John Updike reviews Salman Rushdie’s latest in the New Yorker. 
He moans about Rushdie’s precocious, hyperactive style but has the grace to quote extensively. He slowly dribbles out the master’s words to be set upon by the ravenous she-wolf bitches known as rabid Rushdie fans. Such as, uh, my ‘friend.’
My ‘friend’ here appreciates Updike cribbing from Shalimar. It sounds raw. It sounds risky. It sounds fabulous. Oh, and there’s some famous-author-whining in there too.
In a neat trick both topical and intimate, Rushdie is symbolically returning to Kashmir with this novel. Recall the rapturous prose about Dal Lake, red hair, blue eyes and a distinctive proboscis where Midnight’s Children began. It’s a journey desi authors selling into the West often make in reverse: their first few books aren’t ‘write what you know,’ but rather ‘write what sells.’ Only when they’re comfortable in their bestselling skins, and the wolves of missed rent bay at the doors of younger writers, do they return to exorcise their deeper pains: for Rushdie, the rape of Kashmir; for Michael Ondaatje, the Sri Lankan civil war.
[Dedication:] … in loving memory of my Kashmiri grandparents…
In Kashmir it is paradise itself that is falling; heaven on earth is being transformed into a living hell… Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete… The world was no longer calm…
… he wanted to know what it would feel like when he placed the blade of his knife against the man’s skin, when he pushed the sharp and glistening horizon of the knife against the frontier of the skin, violating the sovereignty of another human soul, moving in beyond taboo, toward the blood…
He went into his blighted apple orchard, seated himself cross-legged beneath a tree, closed his eyes, heard the verses of the Rig-Veda fill the world with beauty, and ceased upon the midnight with no pain…
There were nine grabbers in the cosmos, Surya the Sun, Soma the Moon, Budha the Mercury, Mangal the Mars, Shukra the Venus, Brihaspati the Jupiter, Shani the Saturn, and Rahu and Ketu, the two shadow planets. The shadow planets actually existed without actually existing. They were heavenly bodies without bodies… [Pyarelal Kaul:] “The shadow planets act upon us from a distance and focus our minds upon our instincts. Rahu is the exaggerator the intensifier! Ketu is the blocker the suppressor! The dance of the shadow planets is the dance of the struggle within us…”
He named the Los Angeles River after the angels of Assisi and their holy mistress and twelve years later, when a new settlement was established here, it took its title from the river’s full name, becoming El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula, the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Very Small Plot of Land. But the City of Angels now stood on a Very Large Plot of Land Indeed, thought India Ophuls, and those who dwelt there needed mightier protectors than they had been given, A-list, A-team angels, angels familiar with the violence and disorder of giant cities, butt-kicking Angeleno angels, not the small-time, underpowered, effeminate, hello-birds-hello-sky, love-and-peace, sissy-Assisi kind…
… the new pleasantvilles being built in the firetrap canyons to house the middle-class arrivistes… the less-pleasantvilles in the thick of the urban sprawl . . . the dirty underbelly of paradise…
[Re: India Ophuls] … weekly boxing sessions at Jimmy Fish’s boxing club on Santa Monica and Vine where Tyson and Christy Martin were known to work out… a silver luxury speedmobile with batwing doors…
[Re: Max Ophuls’ affair, Zainab Azam] … the color of scorched earth… hottest box-office star . . . a sex goddess such as the Indian cinema had never seen…
The lovers were their children and must be supported. Their behavior was worthy of the strongest censure… but they were good children, as everybody knew… Kashmiriyat, Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences…
[Shalimar:] “Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children also…”
[Boonyi Kaul:] “What a romantic you are,” she replied carelessly. “You say the sweetest things.” [Link]
So, like every other person in the world, I got an advance-copy of this, read it. And the first thing that threw me off, all the way off, was the dedication. It made me feel or believe that he wasn’t secure with his voice, uncertain of his authority…
I guess there are different ways to read the dedication, but for as disturbing as it was, it was perhaps the one thing that kept me reading the book without getting annoyed. It seemed honest, intentional and a bit manic. In other words, “human” and that made me listen, for once, without splitting the hairs of each line, praising the language hyperbolically or [physically] putting it down…
Speaking of language, I don’t think Updike knew what to say except to peg it as laborious. Well, he didn’t say that, that’s me-interpreting-him-interpreting-Rushdie, but it seems fairly obvious that he got stuck in the gates on this one, so much so that, dare I say, he had a hard time reviewing it.
And speaking of Rushdie… Sunday, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, he blamed Bush for radicalism in Islam and said something like “[Bush] succeeded in starting the jihad that ODB could not.” Sort of a misplaced comment, odd timing, as he also said quite a bit about Kashmir and how “benign” it once was, which tied nicely into the release of “Shalimar” but also seemed to disconnect him from the current political reality of Islam and Kashmir, which, despite its nostalgia, is what makes the book interesting.
(“OBL” not “ODB”–thought I’d get stupid and slip some Wu-Tang in there for ya’ll)
Do some of the people here get paid for publicising books and movies? First it was non-stop publicity for mangal pandey, now it is rushditty.
We’re media-whores Yawn…What can I say, we publicize publicity. If you’ve got news, send tips!
No. But we get paid a princely sum to blog. Actually, our North Dakota headquarters have gold-plated toilet seats. Shhh… don’t tell anyone our funding secret.
And M.I.A., the London bombings, my continuing obsession with the de Menezes case…
Blogs run off equal parts pointless outrage and pointless obsession.
One of you has gotten the chance to read “Shalimar”, please let us know if it’s worth the read. I love me some Rushdie, but after “Fury”, I’m quite put off, and this new one reeks of leave-it-on-the-shelf…
Updike’s review is funny. He keeps trotting out examples of Rushdie’s writing to show what an undisciplined, overwrought book it is. And almost all of those passages are excellent – totally undermining his point. Just goes to show what p**** envy can do to a reviewer.