There are a few authors (Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Zadie Smith, Michael Ondaatje) who rock so hard, I devour their entire canon in weeks and wait impatiently for the latest installment. Fortunately, I’m not alone. The manly Booker committee just long listed both Rushdie and Smith, author of the Bangla-friendly White Teeth, for their upcoming books.
Amardeep previously pointed us to Amitava Kumar’s review of Shalimar the Clown, whose launch has been moved up to Sep. 6. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens reads the novel as political science tract, comparing Kashmir to Palestine. It’s reportedly a glowing review (only the intro is online) penned by Hitch for his longtime buddy:
Take the room-temperature op-ed article that you have read lately, or may be reading now, or will scan in the future. Cast your eye down as far as the sentence that tells you there will be no terminus to Muslim discontent until there has been a solution to the problem of Palestine. Take any writing implement that comes to hand, strike out the word “Palestine,” and insert “Kashmir…”
If anything calamitous in the thermonuclear line does occur in the next few years, it is most probable that Kashmir will be the trigger. Moreover, it was the lakes and valleys and mountains of Kashmir that made the crucible in which the Pakistan–Taliban–al-Qaeda “faith-based” alliance was originally formed. The bitterest and longest battle between Islamic jihad and its foes is a struggle not between jihad and the West, or jihad and the Jews, but between jihad and Hindu/secular India. It is a matter not of East versus West but of East versus East. [Link]
I know this from a little study and also from a visit to the Pakistani-held side of Kashmir, where I was reminded that although human beings will always fight over even the most arid and desolate prizes, there are some places so humblingly beautiful that it is possible to imagine dying for them oneself. Salman Rushdie knows it in his core: he is Kashmiri by family… [Link]
The Village Voice is turned off by the degree to which Shalimar plumbs the senseless grief of militant violence:
The events of Rushdie’s life are allegory for the unavoidable world-historical collision between rootless cosmopolitanism and theocratic absolutism, between civilization (with its values of secularism, skepticism, and relativism) and the gathering forces of a new medievalism. His greatest novels–Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh–percolate around just this kind of conflict, as India, or some subset of the subcontinent, tears itself apart. Rushdie repeatedly returns to the primal scene of a paradise squandered…
… playful garishness has always been one of his best qualities. Unfortunately, the usual glorious torrents of slanguage and gouts of Rabelaisian humor are largely missing in Shalimar the Clown. In Rushdie’s South Asian version of magical realism, it’s realism that dominates this time round. Depicting a program of ethnic cleansing against Kashmir’s Hindu population, he dissolves in an uncharacteristic wail of anguish (“why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that”) as his formidable imagination buckles under the pressure of too much reality… [Link]
Novelist William T. Vollman reviews the book in Publisher’s Weekly:
The focus of this novel is extremism. It tells the tale of two Kashmiri villages whose inhabitants gradually get caught up in communal violence… hatred takes on especially horrific manifestations when neighbors turn against each other…The neighbors to whom Rushdie introduces us are memorable and emblematic characters, especially his protagonists, the Hindu dancer Boonyi Kaul and her childhood sweetheart, Shalimar the clown, son of a Muslim family. Their passion becomes a marriage solemnized by both Hindu and Muslim rites, but as conflict heats up, Boonyi seduces the American ambassador… The resulting transformation of Shalimar into a terrorist is easily the most impressive achievement of the book, and here one must congratulate Rushdie for having made artistic capital out of his own suffering, for the years he spent under police protection, hunted by zealots, have been poured into the novel in ways which ring hideously true…
Now for the novel’s defects: Rushdie’s female characters are generally less plausible than the male ones. When he is describing Kashmir’s good old days of communal tolerance, he too frequently takes refuge in slapstick. His depiction of Los Angeles relies so much on references to popular culture that the place becomes a superficial parody of itself. In terms of technique, Rushdie’s most irritating tic is the sermonistic parallelism or repetition, but the novel’s best passages (not to mention his other great work, Shame) prove him capable of great style…
Never mind these flaws. Shalimar the Clown is a powerful parable about the willing and unwilling subversion of multiculturalism. [Link]
If you read Portuguese, you can get a head start on the book:
Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie’s latest novel, is being published here in Brazil two months ahead of its English release…
On the second day of the Paraty Literary Festival, the main square of this small Brazilian town is buzzing. A parade of papier-mâché dolls passes the ancient church, a clown eats fire near a packed corner cafe, and people stream from two tented pavilions after an author’s talk. Among the throng, ambling the cobbled streets in plain sight, is the characteristically disheveled figure of Salman Rushdie, the Anglo-Indian writer who is the star of this year’s festival…
“Because of the shrinking planet and the consequences of mass migration and geopolitics and so on, we all live in this world where our stories are no longer separate. [Before], one could mostly tell a story about India. You can’t think like that anymore.” [Link]
Heck, if you’re eBay-literate, you can even get gray-market galley proofs. Seriously, am I the only one on the planet who hasn’t read them yet? Publishing house insider bastards 
I bought an Advanced Reader’s Copy of Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie due out in September. (Ebay rules.)… “Advanced Readers Copy” means that there are errors in the book, but after it’s 397 pages, I found… about six. [Link]A friend of mine was brilliant enough to score me an advance reading copy of Zadie Smith’s new novel, On Beauty, and though only about 70 pages into it, it’s very good and very funny. [Link]
I hear from a reliable source that there is a lot of movie industry interest in the rights to Zadie Smith’s new novel On Beauty. Having now read the manuscript, I am not a bit surprised. There are really juicy parts for black and white actors – both male and female – in their 20’s and middle years. The novel is brilliant. Sadly, I am sworn to secrecy from revealing any of its contents or blogging a review at this stage. [Link]
The Guardian reviews Smith’s latest, which comes out Sep. 13:
The meaning of love in a time of fear is also a theme in Zadie Smith’s new novel, On Beauty, which is published in September. Her black and mixed-race characters are confused and adrift; they are all looking for something – for certainty, for meaning. Her book is about many things. It is a hugely engaging social comedy about miscegenation and cross-generational misunderstanding. It is about the vexed issue of Anglo-American relations. It is a campus novel. And it is also a smart rewriting of Howard’s End. As EM Forster’s novel did before it, On Beauty asks important questions about the relationship between culture and power – such as is the acquisition of knowledge and culture dependent on wealth and privilege?… [Link]
Here’s the Publisher’s Weekly blurb:
Like Smith’s smash debut, White Teeth (2000), this work gathers narrative steam from the clash between two radically different families, with a plot that explicitly parallels Howards End. A failed romance between the evangelical son of the messy, liberal Belseys; Howard is Anglo-WASP and Kiki African-American; and the gorgeous daughter of the staid, conservative, Anglo-Caribbean Kipps leads to a soulful, transatlantic understanding between the families’ matriarchs, Kiki and Carlene, even as their respective husbands, the art professors Howard and Monty, amass matériel for the culture wars at a fictional Massachusetts university. Meanwhile, Howard and Kiki must deal with Howard’s extramarital affair, as their other son, Levi, moves from religion to politics. Everyone theorizes about art, and everyone searches for connections, sexual and otherwise. A very simple but very funny joke; that Howard, a Rembrandt scholar, hates Rembrandt; allows Smith to discourse majestically on some of the master’s finest paintings. [Link]
The Brazilian literary festival is rooted in the convenience of a publishing magnate:
… the Festa Literária Internacional de Parati [is] a festival just three years old, in a tiny town halfway between Rio and São Paulo. Liz Calder, the Bloomsbury supremo who discovered Salman Rushdie and J. K. Rowling, has a house outside Parati, and decided to start a literary festival there because she thought “it would be good for everything”.
She had no money, she had no backers, but she knew that Brazilians love ideas and that they are open-minded. She launched the festival, and in the first year had 800 visitors, in the second year, 12,000, yes, that nought is 12,000, and now has so many people who want to come along, that they have big-screen monitors and overflow tents. [Link]
Rushdie won the Booker for Midnight’s Children in ’81 and was nominated again for The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Satanic Verses and Shame. Here are the other Bookerati for the year:
Tash Aw – The Harmony Silk Factory
John Banville – The Sea
Julian Barnes – Arthur & George
Sebastian Barry – A Long Long Way
JM Coetzee – Slow Man
Rachel Cusk – In the Fold
Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go
Dan Jacobson – All For Love
Marina Lewycka – A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Hilary Mantel – Beyond Black
Ian McEwan – Saturday
James Meek – The People’s Act of Love
Ali Smith – The Accidental
Harry Thompson – This Thing of Darkness
William Wall – This Is The Country [Link]
Sorry for being so contrarian today…
Manish, you can devour Zadie Smith’s entire “canon” in weeks? Did you read AUTOGRAPH MAN? I thought it was awful, but would love to hear what you thought about it.
I have an advance reading copy of Shalimar… :). You know, we should have a Sepia book club.
Autograph Man was a studied rebellion against what made White Teeth so luminescent– anti-author as celebrity, anti-wordplay. And it announced its attentions with a fixation on trivialness and bodily fluids in the opening pages. Seriously, I’ve never read so many pages devoted to headaches, saliva and mucus.
I read it as a tantrum. Zadie will eventually get over her platinum-selling loss of street cred and return to form 😉
I second that Rani – Sepia book club Zindabad!
Anyone know when Vikram Seth’s “Two Lives” is coming out?
Jay, in November, according to Amazon.com. Now there’s a writer – Vikram Seth. Everything he touches turns to gold.
Thoughts on A Suitable Boy?
From christian science monitor
Amazing.. fleabay to the rescue
Cicatrix, ASB is way up there on the list of “Rani’s Favorite Books.” I know quite a few people who loved it and others who hated it.
Your thoughts?
I want Zadie to win because she is sexy!
ASB: a magnificent novel! I read it at a time when most sepia-writers were just doing poor impersonations of Rushdie. The conversations, letters, narrative: all the details were simply exquisite.
Did Salman see Mission Kashmir (the movie) before/during writing this book?
Rani, Anything I say would be in bad faith at the moment, (let’s just say I respect it)..so I’m more interesting in knowing yours. What did you like the most about it? Did you expect Meenakshi to get some sort of comeuppance? Do you fit VS under the ‘postcolonial’ rubric?
Cicatrix,
Hmmmm… I don’t have time right now to write a (lenghthy) post on why I loved ASB. It’s a book I like to reread over and over and over again. It’s a book in which I can open to any page and enjoy the dialogue, characters, humor (I love funny books), and word play (love that, too). Other books I love in the same way – anything by Jane Austen, anything by Oscar Wilde, The Jeeves and Wooster books by P.G. Woudhouse, anything by Nabakov, some Dickens, Midnight’s Children.
As for your question: “Do you fit VS under the ‘postcolonial’ rubric?” I don’t fit books under any rubric. Books are either good or bad. Enjoyable or not.
Fair enough. Thanks Rani 🙂
If we’re picking favorite Rushdies…mine’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories
(I’m still pissed that Sri Lanka was the goober hanging off whasisname’s nose in Midnight’s Children 😉
Haroun and the Sea of Stories is my favorite, too. Don’t know how that one slipped my mind. Started Satanic Verses twice, still haven’t been able to crack it.
You didn’t appreciate Saleem Sinai’s peninsula?
Well, he did say he was jealous of Vikram Chandra, one of the screenwriters 😉
Satanic Verses is funny.. great compared to most authors..but not as good as Midnight’s children.
I actually did read all the other Rushdie’s in one binge session. Not a good idea because.. that old saw that all artists continually re-work the same material? Too true for Rushie. They all blurred togther, sometimes it just seemed like only the names had changed. And Grimus? Unfuckingreadable. I almost cried.
Grimus was aptly named.
You actually think he is funny? I can accept most claims made about Rushdie – except that he is funny. I mean, I have never laughed out loud when reading anything he has written – have you?
Rushdie may be many things but he isnt funny as in laugh-out-loud hahaha funny. Sometimes you get the sense that he is trying to be funny – but it just doesnt work.
Depends on whether you appreciate deadpan literary humor. I think he’s hilarious– and if you’ve seen him live, he’s extremely witty in person.
I do that public snicker-giggle-choke thing all the time reading Rushdie. I’d catch my roommtes exchanging glances over my head when I first read midnight’s children. How could you not think he’s funny Punjabi Boy?
I wouldn’t limit it to just deadpan, Manish. He uses humor in all it’s forms very effectively, but it’s those absurd/tragic moments and phrases that get me every time. I’ve never been to one of his book readings. I’m so jealous.
I am sorry Rushdie is not gush worthy. Frankly it is embarrassing to watch someone gush over Rushdie. I will have to discount all future recommendations.
Has anyone read GV Desani; according to Rushdie, the godfather of the comic Indian novel. I read about a third of Desani’s book, his hyper-verbal ‘comedic styling’ gets a little tiresome.
I dont know cicatrix – he just doesnt make me laugh. I will just put it down to not having the right sense of humour for him – I suppose its an individual thing.
oops my remark at Rushdie being not gush worthy is aimed at Manish’s post not at cicatrix’s comment. : )
Agree on the wit – Try “Step across this line” – non-fiction – writing’s not heavy on the fantastic so humor’s direct – sample – do you remember his article in the NYT(I think) on India’s 50th anniversary of independence – he skewered a government plan to put up a statue of the Mahatma in the Antarctic clad only in his loincloth – had me in splits – article is in the compilation. Another favorite from that compilation is “heavy threads” – Heard him tell it in person. Terrific raconteur. Also told story of when he was in advertising – wrote the ad for some chocolate with bubbles. was a hit. But yea… his novels are a little too weird. It’s like watching the clown from King’s It.
wha? all that stuff in Midnight’s children about Saleem Sinai’s childhood? The Brass monkey? His nose??!
Some parts had me laughing out loud until I had to stop to catch my breath!
I’m honestly not exaggerating…I loved the book and laughed out loud, despite the fact that magic realism usually makes me roll my eyes.
dhaavak: I think that’s it! The humor in his early novels is lot like kitschy Indian advertizing humor.
There was some talk a while back about the possibility of his publishing the diary from the post-Satanic Verses days. Anyone know if that’s still on the cards?
Not that you’re doing so, but some commenters have slammed Rushdie for his copywriting origins in the past. IMO it’s an unfair dig– who among us hasn’t had a humbler job when starting out? Patent clerk, anyone?
I just want to say that Ondaatje’s In The Skin Of A Lion is so amazing that I am actually afraid to ready any more Ondaatje in case it’s not as exquisitely good.
Tef,
Has anyone read GV Desani; according to Rushdie, the godfather of the comic Indian novel. I read about a third of Desani’s book, his hyper-verbal ‘comedic styling’ gets a little tiresome.
I’ve read Desani’s Hatterr — really, really nutty. You have to have a high tolerance for zany non-sequiturs.
But here’s a hint: it works better if you try reading it out loud in a comic-melodramatic voice. Also helps if you have access to a Hobson-Jobson…
Just scroll up again.
Dont you all think Zadie has the most gorgeous cheekbones and bee-stung lips? And she has freckles too, the little minx.
She is a good writer too.
I don’t know whether to say this under my breath of defiently, but.. I write copy.
Not advertising, though. Paperbacks. You know how you flip the book over to see what it’s about?
-me
And yes, most of the time that description might turn you off/ be riddled with cliches/sound like the the writer never read the book..
well, it’s harder than you’d think to whip up something in under an hour that’ll seduce a browser, please the editor and flatter the author. Half the time they don’t give us enough time to actually read the book. So. There.
He is like Rushdie as far as I am concerened – you have to read him in small doses or else you get a case of heartburn.
But Desani was an original – nobody had written like that before.
“Haroun and the sea of stories” is my favorite too. Probably becuase it had an emotional punch, namely:
Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu; All our dream-worlds may come true; Fairy lands are fearsome too; As I wander far from view; Read, and bring me home to you.
That’s what I don’t like about Rushdie’s fiction — where the Heart? His sentences are spectacular, his paragraphs are sublime. But his characters leave me cold. Clever wordsmithing is not the same as good novel writing.
Love his nonfiction though.
I didn’t mean the remarks re: advertizing as a dig. I think Rushdie IS hilarious, and I credit his advertizing background partly for giving him his unique style of humor based on relentless punchlines – someone else once described him as the stand-up-comic novelist.
clever wordplay can disguise heart that’s dripping emotion on every page
Saheli, The English Patient is excellent but uneven: lots of poetic, inspired writing with lots of false notes. My first impression:
After 50 pages:
The Achilles’ heel of Ondaatje is that every piece of dialogue is written in the author’s voice– they all sound the same and they’re all quite unbelievable, because we don’t speak the way we write. There are some serious clunkers of lines in his work. He also pens ungratifying endings, some of his books just seem to fizzle out unresolved, whereas Rushdie likes to go out with a bang.
But he won me over completely in the end, and I’m plunging through the oeuvre. Anil’s Ghost is more consistent, but grim (forensic anthropology in the Sri Lankan civil war). Overall, he’s a tremendous author.
Yeah, don’t hate it because it’s beautiful. Prose before hos, y’all 😉
man, i’m on deadline and this kick-ass conversation is going on. i can only skim. grrr….
but i will say this: punjabi boy, you’re a pervert.
and yes, i know you’re proud of it!
peace
Cold? Like Aurora Zogoiby in Moor’s Last Sigh? Or perhaps like Tai the boatman in Midnight’s Children. How about Padma then, the Dung Lotus from M.C.? Or Major Zulfy and his wife? The incomparable Vina/Ormus duo from Ground Beneath her Feet.
If anything, Rushdie tends to go long on the ethnography with the express purpose of providing a ‘backstory’, as it were, for his characters. They are handpicked and never out of place — even when he is talking about the minority Parsi community locked up in little apartments in Malabar Hill.
And his current squeeze is pretty fit too 😉
Hi,
Read Shantaram, it is not a literary tour de force but incredibly insightful, more than highly educated, pedantic writers are. The book is amazing and will knock you off. I am in the process of blogging about the book.
Salman Rushdie…..I have mixed feeling about him and his writings. He is definitely in love with himself but does have courage.
English Patient. I read it 10 years ago. The beauty of the book is in its nonlinear flashbacks that are in disjointed bits and pieces. You see that in South Asian literature, something like Guleri’s Usne Kaha Tha. Another master piece Perhaps, because of his growing up in Sri Lanka.
Kush
Manish,
I was not slamming Rushdie for his job origins. ItÂ’s with the way he writes, he still writes like a copywriter.
And I believe, I have the right to slam copywriters, I was one for a while. It takes years to wash out the glibness.
Amardeep,
I think Desani’s book would work better as a movie, or even a radio-play. I heard a reading of Nabokov, and never realized what a ‘performer’ he was. Desani is dead, but it would have been interesting to hear him read it.
PS: I am re-reading NaipaulÂ’s Among the Believers.
Actually I would be interested to know what everyone is reading, except you Manish.
What a pity ’tis that I have posting rights on this blog then. I shall continue to bray my talentless opinions into your blog-reading ears until you go mad.
And I shall rejoice in it 😉
Funny – went on two streams of thought – converged and I discovered something that should have been obvious. Rushdie’s work – my fav by far is Mirrorwork… – the anthology of Indian writing – introduced me to Manto, Nayantara Sahgal, Firdaus Kanga and many more. Then I started thinking about Ondaatje – my fav work is the anthology of Canadian writing – Leacock, macleod, munro etc. Quiz – who appears in both – quite a distinction if you ask me!!!?? … first person to answer wins a pint of sleeman dark from me – ummm.. you have to commit to come to Guelph or nearabouts first.
Tef, on my bedside table: Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi; The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova; Wodehouse:A Life by Robert McCrum; Candyfreak by Steve Almond.
Books I’ve read recently that I liked: Harry Potter IV; Vermeer in Bosnia: Cultural Comedies and Political Tragedies by Lawrence Weschler; Snow by Orhan Pamuk; Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde; Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell; Be More Chill by Ned Vizzini.
Books I’ve read recently that I didn’t like: Blink by Malcom Gladwell; Freakonomics; the new one by Jonathan Safran Foer; The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.
tef- Having finished Harry Potter book 6, we are all sulking and reading nothing right now. 🙂
Manish,
Actually I would like to hear your views on Eggers’s first book.
I was reading the book; I read about HUM. So I have to google to see what happened to HUM. Guess who’s name I bumped into?
So were you part of the scene?
re: Comment 45. A premature post.
A few more: Books I’ve read recently that I didn’t like: Babyji by Abha Dawesar; Bodies in Motion by Mary Anne Mohanraj; Bollywood Confidential by Sonia Singh; The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. (I’ve been having bad luck with desi writers lately.)
Also, that list is a bit short, actually. I average about 3-5 books a week, but I’ve been doing loads of rereading recently. Like Wuthering Heights. And Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
When do you get time to brush your teeth?
Only tangentially. At the desks next to Hum, Dave Eggers & Dave #2 put out Might magazine. Mark Fraunfelder et al put out Boing Boing, now a blog. Wired was upstairs.
So far I’ve only read the Shalini bits in Dave’s book, and that too during a dark Chinatown loft party in a fit of boredom.
I also briefly met Zadie at a London party, before I’d read her. She’d penned a sharp, raunchy birthday wish for the host. It was absolutely hilarious.