Zadie Smith, she of the Bangla-Jamaica mashup White Teeth, got married last September; they met at Cambridge. I ran into her at a small London birthday party at an age when she was considered precocious, well before I’d read her. She was all biting wit, creeper hair and privacy. Authors never look like their jacket photos, nor friendsters like theirs.
She’s due out with a third novel, On Beauty, in September. Autograph Man was studiedly trivial, seemingly an entire chapter devoted to Alex-Li’s body fluids. You’ve gagged on the wealth and hype jalebi, now toss me some more of that fine, fine namkeen.
Rushdie dogged my steps all through this India trip via the gossip columns. He returned to his eternal muse, Bombay; worked the press in that quintessential writer’s city, Calcutta; and held court at a fashion designer’s nightclub in that most elegant of settings… a Noida mall. Avoid-a the New Okhla Industrial, y’all.
Kitabkhana drolled on about Rushdie’s Delhi reading:
“That story, man, that story, it has the touch of genius, pure, jaano, calibre aachey. Each line has the stamp of a Master.” (Displaced Bong intellectual wannabe who spent most of the reading with eyes closed in ecstacy that would have been more convincing if he hadn’t snored once or twice in between.) … Sleepy photographer… wanted to go home but had been told by his editor to stay till the bitter end. “In case,” the editor apparently said, “Rushdie gets shot or something.”… my last glimpse of the Rushdies was of them using upturned plastic chairs to hold at bay hordes of… squeaky-voiced journalists asking original questions (“Mr Rushdie! Are you writing a new novel?” “Padma, what’s your favourite food?”)
He’s punching out Shalimar the Clown Sep. 29. It’s not a promising title, and Fury was one of his weakest; can an auteur with a quenched libido yet turn out good work?
“When I am writing, I tend not to read a lot of fiction. I read poetry, as it teaches you to pay attention to the language, because that’s what poetry does. It reminds you that a reader reads sentence by sentence…”
The Mumbaiphile in exile weighed in:
“The moment my parents sold the house in Mumbai changed my life… If the choice was between Mumbai and London, I would have chosen Mumbai. But when the choice was between Karachi and London, I chose London.”
Rushdie also plugged Vikram Chandra, whose work he claims to envy, and Maximum City, which is fast turning into the Sideways of the South Asian shelf. An elegiac paean to Bombay — now why would he be interested?
I still haven’t read any Zadie Smith but she’s on the list. That huge list of books that just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger because there is just so much good stuff out there AND I JUST CAN’T SEEM GET TO ALL OF IT!
For some reason this post reminded me of the scene in Sabrina (the remake with Harrison Ford) where Sabrina praises her father for taking a job as a chauffer so he could have all the time he wants to read because reading is his great love. He is surrounded by piles and piles of books and looks completely at peace.
I liked “White Teeth” a great deal, and I have to agree with you, “Fury” was quite rubbish. While I like a few of Rushdie’s pieces (“The Moor’s Last Sight” and “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, to name two), I find him–for the most part–to be a little too pompous and impressed with his own brilliance. Ah well. Lets see how the new one turns out.
I’m surprised you’re so critical of Autograph Man. Maybe it’s just because I’m fond of dorky jews and, more pertinently, I have a similar family situation. Granted, I didn’t understand all the kaballah references, but overall I thought the book was a more sensitive character portrayal than White Teeth (which I also loved, particularly reading it on a vacation to London). Plus the humor is good. Something about Zadie Smith’s voice just pokes through in both her books I’ve read and makes me smile.