Quichotte - Salman Rushdie

 It's the breadth of imagination which hooks us in, the depth of thought and compassion that enthrals.  Salman Rushdie may just be the greatest living novelist in English.  Rushdie, however, lives in America, as do both of the heroes in Quichotte.   I say both because Quichotte (pronounced key-shott) is a double picaresque, blending the journeys of the ageing seller of opioids in his quest for the affections of former Bollywood star, now US talk-show host, Miss Salma R, and his creator, the pseudonymous author 'Sam DuChamp' who is trying to put his family back together before he dies.   Both protagonists were born in India and live in America.   'Sam' has a sister who is a British peer, Quichotte has a half-sister who lives in America; both have survived breast cancer.   Sam has an estranged son who has become embroiled with US Security Agencies.   Quichotte conjures up an imaginary son, whom he names (of course) Sancho.

Before we know it, Sancho (like Pinocchio), has become a real boy.   So real that other people can see and speak with him.   Because Quichotte's picaresque also includes Magic Realism.   One of the towns they pass through is being terrorists by mastodons - technically humans turned into rampaging mastodons, some of whom still walk upright and wear green suits.   It is all brilliantly done, all enthused with empathy and a profound humanity.

Quichotte may not be as celebrated as Midnight's Children nor as controversial as Satanic Verses.   It is nonetheless a mini masterpiece, a triumphant autumnal work brimming with life even as its protagonists consciously face death. 

Moravagine - Blaise Cendrars

I found out about Moravagine from Jacques Chessex's Vampire of Rompraz (reviewed below) which was a take on Cendrars' original. The Cendrars certainly is original. I know of nothing quite like it. It is, in a sense, a psychological picaresque in which our narrator ("Dr Science") has devoted his life to studying "Moravagine" a nobly-born serial killer of pubescent girls, gross comedian and adventurer. Clearly neither of these men are really encumbered with these names, nor are we told who they really are. Cendrars is himself a fiction, who himself appears in his fiction. One thing both Rompraz and Moravagine have in common is the scene in which Cendrars of the French Foreign Legion loses his arm in World War I. That might well be the only real event in either, but both writers adopt a terse, journalistic style, skimming through loads of circumstantial detail which would otherwise slow down their narrative. They both profess to explain their titular freaks of nature and never get anywhere near so doing. Moravagine is the more imaginative novel, Ropraz the more convincing illusion. The Vampire is more frightening than the child killer because we never really see the killer at work whereas we are shown the gruesome handiwork of the Vampire.

Moravagine is relentlessly offbeat, wacky to the point of derangement, yet it is compelling, occasionally funny, and always fascinating.

Juan in America - Eric Linklater

Eric Linklater is not a name on literary lips these days, but in his prime he was enormously popular and critically highly regarded. His wartime radio plays for the BBC were seen as so important to the war effort that they were discussed in broadsheet editorials. His third novel, Juan in America, was a bestseller and whilst it may seem entirely fanciful, Linklater's own travels as a young man were even more incredible - India, China, and indeed America. This is a novelist who knows whereof he writes.

I don't know, but I suspect his work and amatory experiences were not quite so varied as Juan's, who goes from college football hero to bum to slinger of hash, bootlegger, ice cream dispenser, upside-down opera singer and movie extra, and whose conquests include an Amazonian acrobat and a gangster's daughter.

Juan is a direct descendant of Byron's Don Juan. He shares the Don's taste for adventure and the ladies without being either predatory or amoral. He is a likeable companion as we follow his picaresque travels. There are occasional affronts to modern taste - Linklater's handling of black people is not what we would wish, though it has to be remembered that he was writing in America in 1931 and in many ways reflects the attitudes of East Coast Ivy Leaguers of that era. Read closely enough and you realise that, whilst he doesn't seem to rate his impoverished black characters as individuals, he does empathise with their historical plight, "the result of forcibly transporting a people from one continent to another, using them in slavery for several generations, and then bestowing on them a nominal freedom and a position beyond the pale of society."

All in all, Juan in America is a splendid example of English picaresque from the first half of the 20th century. As such, Linklater's rivals in the field were not Huxley or Forster but Priestley and Mackenzie, neither of them particularly popular these days either. But Juan in America has never been out of print in the eighty years since it was written, and that has to be the best kind of recommendation.