John Updike reviews Salman Rushdie’s latest in the New Yorker. 
He moans about Rushdie’s precocious, hyperactive style but has the grace to quote extensively. He slowly dribbles out the master’s words to be set upon by the ravenous she-wolf bitches known as rabid Rushdie fans. Such as, uh, my ‘friend.’
My ‘friend’ here appreciates Updike cribbing from Shalimar. It sounds raw. It sounds risky. It sounds fabulous. Oh, and there’s some famous-author-whining in there too.
In a neat trick both topical and intimate, Rushdie is symbolically returning to Kashmir with this novel. Recall the rapturous prose about Dal Lake, red hair, blue eyes and a distinctive proboscis where Midnight’s Children began. It’s a journey desi authors selling into the West often make in reverse: their first few books aren’t ‘write what you know,’ but rather ‘write what sells.’ Only when they’re comfortable in their bestselling skins, and the wolves of missed rent bay at the doors of younger writers, do they return to exorcise their deeper pains: for Rushdie, the rape of Kashmir; for Michael Ondaatje, the Sri Lankan civil war.
[Dedication:] … in loving memory of my Kashmiri grandparents…
In Kashmir it is paradise itself that is falling; heaven on earth is being transformed into a living hell… Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete… The world was no longer calm…
… he wanted to know what it would feel like when he placed the blade of his knife against the man’s skin, when he pushed the sharp and glistening horizon of the knife against the frontier of the skin, violating the sovereignty of another human soul, moving in beyond taboo, toward the blood…
He went into his blighted apple orchard, seated himself cross-legged beneath a tree, closed his eyes, heard the verses of the Rig-Veda fill the world with beauty, and ceased upon the midnight with no pain…
There were nine grabbers in the cosmos, Surya the Sun, Soma the Moon, Budha the Mercury, Mangal the Mars, Shukra the Venus, Brihaspati the Jupiter, Shani the Saturn, and Rahu and Ketu, the two shadow planets. The shadow planets actually existed without actually existing. They were heavenly bodies without bodies… [Pyarelal Kaul:] “The shadow planets act upon us from a distance and focus our minds upon our instincts. Rahu is the exaggerator the intensifier! Ketu is the blocker the suppressor! The dance of the shadow planets is the dance of the struggle within us…”
He named the Los Angeles River after the angels of Assisi and their holy mistress and twelve years later, when a new settlement was established here, it took its title from the river’s full name, becoming El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula, the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Very Small Plot of Land. But the City of Angels now stood on a Very Large Plot of Land Indeed, thought India Ophuls, and those who dwelt there needed mightier protectors than they had been given, A-list, A-team angels, angels familiar with the violence and disorder of giant cities, butt-kicking Angeleno angels, not the small-time, underpowered, effeminate, hello-birds-hello-sky, love-and-peace, sissy-Assisi kind…
… the new pleasantvilles being built in the firetrap canyons to house the middle-class arrivistes… the less-pleasantvilles in the thick of the urban sprawl … the dirty underbelly of paradise…
[Re: India Ophuls] … weekly boxing sessions at Jimmy Fish’s boxing club on Santa Monica and Vine where Tyson and Christy Martin were known to work out… a silver luxury speedmobile with batwing doors…
[Re: Max Ophuls’ affair, Zainab Azam] … the color of scorched earth… hottest box-office star … a sex goddess such as the Indian cinema had never seen…
The lovers were their children and must be supported. Their behavior was worthy of the strongest censure… but they were good children, as everybody knew… Kashmiriyat, Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences…
[Shalimar:] “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…”
[Boonyi Kaul:] “What a romantic you are,” she replied carelessly. “You say the sweetest things.” [Link]
