Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie

I savored the moment when I would read Shalimar the Clown, anticipated it as one might a lazy Sunday afternoon. I remember when I first read Satanic Verses in the same way one remembers falling in love for the first time--fondly, with real affection. Midnight’s Children, Last Moor’s Sigh, his short stories in East/West. These books are the reason I get excited when I hear that Salman Rushdie appeared on Seinfeld or Bridget Jones’ Diary or that he gave an interview at the restaurant down the street from my work. A writer whose wonderfully chaotic genius plays out in each page he writes with all the might of a true magician.

Which is all the more reason why it was so dismaying to find rampant mediocrity in his latest book, Shalimar the Clown. With the same dizzying rhetoric that has become his trademark, Rushdie lays out a multi-generational, multi-continental, multi-historical story of one man, his wife, her lover and all the people that populate their world. The book opens in Los Angeles, with the violent, and bloody death of the brilliant, and charming Max Ophlus—former US ambassador to India. His death spins out into the story of Boonyi Kaul and her husband, Shalimar, the clown—characters from two adjoining villages in Kashmir that enjoyed communal harmony, beauty and love before the terrible realities of personal and national infidelities. It’s a story of cruel betrayals, love, war, and death.

It's a story that despite all of its decorations, is uncomfortably simple. Two young people deeply in love are ripped apart by a beautiful outsider who whisks away the simple village girl for a fling that destroys all their lives. The husband becomes rabidly, murderously vengeful. A daughter named India/Kashmiri is born who grows up predictably troubled. Woven into the background, is the larger histories of WW II, the Indo-Pakistan war, and the LA riots.

Surprisingly clumsy at times, with overly-drawn out thought bubbles from characters whose maudlin self-importance was embarrassing. Take this passage for instance:

“The words right and wrong began to crumble, to lose meaning, and it was as if Max were being murdered all over again, assassinated by the voices who were praising him, as if the Max she knew were being unmade…” ...and so on.

There was a particularly hollow scene where Rushdie slyly alludes to a “writer against God, who spoke French and had sold his soul to the West”. He gets killed off by Islamic terrorists.

Aside from half-baked philosophsi-fizing, Rushdie draws problematic conclusions about the dangers of breaking free of one’s role and place in life. The characters in his novel suffer horribly for having ambitions, and dreaming big. Love is possessive and jealous and will always either stifle or betray you—it is an inescapable curse.

But despite all of its disappointing shortcomings, Rushdie still delivers an engaging story that lays out tempting morsels, after every disenchanting moment. At its best, Shalimar the clown soars high on its author's uncanny ability to tell a story. At its worst, the history that Rushdie uses to clog up his passages, feel like fillers--background noise to distract from the emptiness of his characters. It is like catching the magician slip a rabbit in his hat--the trick still works, but you now know the secret and it's not magic anymore.

Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing Edited by Philomena Mariani

Margaret Atwood’s essay, The Female Body, begins with the wonderfully playful request, “I agree, it’s a hot topic. But only one? Look around, there’s a wide range. Take my own, for instance. I get up in the morning. My topic feels like hell. I sprinkle it with water, brush parts of it, rub it with towels…I dump in the fuel and away goes my topic, my topical topic, my controversial topic, my capacious topic…”

The very idea of a book that has collected essays about the politics of creativity is as provocative and irresistible an idea as Atwood’s invitation above. What would that look like? What does that mean? With the collected works of 41 internationally renowned authors from Zoe Wicomb and Ama Ata Aidoo to James Baldwin and Salman Rushdie, this collection of essays attempts to answer these questions through writings that explore “what it means to be writing from specific race, class and gender positions at a particular historical moment.” Which is to say that is a hopelessly inadequate description to the wonderful diversity and range found here.

This is a good book, with a few really great essays butting heads with feminist theory, poetry, and fiery conference presentations. One of the great things about a book like this, is that one minute you can be thoroughly irritated by the somewhat nonsensical incantation (and embarrassing if you picture it being blasted at a pro-choice rally in DC as it was) by Alice Walker’s The Right to Life: What can the White Man Say to the Black Woman? And the next minute you are sucked in by Philomena Mariani’s evocative and finely wrought essay, God is a Man. Among the noteworthy is my old favorite—Notes of a Native Son—which reminded me again why I love James Baldwin. Here’s an essay (like so many other treasures in this collection) that exemplifies how politics and art can be a formidable force that speaks the truth more loudly and clearly than anything we listen to or read. With exquisite finesse, Baldwin paints for us the racial politics of 1940s America through the lens of a difficult and abusive father. Here’s one of my favorite passages from that essay.

He was, I think, very handsome…Handsome, proud, and ingrown, “like a toenail”, somebody said. But he looked to me, as I grew older, like pictures I had seen of African tribal chieftains: he really should have been naked, with war paint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears. He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met; yet…buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm. It had something to do with his blackness, I think—he was very black—with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful.

Gorgeous. If I had my way, I would be typing out his entire essay.

There’s one more that stands out—a newbie (to me)—Gary Indiana’s Identity Check. A moment that poignantly captures the essence of the entire collection, is when the narrator’s mother discovers his diary and reads the lurid fantasies that her son has been having about his brother’s best friend—a poor, Portuguese teenage boy who lived “literally on the wrong tracks”. Here’s that passage.

She refuses to believe that Eugene’s big, stiff cock is a little boy’s fantasy. She grills me for days, an avenging cop: Where did it happen? How many times? Eager to blame an outsider for “corrupting” me, she cites this episode years later, still convinced of its reality, as the likely “cause” of my homosexuality. That might have been my first intimation of the power of the word…this writing was able to cause an eruption of violent feelings. My imagination altered the state of things in the real world.

The best of the pieces in this collection asks us to reconsider art as the only adequate medium for the truth and the politics of identity. At its worst, there are hysterical outcries against “oppressors” by the “oppressed”—words used too freely, blithely. If you get one of the latter, you can always flip it over and come to this challenge: “Rather than set agendas for various kinds of writing, we can do more than ask of our education system that it encourage the writer to think about how she positions herself in the political space. Reactionary positions may well be reduced, or may not. But readers will have to be prepared for both possibilities.” (Philomena Mariani’s God is a Man)

Indeed.