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drews1's review against another edition
5.0
Definitely flawed but still brilliant.
This is an interesting novel in the sense that there are some real flaws. Rushdie takes a lot of chances in this work and while a lot work out there are also a lot that fall flat. In the end the highs outweigh the lows.
This is an interesting novel in the sense that there are some real flaws. Rushdie takes a lot of chances in this work and while a lot work out there are also a lot that fall flat. In the end the highs outweigh the lows.
shimmery's review against another edition
3.0
‘So many of today’s stories are and must be of this plural, sprawling kind, because a kind of nuclear fission has taken place in human lives and relations, families have been divided, millions upon millions of us have travelled to the four corners of the (admittedly spherical, and therefore cornerless) globe, whether by necessity or choice.’
This is a sprawling story, covering love, family, addiction and ‘the junk culture... addling the brains of many fools old and young, maybe even of America.’
I found this a fun read, though slow in places. I enjoyed Rushdie’s descriptions of reality TV and laughed out loud in places, but felt some of the commentary surrounding social media and contemporary culture was a little reductive/old news. Some unexpectedly moving sections towards the end. Interesting parts about the relationship between the author and their work.
This is a sprawling story, covering love, family, addiction and ‘the junk culture... addling the brains of many fools old and young, maybe even of America.’
I found this a fun read, though slow in places. I enjoyed Rushdie’s descriptions of reality TV and laughed out loud in places, but felt some of the commentary surrounding social media and contemporary culture was a little reductive/old news. Some unexpectedly moving sections towards the end. Interesting parts about the relationship between the author and their work.
kmerms's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
sidharthvardhan's review against another edition
4.0
Rushdie's novels have some motifs that repeat a lot - broken families spread across the worlds, references to Bollywood, Hollywood, political figures, sci-fic, other literature and alll sorts of other cultural figures, socio-political commentary etc. He is an amazing author, incredible story teller - that is, when he does have an incredible story to tell, as with Midnight Children but most of his lesser novels barely hold togather because of chaotic ways he has, almost exploding with amount of world he wants to contain in them.
What might probably make it one of his better books is that chaos are basically a theme within the novel - trying to reflect the chaos of our modern world, where satire becomes real, the elections of two world's biggest democracies are won by the persons who most manage to entertain the public most, musicians win Nobel prize for literature, the wars for peace, defense departments buying weapons of mass destruction, the examples go on and on but I am in no mood to be eloquent. Rushdie does a good job to show those chaos.
The theme of worlds of fiction and reality merging togather is another theme which though hardly originally is very well done - not only Brother's (the author-protagonist in book) world show mergance with that of Quichotte, the character of his novel - and their similarities with one another, but but Rushdie himself has similarities with characters of his novel - there are many instances but the most powerful of them is that Brother's prose style is same as that of Rushdie. Look at this quote about Brother, the other protagonist of the story:
I can see why booker people short listed this book after ignoring last couple of Rusdhie's works.
To be honest, my problem with this book was opposite of problem I normally have with books - it was too small, it needed to be much bigger, much, much bigger to contain the whole world and provide a proper growth to themes it touches only superficially. Quichotte and his son needed more adventures to accomplish the amobitious project this book had taken. It seems to me that authors, especially ones who are very successful feel compelled (or actual pressure from publishers) to release a book every couple of years, and launch the books which might still have much more potential. If only books were like mobile apps that could be updated with improvements after their release!
Some quotes:
▪ Sometimes the story being told was wiser than the teller.
▪ One made the finest cloth one could with such skills as one had, accompanied by, one hoped, the humility lacked by Arachne when she challenged Athena and insulted the gods. (However, if it was true that Arachne’s tapestry, which showed how the gods had abused humans, especially Zeus with all his rapes, was superior to Athena’s, then she was all for Arachne, and vengeful Athena, spidering her opponent, didn’t come out of the story at all well.) But now, discontinuity ruled. Yesterday meant nothing and could not help you build tomorrow. Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by.
▪ “It builds up, the resentment. It piles up like New York garbage. Then something comes along and gives it a shove and after that, get out of the way of the avalanche if you can.”
▪ I’ve been writing about the end of the world, he thought, and what I was really doing was imagining death. My own, masquerading as everyone else’s. A private ending redescribed as a universal one.
▪ When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,” Czesław Miłosz once said
▪ He said he was trying also to write about impossible, obsessional love, father-son relationships, sibling quarrels, and yes, unforgivable things; about Indian immigrants, racism toward them, crooks among them; about cyber-spies, science fiction, the intertwining of fictional and “real” realities, the death of the author, the end of the world. He told her he wanted to incorporate elements of the parodic, and of satire and pastiche. Nothing very ambitious, then, she said. And it’s about opioid addiction, too, he added.
▪ Haven’t you heard about British doctors?” she said. “They don’t like giving their patients medicines for what ails them. They think medicine is bad for sick people.”
▪ Everyone wanted youth now. How tedious that was! Young Indiana Jones. Young Han Solo. Young Sherlock Holmes. Young Dumbledore. Any minute now there would be a mini-series about the young Methuselah. As an older person he wanted the trend to be reversed. How about Old Sex in the City? Old Friends? Old Girls? Old Gossip Girl? Old Housewives? Old Bachelors? How about old models on the runway? (Victoria, after all, had lived to be a very old queen, and no doubt still, in her old age, had her secrets.) Sure, The Golden Girls, okay. But that was just one show. How about Old Simpsons? How about an Old Fonz in Happy Days Got Older?
▪ He now understood that this loosening was perhaps not only physical but also ethical, that when violence was done to a person, then violence entered the range of what that person—previously peaceable and law-abiding—afterwards included in the spectrum of what was possible. It became an option.
What might probably make it one of his better books is that chaos are basically a theme within the novel - trying to reflect the chaos of our modern world, where satire becomes real, the elections of two world's biggest democracies are won by the persons who most manage to entertain the public most, musicians win Nobel prize for literature, the wars for peace, defense departments buying weapons of mass destruction, the examples go on and on but I am in no mood to be eloquent. Rushdie does a good job to show those chaos.
The theme of worlds of fiction and reality merging togather is another theme which though hardly originally is very well done - not only Brother's (the author-protagonist in book) world show mergance with that of Quichotte, the character of his novel - and their similarities with one another, but but Rushdie himself has similarities with characters of his novel - there are many instances but the most powerful of them is that Brother's prose style is same as that of Rushdie. Look at this quote about Brother, the other protagonist of the story:
"He knew that other writers could make masterpieces out of accounts of tea parties (e.g., the Mad Hatter’s) or dinner parties (e.g., Mrs. Dalloway’s) or, if you were Leopold Bloom, out of a day spent walking around a city while your wife was being unfaithful to you back home, but Brother had always needed blood. It was an age of blood, not of tea, he told himself (and others, from time to time)."
I can see why booker people short listed this book after ignoring last couple of Rusdhie's works.
To be honest, my problem with this book was opposite of problem I normally have with books - it was too small, it needed to be much bigger, much, much bigger to contain the whole world and provide a proper growth to themes it touches only superficially. Quichotte and his son needed more adventures to accomplish the amobitious project this book had taken. It seems to me that authors, especially ones who are very successful feel compelled (or actual pressure from publishers) to release a book every couple of years, and launch the books which might still have much more potential. If only books were like mobile apps that could be updated with improvements after their release!
Some quotes:
▪ Sometimes the story being told was wiser than the teller.
▪ One made the finest cloth one could with such skills as one had, accompanied by, one hoped, the humility lacked by Arachne when she challenged Athena and insulted the gods. (However, if it was true that Arachne’s tapestry, which showed how the gods had abused humans, especially Zeus with all his rapes, was superior to Athena’s, then she was all for Arachne, and vengeful Athena, spidering her opponent, didn’t come out of the story at all well.) But now, discontinuity ruled. Yesterday meant nothing and could not help you build tomorrow. Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by.
▪ “It builds up, the resentment. It piles up like New York garbage. Then something comes along and gives it a shove and after that, get out of the way of the avalanche if you can.”
▪ I’ve been writing about the end of the world, he thought, and what I was really doing was imagining death. My own, masquerading as everyone else’s. A private ending redescribed as a universal one.
▪ When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,” Czesław Miłosz once said
▪ He said he was trying also to write about impossible, obsessional love, father-son relationships, sibling quarrels, and yes, unforgivable things; about Indian immigrants, racism toward them, crooks among them; about cyber-spies, science fiction, the intertwining of fictional and “real” realities, the death of the author, the end of the world. He told her he wanted to incorporate elements of the parodic, and of satire and pastiche. Nothing very ambitious, then, she said. And it’s about opioid addiction, too, he added.
▪ Haven’t you heard about British doctors?” she said. “They don’t like giving their patients medicines for what ails them. They think medicine is bad for sick people.”
▪ Everyone wanted youth now. How tedious that was! Young Indiana Jones. Young Han Solo. Young Sherlock Holmes. Young Dumbledore. Any minute now there would be a mini-series about the young Methuselah. As an older person he wanted the trend to be reversed. How about Old Sex in the City? Old Friends? Old Girls? Old Gossip Girl? Old Housewives? Old Bachelors? How about old models on the runway? (Victoria, after all, had lived to be a very old queen, and no doubt still, in her old age, had her secrets.) Sure, The Golden Girls, okay. But that was just one show. How about Old Simpsons? How about an Old Fonz in Happy Days Got Older?
▪ He now understood that this loosening was perhaps not only physical but also ethical, that when violence was done to a person, then violence entered the range of what that person—previously peaceable and law-abiding—afterwards included in the spectrum of what was possible. It became an option.
zeotoy's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
phoenix2's review against another edition
1.0
Quichotte is a book within a book, an almost retelling of Don Quixote with the twist of magical realism.
The book has a slow pace, especially at the beginning, when it introduces the characters and twists the two narrations, of Quichotte and of the author who writes Quichotte. However, both were heavy on the reference to pop culture, literature, historical events, and more, making the book hard to follow, in addition to the magical realism that overcomplicated things. Needless to say, it's not an easy book to read, and even more challenging to enjoy.
The book has a slow pace, especially at the beginning, when it introduces the characters and twists the two narrations, of Quichotte and of the author who writes Quichotte. However, both were heavy on the reference to pop culture, literature, historical events, and more, making the book hard to follow, in addition to the magical realism that overcomplicated things. Needless to say, it's not an easy book to read, and even more challenging to enjoy.
absolute_gemma's review against another edition
lighthearted
mysterious
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
candacesiegle_greedyreader's review against another edition
3.0
3.5
One reviewer mentioned that once you get past the first 85 pages, the novel flies. For me, it went the other way. "Quichotte" started out as imaginative, literate, playful, But as the novel rolled on, I lost the vibe, something that can happen with me and picaresque novels.
I was delighted at Quichotte's creation of his imaginary son, Sancho Smile, especially when Sancho was trying to figure out why he's in black and white and everyone else is in color. There are similar captivating moments but it just went on too long. Yes, the writing is luscious, but more was needed to propel Quichotte through to the end.
~~Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader
One reviewer mentioned that once you get past the first 85 pages, the novel flies. For me, it went the other way. "Quichotte" started out as imaginative, literate, playful, But as the novel rolled on, I lost the vibe, something that can happen with me and picaresque novels.
I was delighted at Quichotte's creation of his imaginary son, Sancho Smile, especially when Sancho was trying to figure out why he's in black and white and everyone else is in color. There are similar captivating moments but it just went on too long. Yes, the writing is luscious, but more was needed to propel Quichotte through to the end.
~~Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader
cindypepper's review against another edition
3.0
This is honestly a lot.
Rushdie's writing style can toe a fine line between complex and extra, and when it works, it works (see: Midnight's Children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories). In Quichotte, it gets meta: there's a narrative baked in a narrative. Sometimes they parallel each other. The novel gets chaotic to the point of utter bombast. The references to modern-day life feel hamfisted at times (e.g. humans that turn into mastodons, the Big Pharma and Elon Musk humanizations), often crammed, and often little more than a checklist of pop culture allusions ("graduating to a Rolls-Royce after years spent behind a Nissan Qashqai. It was colour after a lifetime of black-and-white, Monroe after Mansfield, Margaux after Hobnob, Cervantes after Avellaneda, Hammett after Spillane...").
However, in the moments when Rushdie cuts past the namedrops and the literary allusions, there lies beautiful prose and a deftly layered plot. But it gets bogged down by its own critique and bluster that it can be a fatiguing, maybe even pyrrhic, journey to get there.
Rushdie's writing style can toe a fine line between complex and extra, and when it works, it works (see: Midnight's Children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories). In Quichotte, it gets meta: there's a narrative baked in a narrative. Sometimes they parallel each other. The novel gets chaotic to the point of utter bombast. The references to modern-day life feel hamfisted at times (e.g. humans that turn into mastodons, the Big Pharma and Elon Musk humanizations), often crammed, and often little more than a checklist of pop culture allusions ("graduating to a Rolls-Royce after years spent behind a Nissan Qashqai. It was colour after a lifetime of black-and-white, Monroe after Mansfield, Margaux after Hobnob, Cervantes after Avellaneda, Hammett after Spillane...").
However, in the moments when Rushdie cuts past the namedrops and the literary allusions, there lies beautiful prose and a deftly layered plot. But it gets bogged down by its own critique and bluster that it can be a fatiguing, maybe even pyrrhic, journey to get there.