Salman Rushdie’s ‘Quichotte’ Took its Author to Uncharted Territory

“I’ve always tried to do something I haven’t done before, because I have a low boredom threshold,” Salman Rushdie says while seated in the book-lined conference room at the Wylie Agency. “There was certainly a point in my life where I guess I could have written a version of Midnight’s Children every two years and it would have been fine—except I would have wanted to shoot myself!” Instead, in the 38 years since his Booker-winning breakthrough novel was published, the writer has ranged over a variety of styles and subjects, such as the code of honor underpinning Pakistani society in Shame and what he describes as “the Eastern fabulist tradition” in his 2016 novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.

Rushdie takes, which will be published by Random House in September and was recently long-listed for the Booker. Inspired by ’s , 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.