“The Little King”
by Salman Rushdie
from the July 29, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
It’s been a while since I really enjoyed something by Salman Rushdie, but I haven’t been keeping up with his most recent two novels, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights and The Golden House. I’ve always found his style compelling — the voice he employs will often sweep me through one of his books — but as my years have extended I’ve been unable to see much more that I connect with. I’m sure a lot of that is just me, so I welcome the opportunity to read something new. This piece is an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Quichotte, which is scheduled to hit shelves in the United States on September 3.
As expected, the voice of the first paragraph is welcoming:
There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a travelling man of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers, who had developed an unwholesome, because entirely one-sided, passion for a certain television personality, the beautiful, witty, and adored talk-show host Miss Salma R., whom he had never met: an infatuation that he characterized, quite inaccurately, as love. In the name of this so-called love, he christened himself Quichotte, for the opera “Don Quichotte,” and resolved to be his “beloved” ’s knight-errant, to pursue her zealously right through the television screen into whatever exalted high-definition reality she and her kind inhabited, and, by deeds as well as by grace, to win her heart.
It’s got Rushdie’s usual fairy tale tone, and it mixes in his interest in playing with his own story: Salma R. And obviously he’s also playing with Don Quixote.
I haven’t been able to read the story yet, so I’ll leave this here for now. Please feel free to comment below and let me know your thoughts on Rushdie’s work, this story, your interest in Quichotte, etc.
It’s almost 8000 words long, an excerpt, and there is plenty of other Rushdie I have not read yet I could read if I wanted to, so I’m skipping this one. I’m in the middle of reading two spectacularly great books (Pat Barker’s Union Street and Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac) so I’m just as happy to have a skip week with The New Yorker anyway.
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I did read the (very short) interview with Rushdie and have two critical comments about that. First, Rushdie is asked about his choice of the surname “Smile” and the given name “Happy”. (He named a character “Happy Smile”? Seriously?) He says his reason was “Heavy irony, I’m afraid.” Even he seems to be embarrassed by this. Very odd. My second criticism is of Deborah Treisman, who shockingly uses the word “insure” when she means “ensure”. It’s a mistake I can understand from a less literate person, but in The New Yorker? Oi!
Just read and it reads like a story with an agenda. Which clearly it is. The opioid crisis. As you say Mr. Berrett, it has the tone of a fairy tale, with the way the characters are named, the diction and the syntax to a certain extent; it all sounds like a preaching fairy tale. I find it difficult to imagine this as part of a novel. Regardless, I didn’t feel immersed in the story at all, as if I was being told about the story by someone else who was giving a synopsis of the real story. Alot of exposition with a kind of off the cuff feel to it that took me way out of the narrative. I haven’t read much of Rushdie. Maybe I’m missing something. Couldn’t wait to get to the end.
I’ll agree with Trevor that Rushdie’s style can carry you along. It’s light, affable, ironic and engaging but I also found this far too much an allegory, using the fairy tale as vehicle, to have much identification or involvement up until the rather moving final encounter where Dulcinea, so to speak, is revealed as a junkie. That’s a pretty good image.