Salman Rushdie News

 Rushdie lives.

The New Yorker interviewed him, Salman Rushdie on Surviving the Fatwa.

The Drift published After the Fatwa​ | Losing Faith in Salman Rushdie by Zain Khalid. This reviews his latest novel, which I have not even seen. Having a read a bit of Rushdie, I like him for more than his being a poster child for freedom of expression. Mr. Kahlid presents an interesting counterpoint:

Rushdie’s authorial vices — his moralizing tone, his love of trivia, his chintzy exoticism — have rendered many of his recent novels unreadable. But at his best, Rushdie writes from a perspective between cultural and religious identity, synthesizing the migrant sensibility into a searing, protean critique of the Anglo-imperial world. His finest work is moored to subjects and settings he knows well; it is often about India. My hope was that Victory City, an Indian novel through and through, would mark the return of Rushdie’s critical and creative faculties. No such luck. He has forgone the potent nebulousness of colonialism, displacement, and exile for mannerist expressions of his own prosaic wisdom.

I would have to say it is that perspective of being between expresses my interest in Rushdie. I suggest reading the whole of the article above – it has a tidy summary of Rushdie's early works and also of his biography.

 I will continue to read as much of Rushdie as I can, and suggest you do the same.

sch 2/8

The Brisbane Time reviewed Rushdie's new novel under Salman Rushdie’s new novel is a tale of power, exile and steely defiance. A few excerpts:

In a world where animals talk, gods meddle and humans can transform into birds we follow Pampa’s travails in love, motherhood, queenship and exile – a persistent theme in Rushdie’s writing. At various times she is revered as a goddess, reviled as a witch, admired as a poet and feared as a warrior. Kings come and go, wives and children vie for power and influence, priests connive and another enemy is besieged and vanquished, its leader’s head cut off and stuffed with straw.

There are a great many of these conflicts, lifted from the history books and Rushdie is bogged by chronology. An awful lot of people come and go in 247 years and many are viewed at the same middle-distance focal length, discouraging emotional engagement. The result is a sometimes plodding read, with fatuous asides from the author explaining the poet’s intentions or omissions. As a result, the narrative can wilt with fatigue.

Pampa Kampana is a juggernaut, carrying a vast narrative and her elongated life is in danger of becoming as tedious to the reader as it is to her.

This longevity does, however, allow for an examination of the impermanence of both good and bad regimes. Visionary rulers come and go, some eras treat those on the margin better than others. Buildings crumble but if you’re lucky, chronicles survive. Given his treatment at the hands of extremists and the attack on him that left Rushdie blind in one eye and with a nerve damaged hand, there is a steely defiance to Pampa Kampana’s final poem, which applies also to Rushdie and his persecutors:

“How are they remembered now, these kings, these queens?/ They exist now only in words. While they lived, they were victors, or vanquished, or both./ Now they are neither./ Words are the only victors.”

sch 2/10 

The Guardian has several things on Rushdie, an archive here. I found it following the link to Salman Rushdie says he feels lucky and grateful in first interview since stabbing, which is a report on The New Yorker interview, to which there is a link above. You can find more interesting stuff in the archive, if you want a deep dive into things Rushdie.

sch 2/12

The London Times Literary Supplement published Nat Segnit’s The magic fades Salman Rushdie’s reinvention of ancient epic. Not a rousing endorsement of the novel, but one I found had points worth remembering (albeit maybe not the ones intended by the reviewer):

In assembling this sort of cod ancient epic, his ersatz Ramayana, Rushdie has set himself a formidable tonal challenge. His habitual method, of course, is to dress myth in modernity’s clothes, as in the retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (TLS, April 9, 1999), the Manhattanite Eumenides in Fury (TLS, September 7, 2001) and the refurbished quixotics of Victory City’s immediate predecessor, Quichotte (2019). In the new novel myth is front and centre, with modernity, in the form of the nameless narrator, peeping out from behind the plywood ramparts of his medieval mise en scène to remind us, with the postmodernist’s knack for plausible deniability, that this is simultaneously in earnest and a bucketload of high-spirited codswallop.

This poses a problem for the magic realist. Like many of Rushdie’s novels, Victory City takes place in an ambiguous realm, combining historically verifiable fact with the fantastical, except that in this case the element of fable, of pastiched mythopoetics, is dominant, where in the earlier, contemporaneously set novels it forms part of the pluralist jumble of their postmodern schema. In Victory City characters fly and have lengthy conversations with crows. There is an enchanted forest that transforms all but the most spiritually enlightened men into women. Much of Bisnaga’s fate is determined by the supernatural control that Pampa Kampana has – albeit inconsistently – over its citizens’ lives and desires, manufacturing their memories and whispering them into their ears.

As with all magic realism, the danger lies in a sort of inflationary weightlessness, the fatal devaluation of the fictional stakes when a character can build a huge defensive wall around her city by standing outside it with her arms raised and concentrating very hard. One solution is to be incantatory, to invest your prose, as Rushdie did in Midnight’s Children (1981), with such glittering specificity that it underwrites the fancifulness. In Victory City this option is, unhappily, put out of reach by the deal Rushdie strikes between pastiche and parody. For the most part the plot – the battles, the dynastic intermarriages, the machinations at court – progresses at a highly readable clip, accelerating at times to the pace of synoptic history, slowing down at others to attend in greater detail, for example, to Pampa Kampana’s exile in the Forest of Women. It succeeds in this largely by recourse to a measured, syntactically sedate prose, easy (thank God) on the archaisms, largely resistant to the lure of the mock heroic, but undermined, critically, whenever the authorial conscience stirs and offers a clash of registers to reassure us that the risks of grandiloquence inherent in pastiche have been properly assessed.

Considering some of what I have been writing, even before making the acquaintance of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the preceding paragraphs make take stock of what is still in my pipeline. This has a broader philosophical lesson:

To the extent that Rushdie is telling us that stories are both eternal and constitutive of society, he might only be accused of trading in platitudes: yeah, I know that stories outlive us – I read it in my in-flight-magazine. The larger objection is to the identification of Pampa, and her transcriber Tirumalamba Devi, with the authorial voice and by extension with Rushdie, inarguable on one level (Pampa and Tirumalamba’s fiction-making as a stand-in for Rushdie’s), subtly self-regarding on another. When Tirumalamba suggests to Pampa, who is now blind, that she might transcribe what will become the Jayaparajaya, Pampa subjects her to a job interview. “Can you dance?”, she asks. “Can you ride on a rat? Will you wrap a serpent around your neck like a scarf, or around your waist like a belt?” – the implication being that this is what it takes to be a writer of world literature, unfettered by creed, blessed and cursed in equal measure to write the sort of wildly imaginative, impeccably egalitarian, temperamentally female stories that will outlast us all. But will they? On the basis of a novel as fundamentally unsurprising as Victory City, and in the light of the appalling attack on its author last summer, you would bet, however regretfully, on the facts of Salman Rushdie’s life outlasting much, if not all, of the fiction.

Another interview, profile, is Salman Rushdie: “I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim.”

 sch 2/17 

I had seen and forgot (it's not like I have not been busy) Rushdie's Substack: Salman's Sea of Stories Salman's Sea of Stories. I signed up for the freebie edition.

scch 2/23