There are a few authors (Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Zadie Smith, Michael Ondaatje) who rock so hard, I devour their entire canon in weeks and wait impatiently for the latest installment. Fortunately, I’m not alone. The manly Booker committee just long listed both Rushdie and Smith, author of the Bangla-friendly White Teeth, for their upcoming books.
Amardeep previously pointed us to Amitava Kumar’s review of Shalimar the Clown, whose launch has been moved up to Sep. 6. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens reads the novel as political science tract, comparing Kashmir to Palestine. It’s reportedly a glowing review (only the intro is online) penned by Hitch for his longtime buddy:
Take the room-temperature op-ed article that you have read lately, or may be reading now, or will scan in the future. Cast your eye down as far as the sentence that tells you there will be no terminus to Muslim discontent until there has been a solution to the problem of Palestine. Take any writing implement that comes to hand, strike out the word “Palestine,” and insert “Kashmir…”
If anything calamitous in the thermonuclear line does occur in the next few years, it is most probable that Kashmir will be the trigger. Moreover, it was the lakes and valleys and mountains of Kashmir that made the crucible in which the Pakistan—Taliban—al-Qaeda “faith-based” alliance was originally formed. The bitterest and longest battle between Islamic jihad and its foes is a struggle not between jihad and the West, or jihad and the Jews, but between jihad and Hindu/secular India. It is a matter not of East versus West but of East versus East. [Link]
I know this from a little study and also from a visit to the Pakistani-held side of Kashmir, where I was reminded that although human beings will always fight over even the most arid and desolate prizes, there are some places so humblingly beautiful that it is possible to imagine dying for them oneself. Salman Rushdie knows it in his core: he is Kashmiri by family… [Link]
The Village Voice is turned off by the degree to which Shalimar plumbs the senseless grief of militant violence:
The events of Rushdie’s life are allegory for the unavoidable world-historical collision between rootless cosmopolitanism and theocratic absolutism, between civilization (with its values of secularism, skepticism, and relativism) and the gathering forces of a new medievalism. His greatest novels—Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh—percolate around just this kind of conflict, as India, or some subset of the subcontinent, tears itself apart. Rushdie repeatedly returns to the primal scene of a paradise squandered…
… playful garishness has always been one of his best qualities. Unfortunately, the usual glorious torrents of slanguage and gouts of Rabelaisian humor are largely missing in Shalimar the Clown. In Rushdie’s South Asian version of magical realism, it’s realism that dominates this time round. Depicting a program of ethnic cleansing against Kashmir’s Hindu population, he dissolves in an uncharacteristic wail of anguish (“why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that”) as his formidable imagination buckles under the pressure of too much reality… [Link]
Novelist William T. Vollman reviews the book in Publisher’s Weekly:
The focus of this novel is extremism. It tells the tale of two Kashmiri villages whose inhabitants gradually get caught up in communal violence… hatred takes on especially horrific manifestations when neighbors turn against each other…The neighbors to whom Rushdie introduces us are memorable and emblematic characters, especially his protagonists, the Hindu dancer Boonyi Kaul and her childhood sweetheart, Shalimar the clown, son of a Muslim family. Their passion becomes a marriage solemnized by both Hindu and Muslim rites, but as conflict heats up, Boonyi seduces the American ambassador… The resulting transformation of Shalimar into a terrorist is easily the most impressive achievement of the book, and here one must congratulate Rushdie for having made artistic capital out of his own suffering, for the years he spent under police protection, hunted by zealots, have been poured into the novel in ways which ring hideously true…
Now for the novel’s defects: Rushdie’s female characters are generally less plausible than the male ones. When he is describing Kashmir’s good old days of communal tolerance, he too frequently takes refuge in slapstick. His depiction of Los Angeles relies so much on references to popular culture that the place becomes a superficial parody of itself. In terms of technique, Rushdie’s most irritating tic is the sermonistic parallelism or repetition, but the novel’s best passages (not to mention his other great work, Shame) prove him capable of great style…
Never mind these flaws. Shalimar the Clown is a powerful parable about the willing and unwilling subversion of multiculturalism. [Link]
If you read Portuguese, you can get a head start on the book:
Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie’s latest novel, is being published here in Brazil two months ahead of its English release…
On the second day of the Paraty Literary Festival, the main square of this small Brazilian town is buzzing. A parade of papier-mâché dolls passes the ancient church, a clown eats fire near a packed corner cafe, and people stream from two tented pavilions after an author’s talk. Among the throng, ambling the cobbled streets in plain sight, is the characteristically disheveled figure of Salman Rushdie, the Anglo-Indian writer who is the star of this year’s festival…
“Because of the shrinking planet and the consequences of mass migration and geopolitics and so on, we all live in this world where our stories are no longer separate. [Before], one could mostly tell a story about India. You can’t think like that anymore.” [Link]
Heck, if you’re eBay-literate, you can even get gray-market galley proofs. Seriously, am I the only one on the planet who hasn’t read them yet? Publishing house insider bastards 
I bought an Advanced Reader’s Copy of Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie due out in September. (Ebay rules.)… “Advanced Readers Copy” means that there are errors in the book, but after it’s 397 pages, I found… about six. [Link]A friend of mine was brilliant enough to score me an advance reading copy of Zadie Smith’s new novel, On Beauty, and though only about 70 pages into it, it’s very good and very funny. [Link]
I hear from a reliable source that there is a lot of movie industry interest in the rights to Zadie Smith’s new novel On Beauty. Having now read the manuscript, I am not a bit surprised. There are really juicy parts for black and white actors - both male and female - in their 20’s and middle years. The novel is brilliant. Sadly, I am sworn to secrecy from revealing any of its contents or blogging a review at this stage. [Link]
The Guardian reviews Smith’s latest, which comes out Sep. 13:
The meaning of love in a time of fear is also a theme in Zadie Smith’s new novel, On Beauty, which is published in September. Her black and mixed-race characters are confused and adrift; they are all looking for something - for certainty, for meaning. Her book is about many things. It is a hugely engaging social comedy about miscegenation and cross-generational misunderstanding. It is about the vexed issue of Anglo-American relations. It is a campus novel. And it is also a smart rewriting of Howard’s End. As EM Forster’s novel did before it, On Beauty asks important questions about the relationship between culture and power - such as is the acquisition of knowledge and culture dependent on wealth and privilege?… [Link]
Here’s the Publisher’s Weekly blurb:
Like Smith’s smash debut, White Teeth (2000), this work gathers narrative steam from the clash between two radically different families, with a plot that explicitly parallels Howards End. A failed romance between the evangelical son of the messy, liberal Belseys; Howard is Anglo-WASP and Kiki African-American; and the gorgeous daughter of the staid, conservative, Anglo-Caribbean Kipps leads to a soulful, transatlantic understanding between the families’ matriarchs, Kiki and Carlene, even as their respective husbands, the art professors Howard and Monty, amass matériel for the culture wars at a fictional Massachusetts university. Meanwhile, Howard and Kiki must deal with Howard’s extramarital affair, as their other son, Levi, moves from religion to politics. Everyone theorizes about art, and everyone searches for connections, sexual and otherwise. A very simple but very funny joke; that Howard, a Rembrandt scholar, hates Rembrandt; allows Smith to discourse majestically on some of the master’s finest paintings. [Link]
The Brazilian literary festival is rooted in the convenience of a publishing magnate:
… the Festa Literária Internacional de Parati [is] a festival just three years old, in a tiny town halfway between Rio and São Paulo. Liz Calder, the Bloomsbury supremo who discovered Salman Rushdie and J. K. Rowling, has a house outside Parati, and decided to start a literary festival there because she thought “it would be good for everything”.
She had no money, she had no backers, but she knew that Brazilians love ideas and that they are open-minded. She launched the festival, and in the first year had 800 visitors, in the second year, 12,000, yes, that nought is 12,000, and now has so many people who want to come along, that they have big-screen monitors and overflow tents. [Link]
Rushdie won the Booker for Midnight’s Children in ‘81 and was nominated again for The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Satanic Verses and Shame. Here are the other Bookerati for the year:
Tash Aw - The Harmony Silk Factory
John Banville - The Sea
Julian Barnes - Arthur & George
Sebastian Barry - A Long Long Way
JM Coetzee - Slow Man
Rachel Cusk - In the Fold
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Dan Jacobson - All For Love
Marina Lewycka - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black
Ian McEwan - Saturday
James Meek - The People’s Act of Love
Ali Smith - The Accidental
Harry Thompson - This Thing of Darkness
William Wall - This Is The Country [Link]
