Salman Rushdie's mesmerizing new novel, Shalimar the Clown, opens with a barbaric, public murder. Former U.S. Ambassador to India Maximilian Ophuls is assassinated on the front step of his daughter's apartment complex, his throat "slit like a halal chicken dinner" by his personal chauffer, the Shalimar of the title.
The event is straightforward enough, but it spurns an intricate flood of memories, flashbacks and personal histories that form the beating heart of this devastating new work of fiction. Rushdie takes a simple story of star-crossed lovers and weaves it into the grander socio-political narrative of Kashmir.
At the start, the territory of Kashmir is a paradise on earth, a place where Hindus and Muslims live in relative harmony. Of course, as history has shown (and Rushdie elaborates), Kashmir soon becomes a haven not for peace but for religious and political strife -- a paradise turned into hell.
The framework for the novel's crises is a Romeo-and-Juliet-style love between the Muslim actor and acrobat, Shalimar, and the quixotic Hindu beauty, Boonyi. We can tell from the start, however, that any hopes for an ideal romance are impossible:
"'Don't leave me,' he said. ... 'Don't you leave me now, or I'll never forgive you, and I'll have my revenge, I'll kill you and if you have any children by another man I'll kill the children also.'
"'What a romantic you are,' she replied carelessly. 'You say the sweetest things.'"
Boonyi eventually leaves her first love for the arms of the visiting Ambassador, Ophuls, and we find that Shalimar's post-coital prophecy was not sweet talk but a literal curse. While we learn much from Ophuls's tap-it-and-scrap-it affair with the beautiful Boonyi (who provides him with a daughter then returns in shame back to Kashmir), it is Shalimar, the spurned lover, who steals our attention.
Though he doesn't gain much of our sympathy -- the track Shalimar takes leads into the heart of Islamic fundamentalism. He becomes a freelance terrorist for a rogue organization called the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front.
His personal anger and frustration are honed by the Iron Mullah, a religious cleric who, in a brilliant stroke of Rushdie's magic-realist wand, is literally composed of scrap iron: "There were places on his shins and shoulders where the knocks of a hard life had rubbed away the covering of skin and the dull metal beneath had become visible, battle hardened, indestructible."
This being a Salman Rushdie novel, there are so many radiant passages layered with puns, pop culture and wit that to quote them all would leave little room for a review. Suffice it to say that Shalimar the Clown is a return to the grand, epic narratives of previous novels like The Moor's Last Sigh and Midnight's Children. Rushdie has a way of playing with cultural histories and religious myth, making them seem less like stories and more like self-fulfilling prophecies.
And in the end, no defining solution is achieved. Indeed, the novel itself ends without a solid conclusion; some will find this technique abrupt and unsatisfying. Ultimately, it reflects that however adept at working and reworking cultural and national pasts, Rushdie, like the rest of us, cannot even begin to guess at what the future holds.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
