| Title | : | Shalimar the Clown |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0679783482 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780679783480 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 398 |
| Publication | : | First published September 6, 2005 |
| Awards | : | Booker Prize Longlist (2005), Crossword Book Award Fiction (2005), International Dublin Literary Award Shortlist (2007) |
Shalimar the Clown Reviews
-
(B) 75% | More than Satisfactory
Notes: It's description-over-dialogue, nonlinear storytelling. A tedious read, owing to many lengthy and meandering asides. -
At times, this rambling, rambunctious rollercoaster of a read is feathered by the genius seen in Rushdie's Midnight's Children, at other times it becomes mired in an overload of Indian/Pakistani/Kashmiri political history, which is great for providing context but stems the otherwise rampant flow of this terrific story.
As you would expect from the great man, the humour is irreverent and the human imagery transcendent. To offset this, there is pathos-a-plenty and at times the story is unbearably heart-rending. -
a smart young lady trying to find herself in California. the assassination of her father - America's counterterrorism chief. a portrait of Kashmir before all the ugliness and horror. the life of a man: lawyer, Jew, printer, resistance fighter, diplomat, husband, lover, father. a portrait of Kashmir - the ugliness, the horror. the life of a man: acrobat, actor, husband, freedom fighter, terrorist, chauffeur, assassin. a courtroom drama. a tale of a guy who really knows how to handle himself in prison. a troubled young lady finding love and thirsting for revenge. a miniature epic. a work that is sublime and transcendent. a frustrating book. a masterpiece!
the first section of the novel follows the life of young urban sophisticate India, a documentarian and the daughter of a famous father. right off the bat, i had issues. Rushdie's voice is justly famous for its idiosyncracy. he is a "witty" writer. his voice is polished, erudite, disarmingly casual, sometimes dry, sometimes broad, intellectual, political, personal. Shalimar is full of sharp, wry characterization that is delivered in prose that is complicated, flowing, detailed in long sentences and even longer paragraphs, with much use of striking bits of offbeat imagery. the dialogue can be realistic but just as often feels archly stylized. i couldn't help but think that many characters spoke like Rushdie himself must speak. all of this became rather off-putting, as if Rushdie was oh such a clever man - like that oh so clever gent who goes on and on at a cocktail party, entranced with being the center of attention while never noticing how genuinely pretentious and condescending he sounds (i'll admit here that that dreary kind of cocktail party person is frequently... myself. sigh). this is not to say that the first section wasn't often funny. it was. particularly in Rushdie's depiction of the all-american boy-next-door type, and that type's glorified kind of anonymity. but you can still really want to smack a funny person upside the head if their humor comes wrapped in up-his-own-ass cleverness. at least i did. and all that said, the last part of the section - an assassination and a daughter's removal from reality: brilliant. just brilliant.
the second section takes us into the past, to a Kashmiri village named Pachigam. my God, this section was beautiful! Rushdie's prose sings. the story of this village, its wonderful characters, two young people in love, the myths and legends, the magic, the rivalries, the coming of military types from India and revolutionary types from Pakistan, the stories within stories, the feeling of time moving inexorably forward, the troubling hints of bad times on the horizon, the grand passions, the small things, the humanity, the color and light and life and all the glorious details of a world that is no more... marvelous! just marvelous. i wanted to live in this world. here is also where it becomes absolutely clear how much Rushdie respects the strength of women and the power of art (art in cooking, acting, theatre; art as a tradition and a lifestyle). there is a dreamy kind of wish fulfillment happening in this section. things are not idealized and the narrative is not a sentimental one and characters are not one-dimensional - and yet this section is so full of people surviving in hard times, people living their lives to the fullest, people standing up for each other and being brave and being honest and being utterly themselves - i read this novella-sized section in a state of bliss. it is beauty on the page. i could read the story of this village over and again. swoon!
the third section is the story of Max Ophuls. his name is that of a brilliant, classic director. he has a sinister, cringing assistant named Ed(gar) Wood(s). hey that's the name of another brilliant, classic director, a low-rent one, one who exists on the exact opposite part of the film spectrum as Ophuls. is this another example of Rushdie being clever for the sake of cleverness? perhaps. it doesn't matter. this section is also fantastic. Rushdie knows how to write thrilling wartime drama. Rushdie knows how to write tales of escape and derring-do and brave flights across troubled waters. is there anything the man can't write? this section starts in World War 2-era France, the life before the war, the resistance during, the politics and the spies and the lives lived in hiding. it gives you a brave heroine as well - complicated, butch, tender, merciless, independent, an incredibly sympathetic lady, and - much later - a stone-cold bitch. then Rushdie takes you out of France, into India, and into a disturbing affair. the fall of a Kashmiri villlager turned mistress. Rushdie writes of great events but keeps the personal front and center. he keeps things intimate and he keeps his characters real. Rushdie knows how to write.
some serious spoilers follow!
the fourth section returns to the Kashmiri village of Pachigam and is a tale of horror, why is that. it details the ruthlessness of religious fundamentalism and the madness of mindless militarism and the bloodthirstiness that occurs when the two meet, why is that. it shows us traditions dying, traditions being slaughtered, small things ground under the boots of smaller minds, villages burning and women raped and people tortured and beloved characters being hurt and broken and tormented and demeaned and killed, why is that. the authorial voice remains stylized and that should lead to some distance between story and reader but if anything the wryness and the stylization and the continued use of magic make the brutality even more stark and horrible, why is that. humans are fucking miserable bugs to treat each other this way and yet that's how it is and people die and people don't care and people live to rationalize their disgusting lack of humanity and people die who only want to live and people die and people die and people die, why is that. i hate people, why is that. i read this in an airport terminal while my flight was delayed for hours and it was hard not to cry and so i took many smoke breaks to try and let the heaviness lift a little and i kept returning to the book and i started to feel a strange feeling of being altered, of looking at things from very far away, of wanting to be far away, and yeah i did start crying, why is that. i'm writing this now and for some reason the tears are flowing again, why is that. why the fuck are people so fucking cruel and why is history a record of cruelty and why should humans be alive anyway, why do they do the things they do, i will never understand that, just thinking of what humans do to each other fills me with such sadness and rage and confusing feelings that i barely understand, why is that. people are so fucked up, why is that why is that why is that why is that.
the fifth section returns us to modern day California. tale of a troubled young woman trying to be strong. tale of a man so hollowed out by his lack of love that he is nothing but a terrible shell with a terrible purpose. tale of some courtroom shenanigans. tale of a prison break. tale of a tale of a tale of a tale. things come together; things come apart. Kashmir is more than Kashmir - it is a living symbol for so many things. there is always room for love, even in the middle of vengeance. sometimes the lack of love is replaced by something else. sometimes hate is like love. sometimes things just can't be understood or explained. Rushdie tries, he really does, he tries brilliantly. his sentimental humanism is obvious in the very motivation of Shalimar the clown, who is not your typical terrorist. i don't mind the sentimental humanism; sometimes i crave it. Rushdie is a humanist who has not let the fatwa destroy his sense of decency or fairness, his need to see a person's tale from all angles, to see the why and the how of humans turning into monsters. Rushdie understands both the futility and the necessity of revenge, different forms of revenge. Shalimar the Clown ends on an exciting note. Shalimar the Clown ends on a mysterious note. what will happen next? is there any hope? perhaps i am more of a pessimist than Rushdie because he clearly has hope while i think of humans and often feel hopeless. Humans Off Earth Now! but maybe not. there's hope yet, right? it is a strange and terrible and wonderful feeling to read a book that gives and then takes away and then gives back - just a little - a kind of faith in humanity. hey look the book is bigger on the inside than the little thing you are holding in your hands. -
The story is a tragic one from beginning to end. It's not necessarily depressing but it is a powerful story. Salman Rushdie does an outstanding job of telling a colorful tragedy utilizing imagery and painting the picture of the human character. Lastly, he shows human emotion and the evil it can drive men to do. The quality of the book I liked the most was the blending of cultural, linguistic, social, and religious inferences to add dimension to the plot. In the reading there are concepts pertaining to Islam, Hinduism and places like Pakistan, Kashmir, and India. Some of the transliterated Hindi-
Urdu-Kashmiri and Arabic words you may have to Google (like I did). It's neat how he injects these words and the impact they have on the story.
Overall the plot is multilayered yet all the aspects tie into the main plot. The characters and their behaviors create a butterfly-effect putting them on a collision course. I interpreted themes of star-crossed lovers, religious radicalism, ethnocentric chauvinism, and sectarian violence all resulting in loss.
"Each tragedy belongs to itself and at some time to everyone else.", pg. 138
I was throughly pleased with the quality of the story and appreciated it more than 'The Satanic Verses'. I would definitely recommend this one to anyone who has enjoyed Salman Rushdie's works. Thanks! -
Revisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament.
The book opens with the murder of Max Ophuls – a WWII Resistance hero from Strasbourg (itself a disputed territory fought over between Germans and French and so analogous to Kashmir), turned maker of many of the institutions of the modern world, turned initially popular ambassador to India turned America’s counter-terrorism chief. He is assassinated by his Kashmiri Muslim driver – a mysterious character called Shalimar the Clown.
The book tells the story of Max, Max’s wife (a WWII secret agent), Shalimar, India (Max’s daughter) and Boonyi – a Hindu from a Kashmiri village. Boonyi is a great dancer and Shalimar a trapeze artist. The village gains fame for its combination of folk theatre/circus (run by Shalimar’s Muslim Dad) and feasts (run by Boonyi’s Pashun – Hindu- Dad) – the village combining the two takes away the feast trade from a nearby mainly Muslim village which is much later the cause of much trouble and tension. Shalimar and Boonyi fall in love and are betrayed – but their village’s famed tolerance means that the union is blessed.
However fault lines begin to emerge – the tolerance of the village becomes harder to maintain as increasingly militant Muslim’s enter the area. Max – a serial philanderer – falls for Boonyi and it is his downfall. Firstly he develops an obsession with Kashmir – then when their affair ends in Boonyi’s pregnancy – just at the time when America’s position in the world is being undone by Vietnam, he is forced to resign by the scandal. The baby is adopted by Max’s wife and renamed from Kashmira to India - and Boonyi returns to her village where she finds that the villagers having officially registered her dead refuse to acknowledge her.
Shalimar vowing a long-term revenge becomes involved in terrorism – initially Kashmir militants but then the Taliban and Al-Qaeda all the time pursuing his own long-term plan of revenge.
After murdering both Boonyi (only after both their parents die) and then Max he pursues India who instead kills him.
The book (as often with Rushdie) is over-packed with allusion – each character seems simply a cipher.
Ultimately the book although at heart a love story is dominated by despair and the descent of both the beautiful valley of Kashmir but also the world into violence and terror (with the book particularly influenced by the post 9/11 world).
.
Despite this I found the book by far the easiest of Rushdie’s books to read (language is less tortured and magic realism is more measured) and easily (at the time of publication) his best book since Midnight’s children. -
With Salman Rushdie's fascinating novel, Shalimar the Clown I found it rather easy & often necessary to suspend disbelief, in part because this is no conventional story but rather an amazing fable that uses the fractious land of Kashmir as a metaphor for the India/Pakistan partition, Hindu/Moslem relations and perhaps the world at large.
On the surface, Shalimar the Clown appears as an updated, Kashmir-based Romeo & Juliet tale, seeming to portray an unsanctioned love affair between Shalimar (a Moslem) and Boonyi (Hindu), both born on the same day and an arranged marriage by the village elders that seems to fuse the disparate cultures of Pachigam, a mixed Kashmiri village that even includes a Jewish contingent, with all 3 factions serving on the town's governing body.
Alas, this apparently happy resolution is a very temporary one as the lovely Boonyi has a "ravenous longing for something she could not yet name" but which ultimately includes a one-way ticket out of Pachigam. This is where myriad complications set in & the complexity of Rushdie's fable takes over.
Shalimar's mother is an occultist, while his father trains his son as an acrobat & tight-rope performer who can transcend time & space, suggesting that "a rope could become air, a boy could become a bird, with metamorphosis the secret heart of life". Meanwhile, Boonyi's father is a pandit (educator), a widower who loves his daughter dearly, acting as both father & mother to her.
Another main figure, Max Ophuls, is Jewish, a background that puts him at odds with almost everyone in Europe but being gifted in many ways, in time he flees to the U.S. After WWII, Ophuls becomes a U.S. Citizen & eventually the American ambassador to India, at which point his attention is seized by the flirtatious dance of Boonyi, who is more than willing to be his consort in exchange for passage out of Pachigam. This sets in motion Shalimar's radicalization and a ceaseless quest for revenge. *To go beyond this point with further details on the primary sequence of events would be cause for a cautionary label on my review, something I attempt to avoid.
Colonel Kachhwaha declares that Kashmiris on both sides of the "Line of Control" demarcating the Pakistani zone from the Hindustani one treat it with contempt & he is said to bark like an English bulldog. The good Hindustani colonel has no wife but feels married to Kashmir, later being killed in his sleep by a cobra. With other novels Rushdie has previously used Mumbai, an ethnically & religiously mixed but often divided city, as emblematic of the problems of India but with Shalimar the Clown, Kashmir serves that role, at least until the action shifts to Los Angeles.
I found Rushdie's use of language very inventive & at times quite playful; for example, there is a character alternately called Jack Flack, Jock Flock, Judd Flood & Jake Flake. There is an "Iron Mullah" sounding like a contemporary hard rock band but actually a reincarnated figure who converted Kashmiris in the 15th Century.
There is also Bombur Yambarzal, clad in pots, pans & chicken blood, "the silly armor of righteousness & peace". Later, a colorful character named Olga Simeonovna, "Olga Volga" is the super at the building where Boonyi's illegitimate daughter, India, by Max Ophuls, is living in L. A. Olga sees marriage as akin to "car rentals, with no more glass slippers, cause the factory closed, there are no more princes & they shot the Romanovs in a cellar & Anastasia died."
The touches of magical realism begin with the aura of magic that Shalimar & his fellow performers seem to possess but later shift to Boonyi, the former dancer, who having fallen prey to various addictions & becoming obese after fleeing her home & Shalimar, undergoes a transformation after first dying upon her return to Pachigam. Here is a sample of Rusdie's prose at work at a moment when Boonyi's daughter, India, visits her mother's village:She stood by her mother's grave & something got into her. Her mother's grave was carpeted in spring flowers: a simple grave in a simple graveyard at the end of the village near the place where the forest had reclaimed the iron mullah's vanished mosque. She knelt at her mother's graveside & felt the thing enter her, rapidly, decisively, as if it had been waiting below ground for her, knowing she would come. The thing had no name but it had a force & it made her capable of anything.
Because of occasional distractions involving changes of time & place, keeping the wealth of characters in focus takes a bit of work. Both Shalimar & Boonyi undergo transformations of a different sort in Rushdie's novel and the ending may strike some as ambiguous. Ultimately, Shalimar the Clown is a rather dark fable but one I enjoyed very much.
She thought about the number of times her mother had died or been killed. Her mother had left everything she knew & had gone in search of a future & though she had thought of it as an opening it had been a closing, the first little death after which came greater fatalities. She saw her mother standing in a blizzard while the people among whom she had grown up treated her like a ghost. Then in the hut on the hillside followed a long period of living death while death circled her waiting for its time & then death came in the guise of a clown.
**By way of a post-review comment, during the summer of 2016, I was most fortunate to be present for a world premiere performance at the St. Louis Opera Theatre of an opera based on Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown adapted by Jack Perla & librettist Rajiv Joseph. The opera did omit some of the characters in Rushdie's novel and rather inventively featured soprano Andriana Churchman very effectively playing both the parts of Boonyi & her daughter India, with Sean Panikkar a very convincing Shalimar.
The orchestra was augmented by the addition of tabla (drums) & sitar to insert a particularly Indian sound to the opera. Having just finished reading Shalimar the Clown I found the operatic version of the novel wonderfully evocative & quite a memorable adaptation. Here's hoping that other cities around the world have the opportunity to experience the opera.
***Images within my review: Author Salman Rushdie ; Max Ophuls, on whom Rushdie's character is loosely based; program cover from the St. Louis Opera Company performance of Shalimar the Clown in 2016. -
“For the rest of his life Max Ophuls would remember that instant during which the shape of the conflict in Kashmir had seemed too great and alien for his Western mind to understand, and the sense of urgent need with which he had drawn his own experience around him, like a shawl. Had he been trying to understand, or to blind himself to his failure to do so?”
This book begins with the murder of Max Ophuls, former U.S. Ambassador to India and later chief of counterterrorism, by Shalimar the Clown, while Max is visiting his illegitimate daughter, India, in California. The book then flashes back to provide the family members’ backstories. As we learn about the characters, we also learn about the culture and history of Kashmir. Initially, Kashmir is an area of peaceful coexistence among a diverse population. Over the course of the novel, it devolves into an area of violent conflict. In a similar manner, the characters are initially content, but end up embroiled in gruesome tale of revenge.
“The murderous rage of Shalimar the clown, his possession by the devil, burned fiercely in him and carried him forward, but in the murmurous night it was just one of many stories, one small particular untold tale in a crowd of such tales, one minuscule portion of the unwritten history of Kashmir.”
This is a literary work. Rushdie’s writing is dense and complex. He weaves a compelling storyline, set against a backdrop of Kashmir’s history. He expects the reader to do some heavy lifting. I looked up quite a bit of Kashmiri history to supplement the information provided in the novel. It also includes a number of local myths and legends. Suffice it to say this is not a quick and easy read, but I found it fascinating.
A few of the political, historical, and cultural topics include foreign interference, imperialism, colonialism, corruption, terrorism, and religious differences. I am not going to claim to completely understand all the interconnected elements of this book, but I definitely get the sense that this is a book about the corruption of a paradise. Rushdie is a brilliant writer.
“What happened that day in Pachigam need not be set down here in full detail, because brutality is brutality and excess is excess and that’s all there is to it. There are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun.” -
After toiling through The Satanic Verses a few years ago, my overriding memory is of how little of the novel I understood. I was therefore reluctant to get stuck into Shalimar The Clown when my sister passed it on recently.
Sure enough, I'm finding Rushdie's authorial voice to be much like I remember it - extensive vocabulary, usage of magical realism/dreams/fantasies, strong character descriptions, and multi-cultural savvy that combine together seamlessly. For these reasons I'm finding the story a bit overwhelming, and the author's power of expression is so strong and eloquent that at times I find it overpowering.
The novel tells the tale of Shalimar the Clown, a Kashmiri performer who is blinded by hatred following his wife's affair with the American ambassador. The complexities of character and impulses are beautifully told in this story and are superimposed over historical events and ideological conflict.
The tones of the novel vary greatly, although the story becomes increasingly desperate as Kashmir is torn apart by conflict and Shalimar is possessed by hatred. The author seems ambivilant towards the main characters, challenging the reader to judge/sympathise for themselves.
I would recommend Shalimar The Clown for its sheer scope, humanity and power of description. -
Rather dazzling in a depressive manner.
We are no longer protagonists, only agonists.
Rushdie does wonderful lush prose. Rather sharp, too, in his critiques of peoples and events. But his characterization is superb. In each of the main characters you find things to admire and recoil in disgust. He brings a male sensibility and gaze to his writing, that's not to say that it's performative masculinity, but rather that you would never mistake his gender.
You have an idyllic place with Muslims living side by side with Hindus. Two star-crossed lovers grab that golden ring, and it spirals into a tapestry of betrayals and violence. Fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, and legacy. The legacy of our families, our ideologies, our culture, our lands, and how heavy that burden of debt is on each of us and affecting our decisions.The explosion--the gigantic excitement of the moment of power, followed almost immediately by a violent involuntary physical reaction, a parallel explosion of vomit--taught him two lessons he never forgot: that terrorism was thrilling, and that, no matter now profoundly justified its cause, he personally could not get over the moral hurdles required to perform such acts on a regular basis.
I suppose, in the simplest terms, this is just a story about love gone bad.
I came across a review of this book by Christopher Hitchens in a previous read this year and added it to my reading list. Hitchens' comment about if nuclear war were to come about it would happen between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. And then the events in Kashmir started, and I requested it from my library.
This was not a quick read for me because of the real world implications, and also that the format outlines four different lives: Shalimar, Boonyi, Max, and India/Kashmira. The sections made natural breaks. I walk away from this story with a better understanding of how things kept fracturing until we reach the point where we are now.The fall of Strasbourg was a chapter in its back-and-forth frontier history. The fall of Paris was Paris's fault.
"Be so good," he said at the conclusion of an eloquent tirade, "as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that's what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life."
-
I enjoyed this a lot. Compared to Rushdie's style in The Satanic Verses his magical realism here is more subtle and toned down to the point where it enhances rather than disrupting my suspension-of-disbelief. At one point magic even forms the case for the defence in a trial in an entirely believable way: the argument is, as my friend
Alicia pointed out to me recently "If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences".
The magical strand helps to creates a wonderful, unsettling sense of the fragility of truth. Rushdie also revises interpretations by giving two characters' thoughts on the same thing: he does an unnecessary author-voice thing like 'but Firdous saw more clearly; she knew...' that strategically offers comparative, but never definitive judgement. Nonetheless, this isn't one of those works that casts the reader into despair by dispensing with a stable timeline of events. Rather, it shows how conflict and slaughter rewrite history by erasing memory.
I enjoy how he moves between different styles of dramatising events too, for example when he describes the Indian army crackdown on the Muslim population he does so in a style of utterly transparent propaganda that enables him to describe horror wittily, creating a distance that stops it from being unbearable to read. This is similar to the technique used by Voltaire in
Candide. Kashmir descends into violence, and Rushdie can only show how it happens. In
Orientalism Said points out that any distinction tends to polarise (orientalism makes the Orient more oriental AND the West more western). Here religion turns into a polarising division because it is politicised in the precious materiality of the land. Thus it becomes the defining feature of the bodies of believers...
The vortex of violence in Kashmir is centred on two intense characters, Boonyi and Shalimar. They can be read as ordinary, elevated only by the author's attention (ie everyone is endowed with certain transformative capacities) or as magical beings, foci of passionate energy and power. Kashmira and Max are on the same plane. All of these characters exhibit ruthlessness and the ability to channel all of their resources obsessively to a single end.
I find Rushdie an interesting writer of gender. I don't see this as a sexist book, but as a masculinist one. It's interesting that the person who seems most despicable to the novel's internal poetic(?) morality(?) is an asexual, unmotherly woman. Shalimar also seems minimally sexual, but this feature defines him much less than his brutality. Boonyi's sexuality is her power and it directs her fate; while Max is even more insatiable than her, and the contrast between their downfalls - he never loses agency, is always subject rather than object - is an indictment of patriarchal gender roles. Kashmira is so 'unfeminine' that she takes no interest in clothes and at age seven tells her father she likes 'bows and arrows and slingshots and excaliburs and guns' (I wonder why she calls our attention to King Arthur). He is unfazed, telling her to use the doll he has brought her for target practice. Poetic(?) justice(?) rewards Kashmira's warrior qualities in a literally penetrative climax. -
Kashmir is the head wound inflicted on India as a parting shot by the Britishers while leaving. Over the period following Independence, it festered and turned septic - ultimately becoming gangrenous.
The tale of Kashmir had never been told in its entirety; maybe because it so many-layered, contains so many contradictory points of view, and is so emotionally loaded that nobody could be trusted to give a truthful picture. But where history fails, mythology has to take over. And artists and writers being the myth-makers of today (as Joseph Campbell has said), who better than Salman Rushdie, the "Shah of Blah", to tell the tale?
All myth is metaphor. So it is here: Shalimar the Clown, his wife Bhoomi (called Boonyi) Kaul, her lover Maximillian Ophuls, their daughter Kashmira/ India - characters who are flesh-and-blood people, shameless pasteboard caricatures, and mythical beings spanning time and space at the same time. Because the creation of a new iconography is important, to replace those old images which have become entrenched in our collective psyche and which have lost their power.New images urgently needed to be made. Images for a godless world. Until the language of irreligion caught up with the holy stuff, until there was sufficient poetry and iconography of godlessness, these sainted echoes would never fade, would retain their problematic power...
***
We Indians have grown upon the story that Kashmir has always been an integral part of India. The truth is much more nuanced. At the time of Indian independence and the partition of the country, Kashmir opted for independence. However, a few months after the British left, mercenaries from Pakistan attacked: and the fledgling nation was forced to come to India for support. Subsequently, the Indian army took up the protection of Kashmir, provisionally accessing it to India, with the understanding the question of independence shall be taken up at a future date through a referendum (something which never happened). As time went by, Kashmiri people began to rebel against the Indian army presence which they increasingly began to view as foreign occupation: and India, in the meantime, began to see the people who wanted independence as subversives.Elasticnagar was unpopular, the colonel knew that, but unpopularity was illegal. The legal position was that the Indian military presence in Kashmir had the full support of the population, and to say otherwise was to break the law. To break the law was to be a criminal and criminals were not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on them heavily with the full panoply of the law and with hobnailed boots and lathi sticks as well. The key to understanding this position was the word integral and its associated concepts. Elasticnagar was integral to the Indian effort and the Indian effort was to preserve the integrity of the nation. Integrity was a quality to be honoured and an attack on the integrity of the nation was an attack on its honour and was not to be tolerated. Therefore Elasticnagar was to be honoured and all other attitudes were dishonourable and consequendy illegal. Kashmir was an integral part of India. An integer was a whole and India was an integer and fractions were illegal. Fractions caused fractures in the integer and were thus not integral. Not to accept this was to lack integrity and implicitly or explicitly to question the unquestionable integrity of those who did accept it. Not to accept this was latently or patently to favour disintegration. This was subversive. Subversion leading to disintegration was not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on it heavily whether it was of the overt or covert kind. The legally compulsory and enforceable popularity of Elasticnagar was thus a matter of integrity, pure and simple, even if the truth was that Elasticnagar was unpopular. When the truth and integrity conflicted it was integrity that had to be given precedence. Not even the truth could be permitted to dishonour the nation. Therefore Elasticnagar was popular even though it was not popular. It was a simple enough matter to understand.
Initially, the fight was for "Kashmiriyat": a free country independent of both India and Pakistan, with its unique culture.In those days before the crazies got into the act the liberation front was reasonably popular and azadi was the universal cry. Freedom! A tiny valley of no more than five million souls, landlocked, preindustrial, resource rich but cash poor, perched thousands of feet up in the mountains like a tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giant's teeth, wanted to be free. Its inhabitants had come to the conclusion that they didn't much like India and didn't care for the sound of Pakistan. So: freedom! Freedom to be meat-eating Brahmins or saint-worshipping Muslims, to make pilgrimages to the ice-lingam high in the unmelting snows or to bow down before the prophet's hair in a lakeside mosque, to listen to the santoor and drink salty tea, to dream of Alexander's army and to choose never to see an army again, to make honey and carve walnut into animal and boar shapes and to watch the mountains push their way, inch by inch, century by century, further up into the sky. Freedom to choose folly over greatness but to be nobody's fools. Azadi! Paradise wanted to be free.
Soon, however, the conflict took on religious undertones. The Kashmiri Pandits who wanted to integrate with India were seen as patriots and those who wanted independence were seen as Muslim subversives. And when Pakistan got into the act, and the twins born of the bloody partition went to war over a piece of frozen land, the "Kashmir problem" was born.War, whose highest purpose was the creation of clarity where none existed, the noble clarity of victory and defeat, had solved nothing. There had been little glory and much wasteful dying. Neither side had made good its claim to this land, or gained more than the tiniest patches of territory. The coming of peace left things in worse shape than they had been before the twenty-five days of battle. This was peace with more hatred, peace with greater embitterment, peace with deeper mutual contempt. For Colonel Kachhwaha, however, there was no peace, because the war raged on interminably in his memory, every moment of it replaying itself at every moment of every day, the livid green dampness of the trenches, the choking golf ball of fear in the throat, the shell bursts like lethal palm fronds in the sky, the sour grimaces of passing bullets, the iridescence of wounds and mutilations, the incandescence of death. Back in Elasticnagar, he immured himself in his quarters and pulled down the blinds and still the war would not cease, the intense slow motion of hand-to-hand combat in which the glassy fragility of his own pathetic, odorous life might be shattered at any moment by this bayonet that knife this grenade that screaming black-greased face, where this twist of the ankle that swivel of the hip this duck of the head that jab of the arm could summon up the darkness welling out of the cracks in the jagged earth, the darkness licking at the bodies of the soldiers, licking away their strength their legs their hope their legs their dissolving colourless legs. He had to sit in this darkness, his own soft darkness, so that other darkness, the hard darkness, would not come. To sit in soft darkness and forever be at war.
Yes, the war, the forever war... the "freedom fighters" became "Pakistani terrorists", irrespective of whether they were from India or Pakistan. The conflict became a dirty battle, pitching brother against brother. And the army, assigned special powers, unsurprisingly became the principal oppressor.The political echelon's decision to declare Kashmir a “disturbed area" was also greatly appreciated. In a disturbed area, search warrants were not required, arrest waffants ditto, and shoot to kill treatment of suspects was acceptable. Suspects who remained alive could be arrested and detained for two years, during which period it would not be necessary to charge them or to set a date for their trial. For more dangerous suspects the political echelon permitted more severe responses. Persons who committed the ultimate crime of challenging the territorial integrity of India or in the opinion of the armed forces attempted to disrupt same could be jailed for five years. Interrogation of such suspects would take place behind closed doors and confessions extracted by force during these secret interrogations would be admissible as evidence provided the interrogating officer had reason to believe the statement was being made voluntarily. Confessions made after the suspect was bearen or hung by the feet, or after he had experienced electricity or the crushing of his hands or feet, would be considered as being voluntary. The burden of proof would be shifted and it would be for these persons to prove the falsehood of the automatic presumption of guilt. If they failed so to do the death penalty could be applied.
The impact on the Brahmin Pandits was also devastating. Forced to flee the valley under fear of genocide, they got short shrift at the hands of the Indian government too. Like the Palestinian refugees, they struggle to this day, useful only as pawns in a political battle between the Right and the Left.There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.
***
Now did I give the impression that this book is a political tirade? If so, I apologise. It is deeply political - at the same time, it is a tale of personal tragedy.
The tragedy of Boonyi Kaul, the Pandit girl married to a Muslim man, and who wanted to escape the humdrum life of the valley. That of Max Ophuls, her French-American Jewish lover, who is a counter-terrorism warrior, and who is battling demons of his own. That of her daughter Kashmira, renamed India, rudderless in the last decades of the last century. And ultimately, the tragedy of her cuckolded husband, tightrope-walker-cum-entertainer-turned terrorist, Noman Noman, better known as "Shalimar the Clown".
Because in the case of Kashmir, you see, the personal is always political.In short, she could not get her cuckolded husband out of her mind, and because it was impossible to talk to her American lover about anything important she spoke heatedly of "Kashmir" instead. Whenever she said "Kashmir" she secretly meant her husband, and this ruse allowed to declare her love for the man she had betrayed to the man with whom she had committed the act of treason. More and more often her love for this encoded "Kashmir", arousing no suspicion, even when her pronouns occasionally slipped, so that she referred to his mountains, his valleys, his gardens, his flowing streams, his flowers, his stags, his fish. Her American lover was obviously too stupid to crack the code, and attributed the pronoun slippage to her incomplete command of the language. However he, the ambassador, took careful note of her passion, and was plainly moved when she was at her angriest, when she castigated "Kashmir" for his cowardice, for his passivity in the face of crimes committed against him. "These crimes," he asked, reclining on her pillows, caressing her naked back, kissing her exposed hip, pinching her nipple, "these would be actions of the Indian armed forces you're talking about?" At that moment she decided that the term "Indian armed forces" would secretly refer to the ambassador himself, she would use the Indian presence in the valley as a surrogate for the American occupation of her body, so, "Yes, that's it," she cried, "the Indian armed forces, raping and pillaging. How can you not know it? How can you not comprehend the humiliation of it, the shame of having your boots march all over my private fields?" Again, those telltale slips of the songue. Your boots, my fields. Again, distracted by her inflamed beauty, he paid no attention to the errors. "Yes, dearest," he said in a muffled voice from between her thighs, "I believe I do begin to understand, but would it be possible to table the subject for the moment?"
Five glorious stars! -
4.25|5
This book was two months in the reading and it’s probably one of the reasons I had a big reading slump this Summer... but I still loved it so damn much. It’s not an easy book to read by any means, but for me it was totally worth it. I probably didn’t get all the references since it requires some history knowledge but I was there for the ride and I enjoy every minute of it. -
I've been a reader for some time now & I've read a few good books but none of them have made me realise the power of fiction. Until now. Until I picked up 'Shalimar the Clown'.
Had anyone ever given us a non-fiction book about the issues related to Kashmir as raised in this book, we'd have probably abandoned it after 100 pages or so & I'm not lying or judging anyone when I say that, since that is pretty normal. That is perhaps since most of us have been watching the same thing over & over again in the news since what seems like eternity & we think we know everything about it & we love to have an opinion on the same, but guess what - we know absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. ZERO. And that is perhaps where 'Shalimar the Clown' succeeds so well - in enlightening the reader about atleast some of the aspects of the Kashmir issue, if not all.
Okay, here goes the story - Maximilian Ophuls, a WWII hero, former US ambassador to India & subsequently the CIA counter-terrorism chief, is knifed to death at the doorstep of his daughter India by his mysterious Kashmiri driver who calls himself Shalimar the Clown. What first looks to be a political assasination turns out to be a extremely personal one, linked to a woman in their past.
Pretty simple, right? Except that Salman Rushdie is no mean writer. What Rushdie does is that he weaves an epic narrative that transcends time, space as well as continents as we follow the lives & fortunes of the major players of this tale. We see ourselves transported back in the past, to a time when Kashmir was still what the Great Mughal emperor Jehangir pronounced as 'Paradise on Earth', where Muslims & Kashmiri Pandits practised secularism & tolerance towards each other & treated each other like brothers in bond, where the bond was strong enough to see a village of Muslims stand up for the honour of a Hindu girl, where the marriage of a Hindu & a Muslim was viewed not with skepticism but celebrated as a victory of the culture this paradise nurtured for centuries, where the people were willing to stand up for their principles of love & kinship even when faced with budding extremism.
We're then whooshed away to Europe, where bloodshed & strife is rife in the midst of World War II, as a young Max Ophuls establishes his reputation as a master forger in the Resistance against the Nazi forces & through his acts of daring and espionage, he is elevated to hero-like status. We cheer as he crosses enemy lines in a record-breaking flying adventure & seduces a high-ranking German official much to the utter disbelief of one & all. He also finds love & later marries a fellow spy (which eventually crumbles in the wake of his infidelities). Years pass by & then he is appointed as US ambassador to India, where he arrives to resolve an impending Indo-Pak border crisis & charms his Indian counterparts, winning their love & respect. Until he decides to go in pursuit of a love that is doomed from the very start, the cost of which must be eventually paid with his life.
Then there is Shalimar the Clown, who ditches his vocation of a public performer & turns to terrorism to avenge the betrayal of the love of his life. You feel his anguish & deep pain as his innocent self dwindles away in his chosen path of violence & revenge, the wronged husband whose wrath will destroy anything that comes between him & his sole mission of seeking vengeance against all those who have wronged him.
And there is that woman - the Woman - a free-thinking spirit feeling trapped in a closely-knit community, who wishes to fly away to distant lands & like the legendary Anarkali (a character she plays in her dance troupe) who desires the forbidden love of a prince. When she finally recognises an opportunity & seizes it with both hands, she realises to her misfortune that perhaps the grass wasn't really greener on the other side of paradise. Her actions & decisions ultimately shape the lives of everyone around her & symbolically, that of Kashmir.
As the norm goes, Rushdie invokes themes of magical realism & verisimilitude - lovers talk to each other despite being miles apart, they touch each other tenderly without actually touching & the ghosts of past keeps haunting the present lives of these characters, appearing in their dreams & nightmares.
And then comes an integral part of the story despite technically being a sub-plot in itself - Kashmir. Being of Kashmiri descent himself, the issue of Kashmir is obviously close to Rushdie's heart & as we watch the paradise turn into living hell for its residents as Kashmir is hammered & smashed by militants as well as that uniformed military force that calls itself the Indian Army, whose actions are no less questionable than those of the extremist groups. One passage that is particularly striking & is immensely moving as the beautiful village of Pachigam goes up in flames is as follows -
"Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who killed that youth? Who clubbed that grandmother? Who knifed that aunt? Who broke that old man’s nose? Who broke that young girl’s heart? Who killed that lover? Who shot his fiancée? Who burned the costumes? Who broke the swords? Who burned the library? Who burned the saffron field? Who slaughtered the animals? Who burned the beehives? Who poisoned the paddies? Who killed the children? Who whipped the parents? Who raped that lazy-eyed woman? Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed woman as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again?"
Rushdie can often be brutal like this & you can feel the words tearing away at your heart, tearing away at that conscience of yours, tearing away at your ignorance.
Though Rushdie tries not to take sides & presents matters from the point of view of everyone involved (including that of the Indian Army, justified on few counts), he is critical of the tactics employed against the people by the terrorist groups & the Army - against the latter, he skilfully uses satire to bring out the bitter ironies in the much-tainted AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) & the extremities carried out under the same, something I feel Indians really should be aware about.
I don't really have anything to complain about, except maybe a fairly ordinary last few pages (not to mention a final flourish towards the end), but I don't really how it could've ended otherwise. Maybe it's just me trying hard to find some fault with this book.
4.5 to 5 stars for 'Shalimar the Clown' by Salman Rushdie. This is undoubtedly an important book & I highly recommend it for anyone who wishes to understand the Kashmir issue. A must read for fans of literary fiction & should you decide to read this, be prepared to be mesmerized by one of the most sublime storytellers of our times.
"There was no India. There was only Kashmira, and Shalimar the Clown." -
Shalimar the Clown has been on my shelf collecting dust. While I do admit to having quite the crush on Rushdie, I get flashbacks from the utter disappointment I felt when I read The Satanic Verses. My friend, also a Rushdie aficionado, finally convinced me to pick it up and blow the dust off the covers. My love affair with Rushdie has been rekindled.
Rushdie is at full power in Shalimar. He combines his lush prose and diverse characters with political allegory and cultural savvy. Although it's easily one of Rushdie's most comprehensive novels, it certainly isn't a light read-- he dedicates much of the novel to theorizing about different conflicts. He brings us from WWII Germany to ongoing conflicts in Kashmir and the Philippines. But don't let that scare you from reading it. At it's core, it's a beautiful story about love and vengeance.
The story is told through the eyes of four main characters; Shalimar, a tightrope walker from Kashmir; Max Ophuls; his illegitimate daughter, India; and Boonyi, the woman whose story unites them all. Even more astounding than the characters is the setting itself. Rushdie takes us to a beautiful, Macondo-esque village in rural Kashmir. The religious tolerance in this village allows for the Hindu/Muslim marriage of Shalimar and Boonyi. We read about Pachigam in all its glory, and its slow destruction into an Asian dystopia. Rushdie is all about the allegory, and once again (quite brilliantly) mirrors the destruction of Kashmir with Shalimar's own descent into violence.
Of course, Rushdie can't write a book without stirring some controversy.. Many critics have accused Rushdie of being sympathetic towards terrorists. I disagree. He merely gives us a different perspective of the world. He portrays each character with such intimate detail, but remains ambivalent throughout the book. He leaves it to us to judge each character.
5 stars. Great. Amazing. Brilliant. But it isn't for everybody. -
Sometimes, now, she did not hear his voice for weeks, even months. In the night she reached out for him but found only a void. He had gone beyond her reach and she could only wait for him to return, not knowing if she wanted him to return so that she could preserve her dream of a happy ending, or if she wished him dead because his death would set her free. But he always returned in the end, and when he did it seemed that in his life only a single night had passed, or at the very most two or three. Years of her life were vanishing but in the place from which he called to her, time ran at a different speed, the space around him took a different shape. She did not know how to tell him everything that was happening in Pachigam. There was no time. Increasingly, however, he wanted only to send her the message of himself, of the fire that continued to burn in him, […]
-
Shalimar the Clown is consummate Rushdie although with less magic realism than most of his books, particularly the most recent ‘Two year, eight months and twenty-eight nights’ which was just full on magic! There is so much in this book, starting with an assassination in California, to 1950’s Kashmir to the Second World War and the French resistance in Strasbourg and then back and forth between Kashmir and California.
In Shalimar, Rushdie focuses on the contested land of Kashmir before most of the current troubles began. He focuses on the inhabitants of a small village of theater performers and how one woman leaving that village is the catalyst for the novel; how the rage this causes fuels much of what takes place. It’s difficult to talk too much about it without giving away the story but the book focuses on the rifts between cultures, countries and religions, the ties that bind families, how terrorists are formed, how politics blurs the lines between right and wrong. It also looks at power and colonization in the form of Boonyi and Max Ophuls and of course touches on religion - well ok - criticizes those who distort religion, particularly in the figure of the Iron mullah who says that, ‘When the world is in disarray then God does not send a religion of love.’
His characterization is as wonderful as always, especially when it comes to women –you can always depend on Rushdie for kick arse, intelligent women characters and yes, they may be beautiful too but this is fiction! Rushdie always tells a wonderful story entwined around politics, cultural morays and religion and this book is no different. I particularly enjoyed the parts about the French revolution, not realizing until I looked it up that the Blue Bugatti airplane was real (you have to read the book for an explanation) and the descriptions of Kashmir as this beautiful, magical place made me sad that even today, the fighting goes on. Yet essentially, like all of Rushdie’s novels I’ve read, this is a love story across the decades, love and hate, and masterfully executed as always. -
ovvero storia del pagliaccio che si nasconde nel fanatico religioso
Shalimar il Clown è la storia della nascita del terrorismo jihadista nel Kashmir, terra di confine prima invasa dai soldati indiani, che stuprano come se non ci fosse niente di meglio per piegare una popolazione, e poi "difeso" dai fondamentalisti islamici, provenienti dal Pakistan, che trasformano una terra di pace e coesistenza in una roccaforte del terrorismo e lasciano le stesse macerie dell'esercito indiano...
il racconto è incentrato su una storia di tradimenti coniugali, impensabili là molto più che nel resto del mondo, e sul destino di un popolo che si piega per non spezzarsi e a metà strada si perde e finisce per scomparire...una storia dura, bella e dolorosa...come il destino triste di quell'area geografica...
consigliatissimo a chi non si fida più del telegiornale della sera e vuole davvero capire -
This book has been a hell of a ride. When I started it, I had the feeling I wasn't going to enjoy it that much, but by page 100 I was hooked and so invested in the characters that it I felt like I made all of their decisions with them. The book is a political comentary on the conflict between Kashmir and India, but, through the depth of its characters' humanity, it is also much more than that: a story of love, hatred, feat and death. Just like any good story should be, a reminder of the diversity of human though and human experience.
-
Fiecare carte scrisă de Rushdie îmi reamintește : în '47 s-a născut cel mai mare povestitor.
-
4,5
In Shalimar il clown ho ritrovato il Rushdie di
I figli della mezzanotte. Amo i suoi giochi di parole, la sua ironia, la sua impertinenza, i suoi personaggi. Abbiamo sì una storia di amore, gelosia, tradimento e vendetta, ma il fulcro è la situazione storica del Kashmir (che se la passa molto male ancora oggi). Di solito nei romanzi si parla di background storico, ma con Rushdie la storia viene portata in primo piano grazie ai personaggi che in qualche modo incarnano e rappresentano i vari paesi coinvolti. La storia la fa da protagonista e impariamo della nascita dei conflitti nel Kashmir, del terrorismo jihadista (dall'Afghanistan alle Filippine), ma anche dell'occupazione nazista in Francia durante la seconda guerra mondiale. Rushdie analizza le debolezze umane (soprattutto l'avidità), che alla fine sono quelle che portano a perpetrare il male e ai conflitti. Ci sono anche descrizioni dell'arte, la cultura, le usanze e i paesaggi kashmiri.
Solo cinque capitoli, ognuno dedicato a un personaggio, in cui impariamo a conoscere i personaggi principali e la loro storia partendo dall'infanzia. Il primo capitolo è stato il più lento e mi ci è voluto un po' per ingranare, ma poi il romanzo diventa scorrevole e coinvolge interamente. -
2,5 zvaigznes. Indiskais un Rušdi stils nav man, lai gan stāsts interesants.
-
Pe scurt, musulmanul Shalimar Clovnul devine terorist internațional după ce iubita sa soție, dansatoarea hindusă Boonyi Kaul a fost sedusă de ambasadorul Statelor Unite și i-a născut acestuia o fetiță .
Predestinați încă dinaintea nașterii lor, Shalimar și Boonyi au fost născuți amândoi deodată în aceeași noapte, de două mame prietene, în legendara grădină Shalimar.
Timpul însă îi va transforma însă în protagoniști dramatici ai celebrului conflict pentru Kashmir din anii 60, dintre India și Pakistan.
Un roman de neratat, zic. -
But maybe the truth is that, as he used to say, our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets.
My father says that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains nobility, the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind. -
I was so impressed by this book that it's taken me awhile to work out what to say.... primarily, what fascinated me was the grace and effortlessness with which it moves from one setting to another: a large chunk is set in Kashmir, covering much of the last half of the 20th century; another large chunk in Europe (primarily France) during the Second World War; the last chunk in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Each of these settings and historical periods is richly detailed; a lesser author would have taken an entire book (at least!) to evoke just one of them. Rushdie, however, discusses the history of Alsace and the history of the India-Pakistan conflict with equal facility, making for a truly rewarding read. And the prose is beautiful.
Of course, this isn't just a book about setting: we follow the lives of four main characters, as well as a host of minor characters who add quite a bit of flavor to the stories. Unlike some other reviewers, I think Rushdie's female characters are depicted quite well; neither of the female main characters is Everywoman, but as a woman I found them realistic and compelling even when I couldn't relate to their decisions.
This is one of those books that begins near the end, then works its way backward in time before coming back around; I often find this irritating since I already know what's going to happen, but in Shalimar the Clown it works extremely well: even knowing (part of) the end, I was dying to know what happened in the middle.
Finally, as far as the politics of the whole thing... I was surprised when I came to this site after finishing the book and saw how many people view it as a book about terrorism. Hardly. Yes, the history of Kashmir in the last half-century includes terrorists, and so they appear; yes, the book comments on the causes of terrorism. But there is a lot more to it than that; with slight alterations, the book could have been written with only passing references to terrorism and kept the story largely the same, which should tell you it's not the big focus. If it might bother you, you should know that the Indian government is portrayed in an unfavorable light, while Rushdie's views on the US government come across as somewhat ambivalent. And that the atrocity count in some places is high, although this doesn't make the book depressing all the way through--some of my favorite scenes were the comic ones depicting pre-war village life in Kashmir.
Some have read this entire book as political commentary (with particular characters representing "east" and "west", "Hindu" and "Muslim", etc.), and since Rushdie is a literary author, I don't doubt he intended that. But for me it was mostly just a great story, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as such. Happy reading! -
How do you review a book that's made sure to push you into a deep set of feelings?
The characters that make you take sides even though the writer doesn't?
The characters that don't shy away from their worst behaviour to just buy into the goodness of the world. Because in their world goodness is a non-existent entity now. An entity that is long gone leaving behind it's inhabitants with raw and unabashed feelings about the world.
This is a story of love, loss, revenge or is it all the same? Is it the story about Kashmir? Is it the story from the past? Is this the story of Max who escaped the clutches of Nazis back in the World War era? Is this the story of Bhoomi who dreamt of getting out of her tiny village in Kashmir and have dreams bigger than her own life? Is this the story of Shalimar who gave all for love, blood and last, revenge? Or is it the story of our own kind who seem to lose touch with humanity and kindness? Who lose touch with the real world and move along with the dark and subject others to pain and themselves pain?
There's a reason why I picked Salman Rushdie for one of my classes at the university and it's precisely to understand world through a complex and an iconoclast of a writer. A writer who holds no bars when he talks about his own homeland or about an institution that means a lot to him? Or just the beliefs that he understands but doesn't let it ride over him? From some of the books I've read in the last few months, this one stands out for it's raw depiction of human life and most of all the crown of our nation that's left to bleed since I can remember - Kashmir.
Also, another historical fiction suggestion for you that I'd recommend blind-folded. ✨
Unpopular opinion incoming: A book that's more refined than 'Midnight's Children' itself and will be a lot more interesting to you cus this doesn't have an overdose of magical realism and a work of Rushdie's that doesn't seem to have many takers. I like myself some underdog challenges. -
Joy keeps lending me books that I dislike in interesting ways.
There is no doubt that this is a collection of beautiful sentences. The writing is vivid, lyrical, and evocative. Unfortunately it's mostly evocative of horror. The sections all pretty much start out "Here are some people. Horrible things happened to them. Let's examine their lives leading up to the horrible things." The Kashmir sections are the loveliest, I think, but that just makes the torture, rape, and systematic murder in them all the more gruesome.
My other main objection is the Max Ophuls section. If I never read another book about a brilliant, multitalented Renaissance man who gets all the girls, treats all of them like commodities, behaves in general like a raging narcissist that nevertheless knows his lines and is still supposed to be a sympathetic figure it will be too soon. It made me even angrier that he was supposed to be worthy of pity because he got his throat slit in the first section. (This isn't a spoiler since it's mentioned with increasingly tedious foreshadowing every fifth sentence from the second page on.)
So yeah, women are treated like dirt, minorities are treated like dirt, people in regions the possession of which is disputed by major powers are treated like dirt, and being treated like dirt makes people crazy. That's the takeaway. The presence of a bow- and gun-shooting, boxing, martial-artist hot female instrument of revenge in the last 75 pages doesn't balance the rest of it, really.
Shalimar the Clown is a book filled with richly detailed pictures. They're just not pictures I want in my head. -
Rating: 4.5 stars
A mournful lament of the paradise that was Kashmir ("a ruined paradise, not so much lost as smashed", says the blurb) wrapped in an enticing tale of love, loss, hatred, relegious extremism, power and that ubiquitous, terribly influential entity - luck. The writing is fabulous - at once evocative, captivating, heartbreaking and magical - and the characters are very real.
I read this book on cramped and somewhat-raining train journeys across the beautiful, pond-filled terrain of West Bengal, and neither the landscape nor less-tiring pleasures like listening to music managed to distract me for long.
A masterpiece. -
Dincolo de povestea de dragoste și ură, cel mai mult am apreciat că, deși este un roman de ficțiune, cartea explică pe înțelesul unui cititor obișnuit originea și cauzele nici până azi rezolvatului conflict din Cașmir, nașterea diverselor grupări teroriste cu fundament religios finanțate și înarmate de Pakistan cu ajutorul puterilor angrenate în Războiul Rece, cum au fost eliminați treptat naționaliștii laici, abuzurile și manipulările trupelor indiene, apariția taberelor de antrenament pentru atentatori sinucigași, precum și crimele și violențele ce au decurs din toate acestea.
Ultimul capitol mi s-a părut comercial, grăbit, cinematografic și cumva nepotrivit cu restul cărții. -
Esta é a primeira obra que leio do autor. Gostei bastante da escrita e da estrutura da narrativa. Gostei de "passear" por Caxemira e do contexto socio-politico que foi explicado ao leitor. Também gostei das várias menções aos rituais e deuseus hindus que é uma religião que me fascina.
Não gostei do final.
