Earlier we pointed you to Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith’s latest novels, due this fall. Bibliophile Punjabi Boy has tracked down the plot synopses. Whoever bowdlerized these vigorous authors managed to strip most appeal, like film trailers badly cut. Or both authors really are succumbing to that artistic curse– damn you, marital bliss.
Shalimar the Clown (Rushdie): Maximilian Ophuls, former Resistance hero, postwar economics guru, counter-terrorism expert and a popular US Ambassador to India whose tenure was abruptly ended by a scandalous liaison with a dancer, is murdered in his old age on his daughter’s doorstep in Los Angeles – his daughter India, who dislikes her name. ‘She didn’t feel like an India, even if her colour was rich and high and her long hair lustrous and black. She didn’t want to be vast or subcontinental or excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or ancient or noisy or mystical or in any way Third World.’ The assassin is Max’s driver, who goes by the name of Shalimar, a handsome Kashmiri man in his forties, a former tightrope-walker and clown in a band of travelling players. Salman Rushdie’s new novel is the story of the dead man, his killer and his daughter; the story of the violent termination of an extraordinary life stretching from Nazi-occupied Strasbourg to Hollywood via India, Kashmir, and many of the world’s most dangerous places. [Amazon UK]
Avoiding Lahiri-itis and Mukherjee syndrome (taking ‘write what you know’ as the Eleventh Commandment), On Beauty will be Smith’s first novel set mainly in America.
On Beauty (Smith): Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn’t like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering Professor at Wellington, a New England Liberal Arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists… Then Jerome, Howard’s oldest son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps. Increasingly, the two families find themselves… enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. [Smith’s agent]
Apropos of nothing, Smith gives droll essay, this about the TV adaptation of White Teeth:
… in the adapting-a-novel-for-the-screen business, there might even be a saying: when going to see the writer, carry a 10-foot pole… the first 10 minutes of our conversation were strongly reminiscent of an Englishman’s encounter with a new tribe. He seemed uncertain whether I was going to offer him some rolling tobacco or shoot him with a poison dart… Of these crimes against film, I was most tempted by the idea that Britain needed to hear my early-90’s collection of seven-inch trip-hop records…
I wanted [Willesden Green, her hometown] in all its glory, lit with kindness and photographed with love. The clunky unlovable postwar architecture, the mile-long strip of back-to-back kebab and fried chicken takeaways, the halal butchers and grocers. The two imperious, turreted Muslim schools in Queens Park (from which, at 3.30 every afternoon, a thousand Muslim children in traditional dress pour out into the street and pack into the sweetshops, queuing for ice-pops and candy), the psychedelic, multicoloured Hindu temple, the crumbling nunnery at the end of my street, all the schools that look like Victorian prisons (especially the one I went to)… a church I visited devotedly throughout my childhood, though only to smoke fags around the back of it…
Having absolutely no visual sense, my Archie and Samad were completely blank from the neck up in my mind… I could write another 2000 words on the [face] of Om Puri (Samad)… The terrific, deeply ridged apple-pathways and pockmarks of Puri’s ennobling beauty (he makes things around him become beautiful)…
The scene they put me in occurs at the beginning of the book, the moment when Clara Bowden meets Archie Jones. It is 1975 and they are at a huge party. He is old and white and unhappy, and she is young and black and unhappy. She is also excessively beautiful… This story was a highly bastardised account of the day my parents met… This was the initial creative spark of White Teeth. It took her about 30 seconds to tell the story and it took me about two years to write it. And now, with four friends I had known since I was 11, I was in the party where my parents met, surrounded by fake hippies and fake dope and fake red wine, and a dancing Chinese girl with no top on and a conga line of four pretty black girls bouncing through the hall… goddamn it if I wasn’t crying by the end of the 27th take…
… fiction writing is not really about power… It neither hurts nor heals in any material sense; no phalanx of soldiers will broach borders for it, no one will lose or gain employment as a result, and no babies shall be birthed. Its sublime bloody uselessness — here lies its attraction for this particular novelist. [NYT]
Alkaline wit, tenderness and philosophy all in one piece: if this woman speaks the way she writes, she’ll make a formidable orator.
Zadie seems to be on a Nabokov mission. She name checks him continuously in interviews and recently gave a lecture in London about his novel Pnin, which is about the misadventures of University Professor. She spent some time studying and lecturing at Harvard, so she must have picked up some ideas about her work there. The English academic out of water in America accords with Pnin, where the main character is a Russian Professor flailing in the depths of the USA.
I’d guess that’s because she’s much less daring than Nabokov in casting off the chains of literalness and admires him for it. Rushdie has long been comfortable with magical realism, while Smith has only edged in that direction so far.
Nabokov has some of the lyricism of Rushdie but is more poetically spare, with a cynicism and undercurrent of despair foreign to Smith. Smith’s humor is dry, anecdotal and ultimately hopeful, while Nabokov’s is bitter political parody. (Smith wrote the Whitbread prize book at 23, while Nabokov became a political refugee at the same age.)
Nabokov’s extraordinary career was all about throwing off the chains of literalness. His work is suffused with the preposterousness of his situation; in his middle age, writing masterpieces in the English language, his second tongue, remoulding the language and becoming one of the great stylists of the twentieth century….his magic with words is all part of the cynicism, undercurrent of despair and, well, madness that was his world and situation. I can well see how Zadie is attracted to his writing. His life was one of displacement and difference, and this outsider’s reference and impulse suffuses his work in English. It is easy to see why this, coupled with his high style, dazzles Zadie. It dazzles me.
You should read this interview with Nabokov from The Paris Review (PDF file). You couldn’t test the guy. The section where he describes the meaning of the Russian word Poshlost (Page 12) should be memorised by anyone who ever dares to pick up a pen to write a novel, it should be stuck to the computer screen of every aspiring writer for them to recite and remember before typing on the keyboard each day.
Zadie Smith is on the Booker shortlist!!!!