![]() She’s a bipolar former Bollywood star who has decamped to New York where she has reinvented herself as a daytime TV presenter. Foremost among them is Ismail Smile, a travelling salesman “of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers”, who journeys across the US to meet his beloved Salma R. Quichotte, which has been longlisted for the Booker prize, abounds with exuberantly broad-brush characters. And now? What happens when much of modern life seems like a grotesque noisescape? They were populated by absurd, hysterical, grotesque characters. They dramatised hybridity, interconnection and cultural convergence. They slalomed through history, philosophy, imperial politics. Rushdie’s earlier novels, among them Midnight’s Children and Shame, were heralded as antidotes to the beige provincialism of much British fiction in the 1970s and early 80s. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. ![]() Life itself, a character claims, has become:Ī series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. ![]() It’s a novel less to be read than to be scrolled through, a seemingly endless feed of gags, thought spasms and larger-than-life happenings. ![]() This rambunctious reworking of Cervantes’s Don Quixote judders between inland America and downturn Britain, euphoria and grief, picaresque and satire, postcolonial melancholia and posthuman futurism – often on the same page. ![]()
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