • Narrated by: Vikas Adam
  • Length: 16 hrs and 1 min
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (34 ratings)

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Quichotte cover art

Quichotte

Written by: Salman Rushdie
Narrated by: Vikas Adam
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Publisher's Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

An epic Don Quixote for the modern age, “a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder” (Time) from internationally best-selling author Salman Rushdie

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

“Lovely, unsentimental, heart-affirming...a remembrance of what holds our human lives in some equilibrium - a way of feeling and a way of telling. Love and language.” (Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review)

Named One of The Best Books of The Year by Time and NPR

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.

Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the listener on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie's work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Praise for Quichotte

“Brilliant...a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement.” (Financial Times)

Quichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism.... The narration is fleet of foot, always one step ahead of the reader - somewhere between a pinball machine and a three-dimensional game of snakes and ladders.... This novel can fly, it can float, it’s anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot.” (The Sunday Times)

Quichotte [is] an updating of Cervantes’ story that proves to be an equally complicated literary encounter, jumbling together a chivalric quest, a satire on Trump’s America and a whole lot of postmodern playfulness in a novel that is as sharp as a flick-knife and as clever as a barrel of monkeys.... This is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind.” (The Times, UK)

©2019 Salman Rushdie (P)2019 Random House Audio

What the critics say

“Rushdie weaves together all of his subjects, sharply observed, with extraordinary elegance and wit.... Cervantes’s hero, who is eternally modern perhaps because he is essentially anti-contemporary, couldn’t be a more inspired transplant into the mad reality of the present day, which Rushdie sends up in terms both universal and highly specific, tragic and hilarious, strange but hauntingly familiar.... At least here’s something worth reading as civilization crumbles around us, before we succumb to our fates. Right?” (Entertainment Weekly)

Quichotte is a novel that attempts to reflect back to us the total, crumbling insanity of living in a world unmoored from reality - that shows what happens when lies become as good as facts.... And if Quichotte drives you nuts, that’s fine. It’s meant to. It’s layered in such a way that you will lose yourself in the shifting reality of it.” (NPR)

Quichotte, Rushdie’s Trump-era reworking of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, is a frantically inventive take on ‘the Age of Anything-Can-Happen’ we’ve endured these last few years. It’s a concoction of narratives within narratives that blends the latest news headlines with apocalyptic flights of fancy.... Rushdie doesn’t offer much hope for our dispiriting times. But in a frayed and feverish way, he captures their flavor exactly.” (The Boston Globe)

What listeners say about Quichotte

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Magically Realistically Delicious

First, the story. Brilliant as always. Inventive, magical, and mundane all at once. It’s our world-or is it? The bones of our world are there, but they’re embroidered with the fantasy of Rushdie’s imagined version of a much different place.

Second, the performance. The narrator is superb. The characters have their own voices and verbal tics; it’s easy to keep track of which one is speaking. The language comes alive on his tongue, and it’s a joy to know how to pronounce things I would see on a page and wonder at and woefully mispronouncing them in various creative ways.

Last, and most definitely not least: the language. Rushdie’s prose sings the joys and despairs of contemporary American life. It made me love/hate/love the country over and over - sometimes in the same sentence. He is brilliant as always. The only disadvantage of listening to his work, rather than seeing the words on a page, is that it’s not as easy to go back and re-listen as it is to reread passages that tickles the brain.

Cannot rate it highly enough.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
  • ZAB
  • 2019-10-23

Great book

it was one of the few books in which I enjoyed listening more than the reading part! Excellent effort by Vikas!

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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Vikas Adam

The way he reads makes the story more exciting & more sensible.
Amazing job!
If I had read the novel, I wouldn't have enjoyed it this much.
Thank You!

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Turtles, all the way down.

This re-imagining of "Don Quixote" seems chaotic, perhaps because the original novel is chaotic. There's a story within the story, and an apocalyptic storyline as well. Creation within creation, destruction within destruction.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that, it's all fiction.

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