Me, Rushdie, and Shalimar the Clown



I finished reading the last third of "Shalimar the Clown" this weekend, after months of wondering whether Shalimar the Clown would be a return to form for Salman Rushdie (after a pair of efforts that lacked the genius of his earlier works).

It is better than "Fury" or "Ground Beneath...", if nowhere near as good as "Shame" or "Midnight's Children" or "The Moor's Last Sigh".

At the core of the book, once you strip away frenetic jet-set worldliness of the narrative is the story of Kashmir.  This story, encompassing the middle half of the book, finds Rushdie once again hitting his story-telling stride.

If you can assess this book from this core story outward, and not be distracted by Ophuls or his daughter than you'll enjoy the book.  The heart of this work is the story of Shalimar and his wife and the kashmiri-ness that is broken.

In the other half of the story (the 1st and 4th quarters), Rushdie takes on religious fanaticism and political pragmatism more explicitly than he has in his literature (Note: his essays on these matters are quite lucid).  It's done well, but it's just not the highlight of the work.

I don't think I've ever said this quite so clearly, but Rushdie's work is important to me personally.  He mythologizes many of the same places that I mythologize. He writes about the same dislocations and their consequent compromises that I consider and that my family has dealt with.

All four of my grandparents were born in India.  Three were born in what you would still call India today.  My father's mother was born in Kashmir.  My own mother could be considered one of "Midnight's Children" for being born at the right time, if you will, into an India cleaved into two. Partition, India, and Pakistan are all a part of their stories...as are London and New York and Chicago.  These are kinds of places and stories where Rushdie himself operates. I have taken to absorbing these alternate stories he spins, the new mythologies that he writes, like he is some heretical uncle with whom I probably oughtn't affiliate and I know I oughtn't take too seriously, but nevertheless find compelling.

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My Salman Rushdie "credentials": since 1999 I have read "Shame", "The Satanic Verses", "Midnights Children", "The Moor's Last Sigh", "The Ground Beneath Her Feet", "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", "Fury", "East / West", "Imaginary Homelands", "Step Across This Line", and "Shalimar the Clown". I have heard him speak (and read from "Fury") in 2002. The last time I wrote about Rushdie here, I compared him to R.E.M.

Posted: Sat - January 21, 2006 at 07:02 PM      

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