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“It makes me want to hide behind the furniture,” Rushdie says now of his debut. It’s a science fiction story, more or less, but it also suggests the kind of writer Rushdie would become: talkative, funny, energetic. The tale of an immortal Indian who travels to a mysterious island, it’s chaotic but charming, and the sense of writing as performance is really here. (Acting was Rushdie’s first choice of career, and he honed his skill with fast one-liners while working at an advertising agency.) It’s not a great book, but it is a book that shows a great writer finding his voice, and a great start to an excellent career.
Rushdie’s love of pop culture — which inspired him to write his first story, at the age of nine, after watching “The Wizard of Oz” — has never been more evident than in the rewrites of Don Quixote that reference Back to the Future, Disney’s “Pinocchio,” “Beavis and Butt-Head,” “Starsky and Hutch” and more. The eponymous character is driven mad by watching too much television, but his story itself is written by a washed-up spy novelist. In his layers within layers he is very active like Grimus, But a little more controllable. Even if Rushdie in this book is half charming, half boring narrator, the energy will keep you jumping with joy.
Rushdie’s first novel for adults after The Satanic Verses prompted Iran’s supreme leader to issue a fatwa against him in 1989, was a dam that burst to release all the pent-up ideas, characters, and jokes of the previous six years. It is the story of “Mor” Zgwebi, the deposed heir to a twisted spice dynasty and the youngest of four siblings: “Ena, Minnie, Mina, Mor.” You can infer references to Rushdie’s plight (“Here I stand. I couldn’t have done it differently”), but this is mostly superlative, nourishing entertainment. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and because of Rushdie’s security needs, this meant – according to that year’s winner, Pat Parker – “a lot of men with puffy armpits standing around.”
Coming shortly after his brilliant epic, Midnight’s Children, “Shame” is overshadowed by “Shame” but is one of Rushdie’s best works. It is shorter, sharper and somewhat darker than its predecessor. Set in “not quite Pakistan”, the film is a satirical satire of the country that is both exaggerated and downright dangerous. Here the system of “honour” above all leads to brutal killings – “Shame is like everything else: live with it long enough and it becomes part of the furniture” – but there is also usually glorious comedy. “Shame” had won a major award in Iran for best translated novel of the year – so Rushdie had no idea how the country’s leadership might respond to his next novel, “The Satanic Verses.”
Rushdie’s second memoir is about his attempted murder on stage in New York in 2022. He remembers thinking when a man dressed in black lunged at him: “That’s you.” “Help yourself.” Naif gives an at times grueling account of his recovery – his wife wouldn’t let him look in the mirror, in case she realized how seriously his injuries had sapped his morale – but it’s also full of Rushdie’s usual sense of humour. After losing four stone, he “no longer had to worry about being overweight”. He also shows a rare softness, with lovely tributes to his wife, his late friend Martin Amis and others. It is a book where “hatred is answered, and ultimately overcome, with love.”
Rushdie was ready to stop writing after The Satanic Verses, but “the thing that saved me as a writer was that I promised my son a book.” Haroun, then, is a story for children and adults that encapsulates Rushdie’s greatest qualities—storytelling, comedy, and imagination—in a myth about a narrator condemned to silence. It’s a good entry point for those who Rushdie calls the “page 15 readers club”—people who can’t read his sometimes dense prose. It is not difficult to see his own experiences in the book: “Stories are fun,” says the hero, Haroun; “Stories create problems,” insists the authoritarian dictator Khatam Shud. With a delightful mixture of wordplay, imagination, and “P2C2Es” (processes too complex to explain), Haroun is Rushdie’s lightest and brightest achievement.
Rushdie’s best novel of the 21st century is about the murder of the American ambassador to India by a Kashmiri named Shalimar the Clown. It is a book about “crimes of the fourteenth century.” [being] “Avenged at Twenty” and the horrors of political violence: “all made senseless of a new kind.” By addressing Rushdie’s enduring theme of worlds colliding, it also becomes a page-turning thriller and a powerfully moving tragedy. Even Rushdie was exhausted, and sometimes cried while writing. “What do I do?” he asked himself. “That’s the one I made up.” This, of course, is the power of great writing.
Rushdie’s memoirs of his time under the threat of death from the Ayatollah provide a powerful account of the suffering he and his family felt. Most surprisingly, it is a comedic masterpiece. Rushdie, writing in the third person, shamelessly drops names, whether he is attacking Roald Dahl, who criticized Rushdie during the fatwa case (Dahl was “a tall, disagreeable man with huge throbbing hands”); Or revealing how not to tell Bernardo Bertolucci you hate his new film (“He put his hand over his heart and said, ‘Bernardo… I can’t talk about it’”); or perhaps he shares his greatest agony during his time undercover: Harold Pinter faxing him his terrible poems.
The non-literary reaction to this book has obscured its brilliance as a novel. In swing style, The Satanic Verses begins with two actors, Gabriel and Saladin, falling through the air over England after Sikh terrorists blow up their plane. “What an entrance, yaar. I swear: noise.” But they survive, as they each undergo a transformation—Gabriel becomes an angel, Saladin grows devil horns—and that’s just the first chapter of their troubles. The book deals in particular with the experience of immigrants in Britain, and how the demonization of others only leads in one direction. It is an example of the freedom of literature to say what it wants, as loudly as possible.
After Grimus was “badly beaten,” Rushdie knew he had to give his all in his second novel. His peers – Amis and Ian McEwan – were superior to him. He created the story of Salim Sinai, born at the moment of India’s independence from British rule, making a virtue of drawing on multiple cultures in its eclectic style. It creates a flood of language that flows “quickly” down the page and drags the reader helplessly. Midnight’s Children not only won the Booker Prize in 1981, but it also won the Booker Prize in 1993, and Best Book in 2008. It’s not just a remarkable achievement in itself: it opened the door to the next generation of writers. He was, in Anita Desai’s words, “the voice of the new age.” It is a book that has room for everything and everyone.
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