From Proto-Novel to Post-Novel: Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte as the Rewriting of Don Quixote

Salman Rushdie’s 2019 novel Quichotte is the story of a hero reimagined by Rushdie as a 21st century version of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The novel opens in contemporary America where the 70-year-old protagonist Ismail Smile, who goes mad by watching TV, works as a travelling salesman for a pharmaceutical company called Smile Pharmaceuticals. The plot focuses on Ismail’s love for a famous television personality Miss Salma R. who, like Ismail, comes from India. He gets retired, changes his name to Quichotte and goes on a quest to win Salma’s love. The quest turns into a complete replica of Cervantes’s Don Quixote when, on a shooting star, he wishes that he had a son who suddenly appears in the passenger seat of the car he drives. He names him Sancho. Yet, the narration turns out to be a novel in the novel written by a spy novelist referred to only as Brother. Quichotte, therefore, becomes Brother’s imagination that recreates the classical Don Quixote in a contemporary setting. This paper, then, focuses on the concept of post-truth in the meta-narrative of Salman Rushdie who not only rewrites a classical novel but also raises questions as to whether or not truths and narrators are reliable. This study also analyses the saturation of the manipulating power of post-truth era in the lives of Rushdie’s characters.