In case you missed it in hardcover, Maximum City will be out in paperback next Tuesday.

I will spare you my opinion of the book since Suketu Mehta appears to be Sepia regular, but just for those who can’t get enough, the Columbia Journalism Review runs a highly entertaining interview with Mehta in next month’s issue.

His interviewing technique:

I was writing as I was speaking to these people. IÂ’d bring out my laptop.. one of their hit men might say, ‘You know, we had a job to kill somebody for their laptop last week.Â’ And IÂ’d say, ‘Yes, IÂ’m aware of that” …. I noticed this subliminal thing started happening where as they spoke, I was literally typing. My fingers were dancing, and they would look at me and pick up these cues from when IÂ’m typing or not. Now, in India the problem isnÂ’t getting people to talk, itÂ’s getting them to shut up or to stick to the topic. And I didnÂ’t have to tell them to stick to the topic, but..when they wandered off into a tangent IÂ’d still be nodding, but my fingers werenÂ’t dancing. And so they would, without my ever having to say anything to them, come back to the topic that I was interested in…

Writing as self-actualization:

Each chapter was a journey into myself, into my weaknesses and my strengths. And I asked myself, Why was I attracted to these tough boys? And itÂ’s because in school I was a weedy kid, and I always looked up to the tough boys. The short and the smart sat at the front of the class….in the back were the people who had failed the grade and were taking it again or the really tall kids and we called them the LLBs — the Lords of the Last Bench. And I always looked up to these guys. These were the ones who were good at cricket, could get the girls. And here they were — they were grown up, and they were my protectors.

Even a hitman’s got a conscience:

I remember one of the hit men saying, ‘It used to happen that after I killed, the soul of the man I kill will come and sit on my chest. But then a Muslim gangster taught me to sleep in a fetal position with my back to the door, so the soul doesn’t have access to my chest so I can sleep peacefully.’ Each one of them had different rationalizations, including the police.

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Sorry sorry…wery short notice, thousand apologies, but I just saw this in Flavorpill:

Launching their latest anthology and a new, more svelte format for the magazine, Review editor Philip Gourevitch hosts this evening, featuring Rushdie on the mic and a performance from that precious, precocious kook Miranda July.

That would be the Paris Review, and Miranda July of Me and You and Everyone We Know fame.

Good times are sure to be had by all, so head on over:
Sat 9.17 (7pm) Celeste Bartos Forum, New York Public Library (5th Ave at 42nd St). $15 Continue reading →

The acid-tongued, Yale-educated purveyor of limn places Shalimar the Clown above Rushdie’s ineffectual Fury but below his earlier works (thanks, Rani):

Although the novel is considerably more substantial than his perfunctory 2001 book, “Fury,” it lacks the fecund narrative magic, ebullient language and intimate historical emotion found in “Midnight’s Children” and “The Moor’s Last Sigh.” [Link]

She doesn’t buy the fundamental, near-magical-realism conceit of the protagonist, and without that buy-in the rest of the novel is colored:

Worse, “Shalimar the Clown” is hobbled by Mr. Rushdie’s determination to graft huge political and cultural issues onto a flimsy soap opera plot… But his clumsy suggestion that the title character becomes involved with a group of terrorists inspired by Al Qaeda because he has been jilted by his wife feels farcical in the extreme – unbelievable in terms of the actual story…

The main problem with this novel, however, is its title character, Shalimar… who emerges as a thoroughly implausible, cartoonish figure: an ardent lover turned murderous avenger, a clownish performer transformed into a cold-eyed terrorist. Whereas the other characters’ motives are complex and conflicted, Shalimar is depicted in diagrammatic, black-and-white terms. Indeed, he often seems like a reincarnation of the cardboardy Solanka from “Fury”… These are the sort of words spoken by mustache-twirling, snake-eyed villains in old cartoons…

Rushdie is ‘all about the extended, witty aside, the original, snarky insight,’ which she doesn’t seem to dig:

But others are thoroughly gratuitous asides, included, it seems, simply for the sake of emptying out the author’s archive of recorded and imagined images, and they weigh down the story, diminishing its focus and its momentum.

I’m left wondering whether this review is more a criticism of the genre and Rushdie’s fundamental style than the individual tome. We’ll know soon — the book is officially out tomorrow, though you may have nabbed a copy this weekend.

Previous posts: one, two, three, four, five, six

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This year’s Wells Fargo New Yorker Festival draws a grab bag of celebs-e-tweed you can pay to rub shoulders with: Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Richard Dawkins, Behnaz Sarafpour and Sasha Frere-Jones. And they’re not alone: Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Roots, yadda yadda. It’s like they swiped the Sex and the City item numbers and invited with abandon.

In a highbrow bow, a gesture of noblesse oblige, the magazine not only ran a feature on the Three Stooges this week, they invited the South Park brats to the fest. But of course the Jhumpa-Zadie axis is sold out. How now, brown cow?

The Aug. 29th issue also ran an excellent Vijay Seshadri poem, ‘Family Happiness.’ Seshadri is an English professor who may have been one of the original 2nd genners, with both a pukka American accent and an incongruous shock of gray hair. He read another poem I dig at the SAJA fest; he’s got a radio voice and a knack for lines of astringent tenderness within the clutches of marriage.

Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and came to America at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio… and has lived in many parts of the country, including the Pacific Northwest, where he spent five years working in the fishing and logging industries, and New York’s Upper West Side, where he was a sometime graduate student in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in Middle Eastern Languages and Literature… He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. [Link]

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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…

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The one-man sound bite missile named Rushdie aims His cross-Atlantic test firing at Time and the Times (thanks, Sapna and Karthik):

There’s a line about Klingons on the very first page of Shalimar. Aren’t you worried that a pop reference like that will date the book?

… A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it’s the balance of that that’s difficult to achieve. I have a suspicion that Klingons might be more enduring than we suspect.

Speaking of Klingons, wasn’t your wife… on an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise?

Yes, she was. She was an alien empress of most of the universe, I think. The episode was all right. Next Generation was the one that I liked best. [Link]

Now that Lakshmi’s been on Star Trek, our nerdy readers have official permission to idolize. I love the uncharacteristically autistic, Trekkie honesty here (whereas in the Times Rushdie gives wuvvy-dovey, team player quotes). His wife was on TV, and it was just ‘eh’? Something tells me he’s going to learn about ‘withholding’ tonight, and I don’t mean taxes

The Times delves into his early career, which is always where the critical lessons of history are found — not how a success expands, but how it struggled from obscurity in the first place:

He was not part of the Barnes-Amis-McEwan lit-lad circle back then and, as someone who was still struggling to find his voice, was keenly aware that they had found their way as writers far earlier on: “There was Martin with The Rachel Papers… and Ian with his first collections of short stories… and I thought, ‘I wish I would be able to write as well as this’, but I was still stumbling around trying to find out what to do. It took me a long time to get going as a writer.”

His debut, Grimus, was both a critical and commercial failure and despite the huge and continued success of Midnight’s Children, all the more remarkable for it being only his second novel, Rushdie could not forgive the casual dismissiveness of those first reviews… he admits that if he sees people reading it, his instinct is to hide behind the furniture. “… it embarrasses me.” [Link]

Over a decade ago, I walked up and down the aisles of the local Barnes and Noble because of an all-consuming curiosity which was ignited by some now-forgotten book review. (I would later work at that very BN during my senior year of college, in case you are unbelievably bored). I had picked up a torch for brown-ish fiction which burns just as brightly today as it did when I was a teenager. I found my quarry, picked it up very carefully and took it to the cash-wrap, where the clerk, on second thought, double-bagged it.

I went home and didn’t emerge from my room for two days; I waved away meals, plugged my ears to my father’s indignant screams about how I was missing class, I think I forgot to bathe, who knows. I couldn’t leave this tome, whose protagonist shared MY nickname. Upon reflection, I think I understand why you Potter-heads do what you do…oh, wait. I don’t. 😉

Vikram Seth’s “Suitable Boy” changed my life. It altered my expectations for literature, my perceptions of my parents’ histories, my conception of myself and what I wanted out of my future. Suddenly, I had a thousand things to ask my delighted father, about newly-free India in the 1950s. I looked at my mother, a freedom baby who was born right after India gained her independence with a new affection and appreciation; if Aparna were alive, she’d be my Mother’s age. I regarded all the other books on my shelves with a supercilious disdain.

I’ve read SB three-and-a-half times. It never left my bedside table; it’s been there for over a decade. My most cherished ritual involved briefly immersing myself in it before falling asleep every night; as soon as I finished the entire tome, I’d gingerly turn the book over and start it again the next night. Suddenly, I’m sad that my treasured font of comfort is dusty and untouched. Continue reading →