Writer: Salman Rushdie

   I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

Everybody knew about Salman Rushdie, ever since the Iranian fatwa sentenced him to death. 

But I did not read him until prison. I read The Satanic Verses (and left thinking the Iranians have no sense of humor), The Moor's Last Sigh (which was a wild ride through Mumbai), and Quichotte (another one filled with wild humor).

This interview by Ezra Klein came after the knife attack that almost killed Rushdie. That attack and its history takes up a wide swath of the interview; still, there is much here worth listening to about Rushdie's books and how he writes.

Salman Rushdie on Novel Writing - it is about truth, the truth of fiction sounds like an oxymoron. But I came to the opinion long ago, while working on my writing in prison, that all fiction is a form of fantasy. Nice to have someone like Rushdie backing me on this idea!

A slighter long take on the same ideas:

He goes on a bit more about story - how popular lit tells a good story and literature does not. He does not seem to favor this idea - nor do I. He also mentions how American literature has people bringing their stories here. Sounds a bit like American Gods. Better not let Immigration and Customs Enforcement about this problem.

Doomed in Bombay (NY Times review, 1996)

The grand deception in this book is to conceal a bitter cautionary tale within bright, carnivalesque wrappings. Mr. Rushdie, defiant, plays a dire light on the evil consequences, for the religiously indifferent but nominally Christian da Gama-Zogoiby clan, of militant religion in various guises. The recent de facto banning of ''The Moor's Last Sigh'' by the Indian Government may not be so surprising. (The Government cut off imports of the book after just 4,000 copies had come into the country.) In addition to a few offhand scurrilisms about Pandit Nehru's private life (and the naming of a dog after him), the book contains a devastating portrait of a Hindu political boss, Raman Fielding, who brings unfavorably to mind the powerful Hindu nationalist leader Bal Thackeray. There's much to offend here, and all along the spectrum of belief. At the heart of the plot, for example, is a satanic Jew (more about this later), and all the outright believers in the cast of characters -- the pious self-immolator who inadvertently burns the Moor's grandmother to death, the interfering Anglican priest Oliver D'Aeth, the Moor's multiple-personality-disorder-afflicted Hindu lover -- are odious in some strong way. Which is not to say that this tale should be taken merely as a broadly anti-creedal parable. Mr. Rushdie's subject is subtler than that. What results in cataclysm is the interaction of the reflexive, undefined, pooped-out unreligion of the da Gama-Zogoibys with the absolutist forms of religious identification taking hold in India.

What else does this antic tragedy provide, along the way? At a minimum, the following: (1) a parody of the family saga novel so acute that the genre can never look quite the same; (2) acerbic snapshots of the colonialist mentalite in various stages of defeat; (3) a celebration of the city of Bombay and a lament for its decosmopolitanization; (4) an affectionate and masterly representation of Indian English, with all the jokes, puns and quiddities the dialect encourages; (5) a mordant reflection on the final outlook for religious nationalism in India, whose most cheering conclusion is that any hope for the downfall of that institution lies in the infinite mercenary corruptibility of the human species; (6) an equally mordant rumination on the future of serious art, featuring set-piece descriptions of the paintings of Aurora Zogoiby so vivid that the reader is convinced her works are indeed brilliant creations.

Some other perspectives on Satanic Verses, as controversy and novel: 

Looking back at Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (The Guardian)

MAGICAL MYSTERY PILRIMAGE (NY Times review, 1989)

It is Mr. Rushdie's wide-ranging power of assimilation and imaginative boldness that make his work so different from that of other well-known Indian novelists, such as R. K. Narayan, and the exuberance of his comic gift that distinguishes his writing from that of V. S. Naipaul. In Salman Rushdie's work, both India and England are repeopled and take on new shapes. For the Indian subcontinent there is a more commensurate bigness and teemingness, a registration of the pandemonium and sleaze of contemporary life. London neighborhoods suddenly leap to light as rich collages of transplanted Asian and African cultures. His fiction also takes on fashionable literary gestures - Joycean wordplay, magic realism and the hyperactivity, the ''jouncing and bouncing'' of the Coca-Cola ads that typify American culture to much of the world.

For the Western reader unfamiliar with Mr. Rushdie's work, to what can this latest novel be compared?

In its entirety, it resembles only itself, but there are, in its parts, strands and shades of resemblance: to Sterne, for one, in the joys of digression; to Swift in scathingness of political satire; to the fairy and folktales of the Brothers Grimm, to Ovid's ''Metamorphoses,'' ''The ''Arabian Nights,'' Thomas Mann's ''Transposed Heads'' and the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Italo Calvino, ''Saturday Night Live'' and Douglas Adams's ''Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' - to name a few!

Although Mr. Rushdie explicitly evokes ''Othello'' - Chamcha playing a sort of Iago to Gibreel's Othello, with the mountaineering Alleluia Cone, the ice maiden, as Desdemona, it is not this play but the comic uproar of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream '' that kept coming to mind. But the lightheartedness of that midsummer frolic is not to be found here. Mr. Rushdie's work, at its strongest, is burdened with history and political freight.

Talent? Not in question. Big talent. Ambition? Boundless ambition. Salman Rushdie is a storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up whole geographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air. Yet, in the end, what have we? As a display of narrative energy and wealth of invention, ''The Satanic Verses'' is impressive. As a sustained exploration of the human condition, it flies apart into delirium as ''pilgrimage, prophet, adversary merge, fade into mists, emerge.'' Does it require so much fantasia and fanfare to remind us that good and evil are deeply, subtly intermixed in humankind? And why then trouble ourselves about it? In a world of mirages, of dreams within dreams, what is death and what is life, and why should it matter to choose between them?

For, often, the result of all this high-wire virtuosity is a dulling of affect, much like the blurring created by rapid hopping between channels on television: nothing seems quite real. Mr. Rushdie himself, an astute observer of the effects of fast-forwarding and remote-control devices on the way we perceive the world, takes careful note of the channel-hopping phenomenon, observing that ''all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined'' begin to acquire ''an equal weight.''

But, of course, they aren't of equal weight, and after closing ''The Satanic Verses'' the real strengths of the book assert themselves. What finally lingers, what lives most vibrantly, for this reader, are the scenes that are grounded - the places where magic doesn't overwhelm the realism - the moments when Mr. Rushdie looks ''history in the eye.'' They are scenes of expatriation, of political exile, and the story of Chamcha's patrimony - indeed, the whole, nearly complete novel-within-the-novel concerning Chamcha and his father.

Review: The Satanic Verses (The Literary Omnivore)

However, those fairly elaborate backstories contribute to the novel’s density. There is so much going on in The Satanic Verses, I have to say, that sometimes it feels like a chore trying to find the main story again, especially when you’re in the thick of Gibreel’s dreams–interesting, to be sure, but not as interesting as the main story. It’s a good novel, to be sure, with plenty of marvelous things to say and moments of real beauty (Saladin’s dream about his never to be son is almost haunting), but I can’t help but get the feeling that Rushdie was a bit too ambitious with this novel. And this is his fourth, so I’m not sure what that says about how I’ll like the rest of his work. I haven’t read any of them to compare, although Midnight’s Children is on my reading list.

Bottom line: The Satanic Verses suffers from its sheer density of stories and backstories, but the main story, that of the angelic (or is he?) Gibreel Farishta and demonic (or is he?) Saladin Chamcha, is solid, with the theme of migration firmly in its heart.

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie review – a literary hall of mirrors (The Guardian)

Rushdie’s Booker-longlisted 14th novel is certainly the work of a frisky imagination. We end up in a literary hall of mirrors, as he flirts with every genre he’s ever clapped eyes on, paying dues to Alice in Wonderland, Moby-Dick, Pinocchio, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Nabokov’s Lolita. The prose is dense with cultural allusions, too: Candy Crush Saga, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the model Heidi Klum, Men in Black, etc. The novelist’s natural bent has always been towards the encyclopedic, but now he has graduated from encyclopedia to Google. Quichotte ends up suffering from a kind of internetitis, Rushdie swollen with the junk culture he intended to critique.

At times, he sounds like your dad reciting hip-hop: “We don’t need no stinkin’ allies cause we’re stupid and you can suck our dicks… We’re America, bitch.” More often, his references feel dated. When Salma tries an opioid spray for the first time, it’s like “graduating to a Rolls-Royce after years spent behind a Nissan Qashqai. It was colour after a lifetime of black-and-white, Monroe after Mansfield, Margaux after Hobnob, Cervantes after Avellaneda, Hammett after Spillane…”

While Quichotte is funny, it’s rarely as funny as Rushdie thinks it is. Sometimes, it reads like the work of a man trying to have the final word on everything before the world ends. Or at least before he ends. Still, even if you feel overwhelmed, you can’t help being charmed by Rushdie’s largesse. Let’s not get into whether the four-times divorced novelist who drooled over various “hot” women in his memoir is a bit of a horn dog. Let’s just say he is. But he is also the best of his generation at writing women. Both Salma and Jack are witty, opinionated and complex. When the Author tells Jack that he’s writing about an ageing man who becomes obsessed with a younger TV star, she says: “I’m glad to hear you are capable of sending yourself up.” After, he makes “the usual literary protest, he isn’t me, he’s fictional” and she replies: “It’s better if I think you’re lampooning yourself. It makes me like you a little bit more.”

I suspect Quichotte will make readers like Rushdie more. When he tones down the boisterousness, he is capable of beautiful, lucid prose. If only there were a way to disable Google on his computer.

I do not recall minding his being over the top with the cultural references; where I was more than a little removed from America. 

Book Review: 'Quichotte,' By Salman Rushdie (NPR)

It is, on the one hand, a gutting satire of America right now, India right now, the U.K. maybe five minutes ago (things change so fast...). It is a pastiche of Cervantes's Don Quixote that's set among America's immigrant communities and goes 110 percent off the rails almost the minute Rushdie establishes his connection to the source material. It is a road trip story that lives on a steady diet of pop culture references which, rather than broadening its appeal, narrows its targeted audience almost exclusively to recent retirees who will catch all its glancing, rapid-fire mentions of Law & Order: SVU, Oprah, various Lifetime movies, Paul Simon, cooking competition shows and Jiminy Cricket. It is a novel of magical realism that bends the notions of "magical" and "realism" so far that it's like China Miéville trying to rewrite Roberto Bolano. It's a story of Donald Trump and immigration and Fentanyl and forgiveness. A fantasy missing all the signifiers of fantasy. A comedy where every single joke fails to land completely. It's got so much music in the words it almost demands to be read aloud. Its so inconstant you'd need one of those serial killer boards made of index cards and string just to unpack the plot.

***

 So Quichotte, as a book, is a mess.

But it is a beautiful mess. A resonant mess. A daring mess. An absolute mess that somehow hangs together anyway through digressions and departures, looooong stretches of didactic, narrated passages on history and immigration and the opioid crisis, shifts in POV and, you know, reality.

It's a mess that makes noble (if misguided) heroes of total head-cases — just like Cervantes did. And that's not nothing. It could be argued that Quichotte is a novel that attempts to reflect back to us the total, crumbling insanity of living in a world unmoored from reality — that shows what happens when lies become as good as facts. But I won't make that argument here because I just don't think Rushdie entirely pulls it off. He has the crazy down solid, but fails in examining the consequences. Or chooses to ignore them. Or simply does not care. Because, in the end, Quichotte is a novel about belief more than anything else. Or about believing, anyway. About believing with the conviction that belief alone is enough to make things true.

Who wants the predictable? Who wants a dry-as-dust lecture? If you fit either of these categories, Rushdie is not for you, and you will learn nothing from him. Otherwise, read him! 

This post is too long. I hope it does get you to read Rushdie.

sch 7/19

Salman Rushdie: On Storytelling is from a Canadian outlet, is a little subdued (or I am getting deaf), and 14 years old.

It is more about Muslim writers, his writing, and is eerie considering his almost being killed by a person of the Muslim diaspora. And he is prescient about the future beign the fight between security and freedom.