Wendy Smith at Publishers Weekly:
Rushdie takes another journey into unexplored territory in Quichotte, which will be published by Random House in September and was recently long-listed for the Booker. Inspired by Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the novel portrays an elderly traveling salesman “deranged by reality television” who falls in love with the host of a daytime talk show whom he has never met. As Quichotte (the name he takes in letters to his beloved) travels across the country to meet Miss Salma R, a parallel plot concerns the writer who created him; these twin story lines eventually converge in a fantastical ending that tips its hat to some of the science fiction tales Rushdie loved as a boy.
“It comes from the literary tradition of the picaresque novel, combined with a certain kind of modernist playfulness,” Rushdie says. “There’s quite a lot of Joyce in it. This was a scary book for me to write, because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pull it off. There are these two narrative lines, which echo and mirror and talk to each other. I knew that the thing that would make the book work was if by the end they could merge, and I really wasn’t sure how to do that for a long time. I was quite nervous about it.”
Rushdie adds, “Normally I don’t show anyone a work in progress, but in this case when I had written 50 or 60 pages of the first draft, I actually asked Andrew Wylie [his agent] to read it. I said, ‘Look, this is very weird, but I need to know if it’s good weird or bad weird.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know where you’re going to go with this, because it could go in a lot of directions, but what I can say is that it’s the funniest thing of yours that I’ve read.’ That was comforting, and I’m pleased to see in the early responses that a lot of people have been finding it very funny.”
More here.