Salman Rushdie and Sagarika Ghose

[sophinisba]

Last week I finished two novels that were well written but that I couldn't really get into. Maybe you would like them more than I did. :)

10. Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie

Shalimar the Clown is a big, international, multigenerational novel that starts out in Los Angeles in the 1990s with the assassination of the former US ambassador to India by a Kashmiri Muslim called Shalimar the clown. It goes back through a lot of history and family sagas through California, India, France, and England. I really liked the connections he made between these places at different times in history, particularly with the history of tense but usually peaceful coexistence of different cultures and religions, both between Jews and Christians and between French- and German-speakers in Strasbourg before WWII and between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir. The plot is complex and the prose is very…let's say skillful, but I always felt the narrator was a bit distant from the characters, more interested in being clever than in helping me connect with them. So in spite of all the loves and betrayals and horrible things happening to these characters I never cared all that much about them.

I don't know. I've thought of myself as a Salman Rushdie fan since high school when I read The Satanic Verses, Midnight's Children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and The Jaguar Smile and loved them all. In college I reread several of those and also read The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which I liked somewhat less. I didn't like Fury much and I keep getting stuck in the middle of The Moor's Last Sigh, haven't managed to finish it yet. So I'm less of a fan at this point but not at all sure whether that's to do with a change in his writing over the years or a change in my tastes.

I figured I'd listen to an audiobook of Shalimar the Clown and that would take less effort than reading it. I was excited that the reader was Aasif Mandvi, whom many of us know as a correspondent on The Daily Show. (Did you know that he wrote and starred in an off-Broadway play that's now being made into a movie starring him? Here's a neat interview with him at altmuslim.com.) I'm used to seeing him for 30 seconds at a time so it was cool to hear him reading this long book and doing lots of voices and accents – he does most of the narration in an American accent but all the dialogue in different ones – and pronouncing Indian names correctly. On the other hand, listening to it as an audiobook might have made following a complicated story extra difficult for me, especially on the sections that took place in Kashmir, where there were a whole lot of different characters in two different villages with names that were unfamiliar to me. I couldn't go back easily to review who people were or what had just happened so I got lost a lot.

11. Blind Faith by Sagarika Ghose, 2006

I hadn't heard of this book or author before I ran across it in the bookstore a couple months ago, but the cover looked interesting and I liked the first sentence, so I decided to give it a try. The first sentence is, "When the plane from Delhi to Goa exploded in mid-air and plummeted into the Arabian Sea, the sky wavered momentarily like a computer screen ribbed by static." Isn't that lovely? I really like Ghose's style, the way sentences would go in unexpected directions like that, and I liked knowing right away that this was set in contemporary India.

I also liked that the two main characters are women: there's Mia, a British journalist of Indian heritage, and Indi, an Indian civil servant who lives in Goa and is passionate about her career and refuses to give it up despite her progressive blindness. However I eventually started to get bored with the plot about Mia feeling torn between the two men in her life. She's married Indi's son Vik, a successful businessman, and moves to Delhi to be with him, but she also feels attracted to this mysterious religious fanatic named Karna who wants women to return to their traditional roles. And it's, you know, supposed to be about her choosing between these two men but also choosing between different ideas of what India is and what she's supposed to be, which I guess is interesting but it felt to me like it was done in a heavy-handed and repetitive way, so I was tired of the novel by the time I got through it, even though it wasn't all that long (about 270 pages) and the plot did eventually get more interesting.

The copy I have came with an interview with the author at the end and a list of ten works of Indian literature that she recommends. I thought I'd copy it here since I know a lot of us are always looking for more suggested reading.

1. Devadas
   by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee


2. The Crooked Line (as well as her short story "Lihaaf-the Quilt")
   by Ismat Chugtai


3. Nashtanir (The Broken Nest) and Ghare Baire (The Home and the World)
   by Rabindranath Tagore


4. Cold Meat
   by Saadat Hasan Manto


5. The Second Wife
   by Premchand-Nirmala


6. Midnight's Children
   by Salman Rushdie


7. The Shadow Lines
   by Amitav Ghosh


8. The God of Small Things
   by Arundhati Roy


9. English, August
   by Upamanyu Chatterjee


10. Essence of Camphor
    by Naiyer Masud

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

The God of Small Things had some of the most distressing scenes in it of any book I've read - I don't know why it bothered me quite so much, but, it really got to me. Otherwise I really liked it a lot.

[sophinisba]

I've been meaning to read that one for ages.

[chelseagirl47.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I am still very much a Rushdie fan -- I teach a class on him on the college level -- and I found Shalimar rather disappointing.

[sophinisba]

Thanks for letting me know that. It makes me want to give The Moor's Last Sigh another try. Have you read and would you recommend The Enchantress of Florence?

[chelseagirl47.livejournal.com]

One of the problems with The Moor's Last Sigh, I think, is that he wrote it when he was still in hiding so it's a little . . . bitter. I did like it a lot better than Shalimar, though, which just felt like a retread of a lot of his earlier work.

Enchantress of Florence -- I was even lucky enough to get an ARC! The Mughal scenes are just lovely. The ones in Florence vary -- I got a little tired of hearing how sex-obsessed Machiavelli was. But overall I recommend it.

[sophinisba]

Thank you!