This page contains a list of book reviews done on books written by Salman Rushdie.



A Novel of India's Coming of Age
By CLARK BLAISE

The literary map of India is about to be redrawn. The familiar outline - E.M. Forster's outline essentially - will always be there, because India will always offer the dualities essential for the Forsterian vision: the open sewer and the whispering glade, Mother Theresa and the Taj Mahal. Serious English-language novelists from India (often called Indo-Anglians), or those from abroad who use Indian material, have steered a steady course between these two vast, mutually obliterating realities; hence the vivid patches of local color provided by the timeless South India of R.K. Narayan's novels and the cool pastels added by the later fiction of Anita Desai. The Indian novels of Paul Scott and Ruth Jhabvala also fall comfortably between those two poles. For a long time it has seemed that novels from India write their own blurbs: poised, witty, delicate, sparkling.
What this fiction has been missing is a different kind of ambition, something just a little coarse, a hunger to swallow India whole and spit it out. It needed a touch of Saul Bellow's Augie March brashness, Bombay rather than Chicago-born, and going at things in its own special Bombay way. Now, in ''Midnight's Children,'' Salman Rushdie has realized that ambition.
If I am to do more than describe my pleasure in this book, if I am to summarize and interpret, I would have to start by saying that ''Midnight's Children'' is about the narrator's growing up in Bombay between 1947 and 1977 (and about the 32 years of his grandparents' and parents' lives before that). It is also a novel of India's growing up; from its special, gifted infancy to its very ordinary, drained adulthood. It is a record of betrayal and corruption, the loss of ideals, culminating with ''The Widow's'' Emergency rule. As a growing-up novel with allegorical dimensions, it will remind readers of ''Augie March'' and maybe of Gunter Grass's ''The Tin Drum,'' Laurence Sterne's ''Tristram Shandy,'' and Celine's ''Death on the Installment Plan'' as well as the less-portentous portions of V.S. Naipaul. But it would be a disservice to Salman Rushdie's very original genius to dwell on literary analogues and ancestors. This is a book to accept on its own terms, and an author to welcome into world company.
The ''midnight's children'' of the title are the 1,001 children born in the first hour of Indian independence, Aug. 15, 1947. Two of these babies are born in the same Bombay nursing home on the very stroke of midnight: a boy born to wealth and a boy born to the streets. And, of course, a nursemaid switches babies: a street singer cuckolded by a departing Englishman is given the aristocratic Muslim infant and names him Shiva; a wealthy Kashmiri-descended family, the Aziz/Sinais, is given the ''cucumber-nosed'' English-Hindu and names him Saleem. Shiva and Saleem (the narrator) are destined to be mortal enemies from the stroke of midnight.
Saleem receives all the attention. His birth is celebrated with fireworks, and Prime Minister Nehru sends a letter saying that his fate will forever be entwined with that of India. Growing up on a Bombay estate, he bumps his head one day while hiding in his mother's laundry hamper and discovers a gift for telepathy. From the age of nine, he can enter other lives at will, see through walls, plumb all secrets, including the secret of his true parentage. But his telepathic gifts bring death and destruction and very little happiness. He discovers that every one of the midnight children is miraculously gifted; only Saleem is telepathic, but some can travel through time (and even report that India is destined to be ruled by a ''urinedrinking dotard'') and one can change sex at will. The extravagance of Mr. Rushdie's inventions will call to mind the hovering presence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez; call it a tropical synchronicity.
The midnight children are the hope of the nation, and they await Saleem's calling of a ''midnight parliament.'' The only thing inhibiting Saleem from embracing his political destiny arises from his fear of the murdering street tough Shiva, whom he knows to be the rightful inheritor of all his privileges. And so, because of Saleem's fear and guilt, the gifts of the midnight children are never pooled. When they do finally meet, it is during Mrs. Gandhi's ''Emergency.'' Because of the threat they pose to the Only True Succession, the 581 surviving midnight's children are sterilized, and then treated to an even deadlier procedure: They are sperectomized - drained of hope.
(Perhaps you wondered about the real reasons for the Emergency, the various Indo-Pakistani wars, the deaths of certain Indian and Pakistani political figures? Simple: to destroy Saleem, the Sinais and the gifted extended family of midnight's children. The plot of this novel is complicated enough, and flexible enough, to smuggle Saleem into every major event in the subcontinent's past 30 years. Saleem the Nose - variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and Piece-of-the-Moon - knows).
The complex plotting of the book can be gauged (and its playfulness appreciated) by observing how closely an old seer's prophecy is followed. Of Saleem, it is predicted shortly before his birth: '' 'A son ... who will never be older than his motherland - neither older nor younger. ... There will be two heads - but you shall see only one - there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees. ... Newspaper praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicyclists love him - but, crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep; cobras will creep. ... Washing will hide him - voices will guide him! Friends mutilate him - blood will betray him! ... Spittoons will brain him - doctors will drain him - jungle will claim him - wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him - tyrants will fry him ... He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die ... before he is dead.' ''
As a Bombay book, which is to say, a big-city book, ''Midnight's Children'' is coarse, knowing, comfortable with Indian pop culture and, above all, aggressive. Salman Rushdie assumes that the differences between Colaba and Chembur are as important, and can be made as interesting, as the differences between Brooklyn and The Bronx. ''We headed north,'' Saleem notes, ''past Breach Candy Hospital and Mahalaxmi Temple, north along Hornby Vellard past Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium and Haji Ali's island tomb ... We were heading towards the anonymous mass of tenements and fishing-villages and textile-plants and film-studios that the city became in these northern zones. ...'' Its characters speak in many voices: ''Once upon a time there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we were not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.'' Much of the dialogue (the best parts) reads like the hip vulgarity - yaar! - of the Hindi film magazine. The desiccated syllables of T.S. Eliot, so strong an influence upon other Anglo-Indian writers, are gone. ''Midnight's Children'' sounds like a continent finding its voice.
How Indian is it? It is slangy, and a taste for India (or a knowledge of Bombay) obviously heightens the response. Here is a description of a cafe where Saleem's mother goes secretly to meet her dishonored first husband: ''The Pioneer Cafe was not much when compared to the Gaylords and Kwalitys of the city's more glamorous parts; a real rutputty joint, with painted boards proclaiming LOVELY LASSI and FUNTABULOUS FALOODA and BHEL-PURI BOMBAY FASHION, with filmi playback music blaring out from a cheap radio by the cash-till, a long narrow greeny room lit by flickering neon, a forbidding world in which broken-toothed men sat at reccine-covered tables with crumpled cards and expressionless eyes.'' Very Indian.
Of course there are a few false notes. There is a shorter, purer novel locked inside this shaggy monster. A different author might have teased it out, a different editor might have insisted upon it. I'm glad they didn't. There are moments when the effects are strained, particularly in the early chapters, when an ancient Kashmiri boatman begins sounding like ''The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man.'' On a more serious level, Mr. Rushdie at first has a difficult time endowing the villains of Indian politics with mythic stature (Grass's Germany made it so easy); petty household intrigues seem more momentous than the misaffairs of state (Marquez's Latin America made it easy too). But with Ayub Khan, the Bangladesh war, ''The Widow'' and her son, the later pages darken quite handsomely. The flow of the book is toward the integration of a dozen strongly developed narratives, and in ways that are marvelous to behold, integration is achieved. The myriad personalities of Saleem, imposed by the time, place and circumstance of his extraordinary birth (''So much, yaar, inside one person,'' remarks a Pakistani soldier, of the Saleem then known as Buddha, the tracker, ''so many bad things, no wonder he kept his mouth shut!''), are reduced to a single, eloquent, ordinary soul. The flow of the book rushes to its conclusion in counterpointed harmony: myths intact, history accounted for, and a remarkable character fully alive.
Clark Blaise's most recent books are ''Lunar Attractions,'' a novel, and ''Days and Nights in Calcutta'' (with Bharati Mukherjee), a memoir. He teaches at Skidmore College.

[Credit: The New York Times, April 1981.]

Not Quite Pakistan
By ROBERT TOWERS

wo years ago a 34-year-old Indian Moslem named Salman Rushdie published ''Midnight's Children,'' an astonishing novel that attempted nothing less than to create a fantastic fictional counterpart to the convulsive, often tragic events that have rocked the Indian subcontinent during the past 60 years. It was highly praised, both here and in England. In its fecundity, extravagance and scope, ''Midnight's Children'' reminded me of some vast Hindu temple, a multilayered structure intricately embellished with carvings of gods, demons, heroes, lovers and beasts.
Such an achievement casts a long shadow from which its successor must struggle to escape if it is to find light and space for its own development. Aware of this, Mr. Rushdie has moved the setting of his new novel from India proper to the somewhat thinner soil of a country that is ''not quite Pakistan'' and has erected a less imposing, though equally fantastic, edifice. ''Shame'' is a lively, amusing and exasperating work that will present certain problems for an American reader.
In the second chapter of ''Shame,'' Mr. Rushdie's narrator, who, like Mr. Rushdie, now lives in England, breaks into the story to tell of a recent visit to Pakistan during which he tried, at a party, to raise a question about the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who, until 1977, had been Prime Minister of the country. Before it could be completed, the question was interrupted by a painful under-table kick on the narrator's shins, following which the topic of conversation was switched to sports and the incipient video boom. The deliverer of the kick was a friend, a poet who had spent many months in jail for ''social reasons.'' ''That is to say,'' writes Mr. Rushdie, ''he knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who was the wife of the second cousin . . . of the step-uncle of somebody who might or might not have shared a flat with someone who was running guns to the guerrillas of Baluchistan. You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.'' It turns out that a suspected Government informer was present at the party.
The national disgrace reflected in this anecdote serves to introduce the theme, which is also the title, of the book. ''Wherever I turn,'' Mr. Rushdie continues, ''there is something of which to be ashamed. But shame is like everything else; live with it long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.'' Nor, he is quick to add, is shame the exclusive prop Robert Towers's new novel is ''The Summoning.'' He teaches at Queens College. erty of the East. Perhaps it is Mr. Rushdie's friend who should be telling a story about shame - and its counterpart, shamelessness - in the national life; but he, after the horrors of his imprisonment, ''doesn't write poetry any more. So here am I instead,'' concludes the novelist, ''inventing what never happened to me.''
What he invents, with enormous gusto, is ''a sort of modern fairy tale,'' which the author says nobody need take seriously and which, since it is set in ''not quite Pakistan,'' need not provoke the authorities to ban the book or have it burned. But the link between certain bizarre happenings in the fairy tale and other equally bizarre political events in a certain nation is inescapable. The political allegory may prove a stumbling block to those readers who prefer, more or less, to take their fiction pure, without recourse to recent history. My own feeling is that the material of ''Shame'' is sufficiently entertaining to stand pretty much on its own - though whether one can usefully re gard it as a novel is another matter.
It is probably easier to play croquet (as in ''Alice in Wonderland'') with flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls than to give a coherent plot summary of ''Shame.'' Here are some of the elements: Shortly after the story opens, its nominal (and marginal) hero, Omar Khayyam Shakil, is born collectively to three unmarried sisters and suckled at six flowing breasts. The sisters inhabit their dead father's huge and labyrinthine mansion in the town of Q. (Quetta), a house that can be entered only by means of an ingenious dumbwaiter that ascends and descends an outside wall.
Immured in the house until he is 12, Omar, a fat boy, surveys the outside world (and the ''incomprehensibly appealing figure'' of 14-year-old Farah Zoroaster) through a brass telescope. Eventually he descends by the dumbwaiter, goes to school, endures various humiliations, impregnates Farah after hypnotizing her, only to be dropped for long stretches of the story while the narrator concentrates on what interests him most - the personal and political destiny of two archrivals for power in their nation. One is a famous warrior, Gen. Raza Hyder (read: Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq), who ultimately becomes president-dictator of his country; the other is a rich landlord and playboy, Iskander Harappa (read: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) who enjoys a successfully demagogic reign as Prime Minister until he is overthrown by Raza Hyder and eventually hanged (when already a corpse) after a rigged trial for the murder of a relative.
The families of these two men play an equally large part in the fairy tale, for the position of wives and daughters in ''not quite Pakistan'' is central to Mr. Rushdie's development of his theme in its myriad aspects. When Raza Hyder marries the modest Bilquis, he brings her temporarily to his grandmother's house in Karachi, where she must sleep in a cavernous chamber with all the other women of the huge family; there the married ladies are visited surreptitiously by their husbands (''the forty thieves'') who tiptoe ''along the midnight avenues of the dormitory'' past the snoring figure of the grandmother.
'' 'They still live in the old village way,' Raza warned Bilquis before depositing her in that house in which it was believed that the mere fact of being married did not absolve a woman of the shame and dishonor that results from the knowledge that she sleeps regularly with a man.'' To which Bilquis ''thought but did not say: 'O God. Ignoramuses from somewhere. Backward types, village idiots, unsophisticated completely, and I am stuck with them.' Aloud, she told Raza meekly: 'Much to be said for the old traditions.' Raza nodded seriously in simple agreement; her heart sank further after that.''
Rani, the wife of Iskander Harappa, is exiled to her husband's country estate while he sports with his mistress, Pinkie Aurangzeb, and the film starlets who form part of his entourage. There, submissive but unresigned, Rani spends her time embroidering a series of magically wrought shawls on which are depicted all of the shameful events in the life of the family. Their daughter Arjumand (the ''virgin Ironpants'') finds her fulfillment in her father's career.
THE men, meanwhile, are extremely touchy on the subject of honor, any breach of which can result in shame. Referring to the murder (in London) of a Pakistani girl by her father, a murder perpetrated to wipe away with blood the dishonor she had brought upon her family by sleeping with an English boy, Mr. Rushdie's narrator states that the news, while horrifying, did not seem alien to him. ''We who have grown up on a diet of honor and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.''
Shame reaches its ultimate embodiment in the person of Sufiya Zinobia, the idiot daughter born to Raza Hyder and Bilquis. Hyder so desperately wanted a son that he refuses to accept the anatomical evidence of his daughter's sex, shrieking at the doctor: '' 'There! I ask you, sir, what is that? . . . A bump! . . . Is it not, doctor, an absolute and unquestionable bump?' '' Whereupon the baby blushes - a sign of her shame. Later, the utterly rejected Sufiya Zinobia's blushes become so incandescent that they burn the lips of an old lady who kisses her, necessitating ''twice daily applications of lip salve for a week.''
Shame turned inward breeds monsters, and that is what happens to Sufiya Zinobia; she becomes a hideous monster strong enough to wrench the heads off men and animals with her bare hands before disemboweling them. ''I had thought,'' writes the narrator in one of his typical intrusions, ''that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over.'' Even the final act of revenge that concludes a tale full of such acts is performed by women - the three sisters, now aged crones, who had given birth to the peripheral hero of ''Shame.''
Cruel and ugly incidents and repulsive physical details throng the pages of the book. At times the author's unconcealed anger burns as fiercely as Sufiya Zinobia's blushes. Yet the prevailing narrative mode is as gleeful as it is ironic or indignant. There are some wonderfully comic episodes. Mr. Rushdie particularly delights in palpable absurdities such as those resulting from Raza Hyder's attempt to impose Islamic fundamentalism upon his country after seizing power. When asked by a fatuously deferential British television interviewer if the reinstitution of such Islamic punishments as flogging and the cutting off of hands might not be seen ''in certain quarters'' as barbaric, Hyder smiles into the camera and counts off three reasons why such practices are not barbaric. ''Number two . . . We will not simply order people to stick out their hands, like this, and go fataakh! with a butcher's knife. No, sir. All will be done under the most hygienic conditions, with proper medical supervision, use of anaesthetic etcetera.' ''
SOME of Mr. Rushdie's devices misfire; others are so exaggerated that the reader simply backs away, untouched and unamused. The false starts, loose ends and general extravagance of the tale can become irritating. The theme of ubiquitous shame is driven home at times with all the subtlety of a street-drill. Many of the allusions to recent Pakistani history will be lost upon the average Westerner. And yet the book in its own peculiar fashion works.
''Shame'' can, I think, be best enjoyed if we see it not as a novel but as one of those unclassifiable works in which certain writers of the 18th century excelled - Swift in ''Gulliver's Travels,'' Voltaire in ''Candide,'' Sterne in ''Tristram Shandy.'' The genius of these not-quite novelists expresses itself in a taste for absurd juxtapositions, for fantastic happenings, for the physically grotesque, for mockery and parody, for sexual innuendo and, on occasion, scatology. Often their talents are put to the service of satire. Salman Rushdie, it seems to me, is very much a latter-day member of their company.
The affinity with Sterne is especially striking in the voice he assumes - a voice at once whimsical, sly and exclamatory, full of apostrophes and asides, flexible enough to incorporate the up-to-date slang and obscenities of the warring men and the peculiar speech rhythms (often reminiscent of Yiddish-English) of the Pakistani ladies in a state of excitement. I found Mr. Rushdie's style a source of delight, a bright stream of words that lifted me happily past the most threatening snags and whirlpools of this impossible tale.

[Credit: The New York Times.]

Magical Mystery Pilrimage
By A. G. MOJTABAI

Salman Rushdie, author most famously of ''Midnight's Children,'' opens his fourth and latest novel, ''Satanic Verses,'' with a scene of human figures tumbling from the debris of a hijacked jumbo jetliner. The plane is named Bostan, which is both a Farsi word for garden and the title of the great didactic poem by the 13th-century Persian poet Sadi, proclaiming the virtues of justice, benevolence, self-restraint, gratitude, penitence and so on. This detail is not insignificant in Mr. Rushdie's work, where each act of naming is dense with implication. And the name ''Bostan'' might prompt us to ask, isn't this precisely what the fabled Oriental garden has become in our day - a terrorized, disintegrating jumbo jet?
Falling slowly over the English Channel, the sole survivors are a strange twosome: Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. Gibreel is a celebrated face and figure of the Indian cinema, star of the genre films known as ''theologicals.'' Chamcha is a star of the dubbing trade on British radio and television, a man of a thousand and one voices, none of them his own. His face is unknown to his audiences. He is an ardent Anglophile, a self-created man, who, with poetic license (and poetic justice) is about to be transformed by forces beyond his control.
Washed up on the wintry English coast, salvaged by an aged widow, who is imaginatively reliving her early married life on the Argentine pampas, the survivors feel themselves to be ''born again'' in some sense yet to unfold. Gibreel seems to be acquiring a radiance; Chamcha is slowly developing horns, hoofs excessive body hair and a tail. The two men are ''conjoined opposites'' in relation to one another and within themselves. Gibreel (Gabriel), who has a halo - an angelic countenance without, treachery and poisonous jealousy within - will do the work of Azraeel, the angel of death, as his radiance intensifies to consuming fire. Chamcha, a suffering mass of misunderstood, kindly intentions, will exact a terrible revenge before the end. Interestingly, it is only when Chamcha begins to vent his anger and rage that his satanic stigmata start to disappear.
The book moves with Gibreel and Chamcha from their past lives in Bombay to London, and back to Bombay again. For Gibreel, there is many an imaginary journey on the way - most notably to a city of sand called Jahilia (for ignorance), where a very decent, embattled businessman-turned-prophet by the name of Mahound is rising to prominence.
After his air disaster and rescue, Chamcha is led away to a detention center for illegal aliens while Gibreel silently looks on. Escaping, only to discover his British wife in bed with his best friend, Chamcha seeks refuge within an Asian enclave in London's Brickhall High Street district. From here, after taking revenge on Gibreel, he will be summoned to his father's deathbed in Bombay.
Gibreel's adventures are more interior. He pursues his latest love (a beautiful mountain climber named Alleluia Cone), begins to stage a comeback as an actor, but mainly he broods and dreams. Gibreel's dreams, the nightmares that ''leak into his waking life,'' form the spinoff narratives that keep the novel whirling.
One of the most vivid of these concerns an epileptic woman, a seer, who leads a pilgrimage to Mecca, a tale evoking the Sufi theme of the immolation of the moth, the Exodus account (with the promise of the Arabian Sea parting for the pilgrims), the Pied Piper, Jonestown and other more recent religio-political movements in which the faithful follow a charismatic leader into the depths of destruction. There are many magical embellishments: The pilgrims follow a cloud of butterflies by day; their leader is literally clothed in butterflies, and feeds upon them for her sustenance. Her name is Ayesha, which is - but only coincidentally here, I think - the name of the youngest and favorite wife of the prophet Mohammed.
Which brings us to the controversial part of the book - the tales of Mahound and Jahilia that embroider upon the life of Mohammed and the founding of Islam. Indeed, the title ''The Satanic Verses'' refers to an incident in the life of Mohammed, recorded by two early Arab historians (al-Waqidi, A.D. 747-823, and at-Tabari, A.D. c. 839-923), discredited by later commentators on the Koran, but taken up in Western accounts as the ''lapse of Mohammed'' or his ''compromise with idolatry.''
The story goes like this: confronted by the resistance of the leading merchants of Mecca to his monotheism, Mohammmed is reported to have accepted three local deities - al-Lat, al-Uzzah and Manat - as intercessory beings (or angels - ''daughters of Allah''). This would have been a shrewd diplomatic concession, at least in the short run, since Mecca depended upon the income from the pilgrimage trade to the shrines of these deities.
But Mohammed soon withdrew the verse of acceptance, saying that Satan had placed the words of concession upon his tongue. In the Koran, Mohammed concludes:
''Have you thought on al-Lat and al-Uzzah, and thirdly on Manat? Is He [ Allah ] to have daughters and you sons? This is indeed an unfair distinction!
''They are but names which you and your fathers have invented.''
Mr. Rushdie's revival of this story, the duplicitous Gibreel/Satan agonizing over his role in the incident, compounded by the story of a scribe who deliberately placed erroneous words into his transcription of the Koran, was bound to touch an angry nerve in the world of Islam, where the Koran (''al-qu'ran'' means ''the recitation'') is believed to be the word of God, transmitted without error.
And, to be sure, ''The Satanic Verses'' has sparked bitter controversy among Muslims in South Africa, where the author was prevented from appearing at a book fair by arson and death threats against all concerned with the event. Last fall the importation of the British edition of the book was banned in India as a precautionary measure against religious leaders using it to incite their followers to sectarian violence. Recently, the publisher's New York office has received several bomb threats and many angry letters.
As with Martin Scorsese's film ''The Last Temptation of Christ,'' much of the outrage has been fueled by hearsay. Some of the noisiest objections have been raised by people who have never read the book and have no intention of ever reading it. This opposition does little to educate a woefully ignorant and prejudiced Western public about the Islamic faith. Banning the book only increases its notoriety: it answers nothing. And there are, I think, real problems in the text that need to be addressed. Let us consider two issues by way of example: One of the furor-provoking episodes crops up in Gibreel's story ''Return to Jahilia,'' where the women of a brothel called the Curtain decide to improve their trade by impersonating the wives of the Prophet. What the objectors have overlooked here is that the entire episode is one of Gibreel's dreams, a cinematic fantasy. Prior to his return to Jahilia, he signed a contract ''for a series of films both historical and contemporary'' based on his dreams. Granted, the brothel episode is rather too consciously elaborated to be convincingly dreamlike. As a cinematic fantasy based on a dream, however, it seems all too plausible. The script may strike the reader as tasteless, but this poor taste is an accurate satiric reflection of the state of much contemporary cinema.
Deeper ground for puzzlement, if not complaint, lies elsewhere - particularly in the choice of the name ''Mahound'' for Mohammed. In the medieval Christian mystery plays, Mahound (spelled variously ''Mahowne,'' ''Mahon,'' ''Mahum'' or ''Mahun'') is sometimes the friend of Pontius Pilate or Caesar, sometimes the friend or cousin of Herod, but always a satanic figure. (The name ''Mahound'' seems to have been created by the conflation of ''Mahomet'' and ''hound.'') How are we to understand the adoption - by a writer born a Muslim - of so defamatory a name for the prophet of Islam? And how are we to account for Mr. Rushdie's incorporation of this name into the creed of Islam: ''There is no God except Al-Lah, and Mahound is his Prophet''?
To understand the shock of this, Westerners might try a satanic substitution in the text of the Nicene Creed. Few orthodox Christians would find the alteration a laughing matter. So why Mahound? Again, it must be remembered that this is fiction. ''It was so, it was not.'' . . . as the storytellers say. More precisely, this is a dream within a fiction - twice removed from the actual. Before his ill-fated flight, the dreamer, Gibreel, had a crisis in faith and did a lot of reading. And the insanity defense might be invoked, although it tends to explain away and diminish his visions. Gibreel is, we are told, in the grip of ''paranoid schizophrenia.'' Yet, clearly, something more programmatic is afoot here. In a direct aside to the reader, the author offers this by way of explanation:
''Here he [ the prophet in Gibreel's dream ] is neither Mahomet nor MoeHammered; has adopted, instead, the demon-tag the farangis [ Europeans or foreigners ] hung around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all choose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn.''
A sort of self-immunization, then? But it doesn't work like this, and who knows it better than Salman Rushdie? For much of the power of the novel lies in its ability to make clear the efficacy of our impersonations, of our monstrous descriptions of one another, to create monsters in fact. It is all very puzzling. Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay in 1947, now residing in London, considers himself a ''British Indian novelist.'' Although his family moved to Pakistan when he was 17, Mr. Rushdie has, in large part, lived in England since the age of 14, attending a British public school and Cambridge University.
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.
But I suspect that Mr. Rushdie already knows this. His book is large enough to contain, implicitly, its own self-criticism and its own advice to the author. The words of advice come near the end of the novel. They are addressed to Chamcha. Zeeny Vakil, the first Indian woman Chamcha has ever loved, is letting him have it:
''If you're serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place.''
A. G. Mojtabai is writer in residence at the University of Tulsa. She is the author, most recently, of ''Blessed Assurance,'' which concerns nuclear weapons manufacture and fundamentalist religious belief, and the forthcoming novel ''Ordinary Time.''

[Credit: The New York Times, January 29, 1989.]

Another Dangerous Story From Salman Rushdie
By ALISON LURIE

Behind many of the greatest and most joyful children's fantasies move the shadows of real and often unhappy events in their authors' lives. Many of Beatrix Potter's animals escape from claustrophobic domestic environments like that of her own respectably repressive Victorian parents. J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, like Barrie himself, never attains maturity, and must borrow or steal other people's children for his playmates. And E. B. White, who both as child and adult was described as resembling a mouse, made the hero of "Stuart Little" a mouse born into a human family.
Salman Rushdie's remarkable new children's book belongs in this company. The only difference is that the experiences that lie behind "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" are nearly as fantastic as anything in the tale. Before the fact, who could have believed that a world-famous spiritual leader would publicly exhort his millions of followers to murder a novelist in another country, and promise them eternal salvation should they succeed?'
On the surface, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" is a lively, wonderfully inventive comic tale with an updated Arabian Nights background. It follows the classic folk tale in which the hero travels to strange lands to lift a spell on his native country or cure his father of a fatal ailment. In the course of the story he is aided by supernatural companions and confronts and defeats a wicked magician.
Mr. Rushdie's young hero, Haroun, is the son of the famous story-teller Rashid (a near-anagram of "Rushdie") Khalifa (Caliph) who is known as the "Ocean of Notions." Rashid is able, like Orpheus, to command the fascinated attention even of the birds and beasts. But "luck has a way of running out without the slightest warning." One day Rashid's wife leaves him for a thin, whiny neighbor who hates stories; he loses his gift and can only croak "ark, ark, ark."
This affliction of speech, central to the book, is paralleled by the affliction of the country, which is called Alifbay ("alphabet" in Hindustani; most of the names in the book derive from this language, and a convenient glossary is provided at the end). Haroun lives in "a sad city . . . a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish." In this tale, sorrow causes one to forget one's name and lose the ability to speak; and no wonder, considering the recent life of its author: under how many false and forgettable names, in how many sad cities, one wonders, has Mr. Rushdie had to conceal himself in the past two years since the publication of his novel "The Satanic Verses"?
THE villain responsible for Rashid's affliction is the sinister tyrant of the dark land of Chup, Khattam-Shud, whose name means "completely finished," "over and done with." He is "the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of Language itself." Khattam-Shud's fanatical followers have sworn a vow of silence, and are working round the clock to poison the Sea of Stories. Their country is not only dark and soundless, but freezing cold: "a place of shadows, of books that wear padlocks and tongues torn out."
"But why do you hate stories so much?" Haroun asks when he finally confronts the tyrant. "Stories are fun."
"The world, however, is not for Fun. . . . The world is for Controlling," replies Khattam-Shud (who, though he will not allow anyone else to speak, talks continually in a flat, monotonous voice.) "And inside every single story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all."
Though there is darkness and silence at the center of Chup, most of "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" is full of comic energy and lively verbal invention. In the course of his travels Haroun, like Dorothy in Oz, acquires three fantastical companions: Iff the Water Genie; Mr. Butt, the crazy bus driver, who turns into a mechanical bird with telepathic abilities; and Mali, a "Floating Gardener First Class," made of seaweed. Haroun also visits odd, self-contained communities like those in the Oz books: in Moody Land, for example, the climate is affected by the mood of the inhabitants rather than vice versa.
There are other echoes from earlier children's classics. Mr. Rushdie's puns and anagrams, and his exuberant wordplay, suggest "Alice in Wonderland" and Norton Juster's "Phantom Tollbooth." The army (or "Library") of the good land of Gup is composed of Pages in thin uniforms covered with writing, who are organized into Chapters and Volumes; its general is called Kitab ("Book"). Their love of free speech gives them a strategic advantage over the silent soldiers of Gup, whose "habits of secrecy had made them suspicious and distrustful of one another."
Though "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" is sure to be enjoyed by children, it also contains amusements for adults. On his journey, for instance, Haroun meets two Plentimaw Fish ("there really are Plentimaw Fish in the Sea") who talk in rhymed doggerel, and a Shadow Warrior who can only speak in gesture, but coughs "Gogogol . . . Kafkafka." The extremely foolish and incompetent prince and the ugly princess of Gup ("that nose, those teeth") not only recall Thackeray's burlesque fairy tale "The Rose and the Ring": they may also remind some readers of the British royal family. ("After all," says one of Haroun's companions, "it's not as if we really let our crowned heads do anything very important around here.") One of the ill effects of the poisoning of the Sea of Stories is that, as the Floating Gardener says, "Certain popular romances have become just long lists of shopping expeditions. Children's stories also."
IF there is one encouraging conclusion to be drawn from the recent fate of Salman Rushdie, it is that literature has power -- so much power that it is dreaded by dictators. A single storyteller like Rashid is more dangerous to a tyrant than an army. "What starts with stories ends with spying ," says Khattam-Shud. " Stories make trouble." So they do; that is one reason we need them.
It is Salman Rushdie's good fortune, ours, and our children's, that in spite of everything he has not been silenced. He has survived the death threats of his own Khattam-Shud, and the Sea of Stories from which he drew this entertaining and moving book has not been poisoned, but continues to flow as clear and brilliant as ever.
Alison Lurie won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for "Foreign Affairs." Her most recent book is a collection of essays, "Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature."
COMPLAIN TO THE WALRUS
"My father has definitely not given up. You can't cut off his Story Water supply."
"Orders," said Iff. "All queries to be taken up with the Grand Comptroller."
"Grand Comptroller of what?" Haroun wanted to know.
"Of the Processes Too Complicated To Explain, of course. At P2C2E House, Gup City, Kahani. All letters to be addressed to the Walrus."
"Who's the Walrus?"
"You don't concentrate, do you?" Iff replied. "At P2C2E House in Gup City there are many brilliant persons employed, but there is only one Grand Comptroller. They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus. Got it now? Understood?"
Haroun absorbed all this information. "And how does the letter get there?" he asked. The Water Genie giggled softly. "It doesn't," he answered. "You see the beauty of the scheme."
"I certainly don't," Haroun retorted. "And anyway, even if you do turn off your Story Water, my father will still be able to tell stories."
"Anybody can tell stories," Iff replied. "Liars, and cheats, and crooks, for example. But for stories with that Extra Ingredient, ah, for those, even the best storytellers need the Story Waters. Storytelling needs fuel."
-- From "Haroun and the Sea of Stories."

[Credit: The New York Times, November 11, 1990.]                                                               TOP 

Always the Outsider
By ROBERT TOWERS

The subtitle of "Imaginary Homelands" -- "Essays and Criticism 1981-1991" -- is perhaps too grand a term for this assemblage of Salman Rushdie's seminar papers, television broadcasts, book reviews, movie reviews, public lectures, interviews and articles. Would it have been published now -- and in its present form -- were it not for the high and terrible drama of the author's recent life? Probably not, given the scrappy and occasional nature of a considerable part of its content. Still, enough strong pieces are included to make the book welcome to anyone who has grappled -- in delight or exasperation or both -- with Mr. Rushdie's tumultuous novels or who shares his interest in the political and cultural plight of the migrant.
In his view, the migrant -- whether from one country to another, from one language or culture to another or even from a traditional rural society to a modern metropolis -- "is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century." On the complex situation of this emblematic figure, Mr. Rushdie himself can of course speak with unique authority, for he has embodied the outsider, "the Other," all of his life: first as a Muslim in predominantly Hindu India, then as an Indian migrant to Pakistan, next as an Indian-Pakistani living in Britain and, since the publication of "The Satanic Verses," as a "blasphemer" against Islam, a man in hiding, marked for murder.
Mr. Rushdie does not pull his punches when it comes to the failings of his adopted land (and by extension Western Europe and the United States) in the matter of racial prejudice. Writing from the position of the British left, in a 1984 essay with the neo-Orwellian title "Outside the Whale," Mr. Rushdie voices his scorn for the current nostalgia for the empire and the raj as exemplified in what he calls "the blackface minstrel-show of 'The Far Pavilions' in its TV serial incarnation" and the "overpraised" "Jewel in the Crown"; nor has he much good to say about Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" or David Lean's film of "A Passage to India." He writes that "there can be little doubt that in Britain today the refurbishment of the Empire's tarnished image is under way. The continuing decline, the growing poverty and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain encourages many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence. The recrudescence of imperialist ideology and the popularity of Raj fictions put one in mind of the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb."
In a piece called "Home Front" (1984), Mr. Rushdie analyzes racism in terms of "the fear of the primal Dark" and "the idea of the Other, the reversed twin in the looking-glass, the double, the negative image, who by his oppositeness tells one what one is" -- only to conclude that "it will not suffice to blame racism and the creation of lying images of black peoples on some deep-bubbling, universal failing in humanity." Nor will it do to excuse racial prejudice on the grounds of its universality. While "it is obviously true that blacks and Asians need to face up to and deal with our own prejudices, it seems equally clear that the most attention must be paid to the most serious problem, and in Britain, that is white racism. If we were speaking of India or Africa, we would have other forms of racism to fight against. But you fight hardest where you live: on the home front."
Turning to the literary front, we find Mr. Rushdie attributing his eagerness to break with traditional literary forms in part to his status as a migrant; denied his roots, his original language and the social norms he grew up with, the migrant "is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human." Mr. Rushdie is most persuasive when writing about those novelists whose approach to fiction is similar to his own: writers like Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Italo Calvino, who mix fantasy and naturalism, who employ all of the radically disjunctive techniques of modernism and post-modernism to create fictional worlds of their own that are nonetheless linked in a thousand ways to the world as we experience it. In his essay on Mr. Grass ("half a migrant"), he speaks of books that give aspiring writers ("these would-be migrants from the World to the Book") the "permission to become the sort of writers they have it in themselves to be. A book is a kind of passport." For the author of "Midnight's Children," the passports included "The Film Sense" by Sergei Eisenstein, the "Crow" poems of Ted Hughes, Jorge Luis Borges's "Ficciones," Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," Eugene Ionesco's play "Rhinoceros" and Mr. Grass's novel "The Tin Drum." "This is what Grass's great novel said to me in its drumbeats: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world."
The writing throughout is attractive: lively, allusive, a little flippant. But one could wish that "Imaginary Homelands" had not been quite so inclusive. What is the point of reprinting a 1983 campaign diatribe against Margaret Thatcher ("A General Election")? The account of a two-week trip to Pittsburgh, New York and San Francisco in 1985 ("Travels With a Golden Ass") seems both glib and dated as it revives once again that hoary old comparison of the follies and horrors of American life to those of Rome in its decadence. The reviews of works by E. L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Saul Bellow and Grace Paley are hardly more than brief appreciations.
Whatever weaknesses the collection contains are more than redeemed by the eloquence and pathos of the three concluding pieces, published in 1990. These deal directly with Mr. Rushdie's response to the fanatical (and often politically motivated) reaction to "The Satanic Verses" in parts of the Muslim world.
In the first piece ("In Good Faith"), he again proclaims his allegiance to those novels that "attempt radical reformulations of language, form and ideas" and his "determination to create a literary language and literary forms in which the experience of formerly colonized, still-disadvantaged peoples might find full expression." He defends his own novel as being, "in part, a secular man's reckoning with the religious spirit" and goes on to say: " I am not a Muslim. It feels bizarre, and wholly inappropriate, to be described as some sort of heretic after having lived my life as a secular, pluralist, eclectic man. . . . The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that any person so born who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death."
In the second ("Is Nothing Sacred?"), Mr. Rushdie, without repudiating his secularism, acknowledges the potency of the sacred and the human yearning for transcendence. He proposes that art -- particularly literature -- can be "the third principle that mediates between the material and spiritual worlds," that it can offer us "something that might even be called a secular definition of transcendence."
It is the very eloquence of the reasoning in the two preceding essays that makes his statement of submission in the final piece, "Why I Have Embraced Islam," seem so desperately sad.
Robert Towers teaches in the graduate writing division of the Columbia University School of the Arts. His most recent novel is "The Summoning."
A KISS BEFORE READING
I grew up kissing books and bread.
In our house, whenever anyone dropped a book or let fall a chapati or a "slice," which was our word for a triangle of buttered leavened bread, the fallen object was required not only to be picked up but also kissed, by way of apology for the act of clumsy disrespect. I was as careless and butterfingered as any child and, accordingly, during my childhood years, I kissed a large number of "slices" and also my fair share of books.
Devout households in India often contained, and still contain, persons in the habit of kissing holy books. But we kissed everything. We kissed dictionaries and atlases. We kissed Enid Blyton novels and Superman comics. If I'd ever dropped the telephone directory I'd probably have kissed that, too.
All this happened before I had ever kissed a girl. In fact it would almost be true, true enough for a fiction writer, anyhow, to say that once I started kissing girls, my activities with regard to bread and books lost some of their special excitement. But one never forgets one's first loves.
Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul -- what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
It has always been a shock to me to meet people for whom books simply do not matter.
-- From "Imaginary Homelands."

[Credit: The New York Times (Literary Supplement), January 2, 1991.]


There's No Place Like Oz
By ROBERT COOVER

This sometimes poignant and intimate, sometimes boisterously inventive, sometimes gently provocative collection of short stories, formally wide-ranging though it is, is structured as a tight little syllogism. There are exactly nine stories, three each in three sections, with thesis ("East"), antithesis ("West") and a final synthesis ("East, West") wherein the twain do meet.
In Western literature, the "East" is often an exotic and imaginary realm, conjured up by its more fabulous folk tales, its classic literature, its historical legends, while our own part of the world is more prosaic, workaday, often oppressive, devoid of marvels: Dorothy's gray Kansas is West and Munchkinland, over the rainbow, is East.
From the perspective of the Indian subcontinent, whence so many of our own tales originate and where Salman Rushdie was born and spent his childhood, this dichotomy is seen, not surprisingly, in mirror image. "I remember that when the possibility of going to school in England was mentioned," Mr. Rushdie has written, "it felt as exciting as any voyage beyond rainbows. It may be hard to believe, but England felt as wonderful a prospect as Oz." So it is that in this book, in the first two sections, it is the East that provokes realistic stories concerned with the intimate details of character and ordinary daily life, while those of the West are set in the fanciful country of its classic literature, its historical legends and its folk art: the movies.
When East and West meet in the great epics by which Mr. Rushdie is best known -- "Midnight's Children," "Shame" and "The Satanic Verses" -- reality, especially that of the subcontinent, is reconfigured by the revelatory power of his ebullient imagination, shaped in the West, and so is seen anew in forms often compared with those of the Latin American magic realists.
Curiously, that is not the case in the third section of "East, West." When the two meet here, the stories return to a realistic account of character and the relationships (especially love and friendship) between ordinary people, though filtered each now through a subtle prismatic metaphor: the occult, "Star Trek," chess and pop music. It is as though, formally at least, Mr. Rushdie's homeland, from which he is effectively and remorselessly exiled, is reasserting its dominion. Or else, the West has lost its magic.
The first two stories in "East" are O. Henryish village tales told by unreliable narrators, the first about a woman who is condemned to an arranged marriage with an immigrant to England and who outwits the authorities by playing dumb and so is happily denied the passport she seems to be seeking, the second about a highly imaginative rickshaw driver who does it his way. The third, "The Prophet's Hair," is more like a moralistic fairy tale using religious elements: a silver vial containing a famous relic brings catastrophe upon the greedy.
Formal play is the central feature of the three stories in "West" -- from the revisionist tale of Hamlet's Fool (the narrator calls it a "cock-and-bull story," and intends the generative double entendre, laying claim as he does to being one of the multicolored descendants of the Fool), through the mock-futuristic nightmare of "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers," to Columbus's imagined wooing of Queen Isabella, a tale that reads like a witty historical displacement of a contemporary love story: he desires that she grant him the chance to make his life meaningful ("consummation" is what he asks for), while she, flirtatious and all-powerful, toys with this foreigner, this "invisible (though raucous, multicolored, wine-bibbing) man."
Mr. Rushdie, one suspects, would rather have his work discussed purely as literature, without reference to the unhappy history that has plagued him, but sometimes the stories themselves make it difficult to ignore the story of their author. "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers," the middle piece of this middle section, and thus the middle of the book as well, is an example. The ruby slippers are of course those worn by Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," and, on the surface, the story is a broad sociopolitical satire, a bit over the top at times, told by a communal "we" and depicting the current market-based free-for-all as a brutal futuristic hell wherein everything in the world is for sale, with the hoarding of possessions leading to universal paranoia: "These are uncompromising times," the narrator says.
Uncompromising times: Ayatollah Khomeini issued his notorious fatwa against Salman Rushdie on St. Valentine's Day 1989, and throughout the nearly six years since then Mr. Rushdie, a target not only of religious zealots but of professional killers hired by ecclesiastical thugs and heads of state, has remained in virtual exile from his national and literary communities -- indeed in virtual imprisonment, managing only occasional dramatic appearances on the world stage to plead his unique and desperate case.
"At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers" thus speaks directly to the author's own consequent dread of the bunker mentality, and to his fear of a world market economy that tolerates the intolerant, since it's all good for business (and it does so by way of a central metaphor close to his own heart as a writer).
THIS story was originally published along with an essay, "A Short Tale About Magic," in a small British Film Institute book as a kind of accompaniment to the film "The Wizard of Oz," which Mr. Rushdie describes as his "first literary influence" at the age of 10: "When I first saw the 'The Wizard of Oz' it made a writer of me." It was also his model during the writing of his remarkably cheerful post-fatwa novel "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" (1990): "Of all movies, the one that helped me most to find the right voice for 'Haroun' was 'The Wizard of Oz.' The film's traces are there in the text, plain to see; in Haroun's companions there are clear echoes of the friends who danced with Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road."
Late in "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers," there is a moment when the harsh impersonal satire shifts abruptly and somewhat discordantly into a first-person-singular account of a frustrated love affair between the narrator and his cousin Gale, who is lost to an imaginary and clearly uncivil lover who has escaped from a caveman movie. Gale, of course, is Dorothy's surname in "The Wizard of Oz," and as his loving cousin she liked to cry out during sex: "Home, boy! Home, baby, yes -- you've come home!" The narrator keeps a portrait of her "in the guise of a tornado."
HE sees her in a bar watching a television report about a spaceman stranded forever on Mars, showing "his slow descent into despair, his low-gravity, weight-reduced death" while he sings a medley of old songs, including several from "The Wizard of Oz." The narrator wants to buy Gale the auctioned ruby slippers (the universal reverence for them, he suggests, is due to "their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy") so she can go to Mars and bring back the spaceman, with whom he clearly identifies: "Perhaps I might even click the heels together three times, and win back her heart by murmuring, in soft reminder of our wasted love, There's no place like home." He has not only been left to waste away in enforced solitude on an inhospitable planet, he has also been threatened, in these uncivil times, with the loss of his most precious love, his hope, his "Over the Rainbow" muse.
The three final stories in "East, West," if less innovative, are the most complex and convincing of the collection. They focus, as though to throw water on the hateful witch, on the themes of love, family and friendship, especially that between schoolmates.
"The Harmony of the Spheres" is a sensitive meditation, diminished only by its closing punch line, on the suicide of a brilliant but deeply disturbed English writer and devotee of the occult, as told by his Indian school friend. In it, the narrator, trying to explain his fascination with this "most unlikely of friends," says: "But in Eliot's enormous, generously shared mental storehouse of the varieties of 'forbidden knowledge' I thought I'd found another way of making a bridge between here-and-there, between my two othernesses, my double unbelonging. In that world of magic and power there seemed to exist the kind of fusion of worldviews, European Amerindian Oriental Levantine, in which I desperately wanted to believe. With his help, I hoped, I might make a 'forbidden self.' "
When he goes through his friend's papers after his death, however, he finds no serious work, only ravings, and all of it malicious, lubricious, utterly unloving. "Since then there has been no intercourse between the spiritual world and mine."
"Chekov and Zulu" is a spy story of sorts, set at the time of the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and later of her son Rajiv. The deep friendship between two old school chums, both employed in the Indian secret service, who call themselves by "Star Trek" nicknames ("not the leaders, as you'll appreciate, but the ultimate professional servants"), is dissolved when one of them, for reasons of ambition, refuses to take a moral stand against terrorism. He is ultimately destroyed by the terrorism he will not resist. This is the story in this collection that will be most familiar and most appealing to readers of Mr. Rushdie's imaginative and politically engaged larger works.
The closing story reads like an autobiographical tribute to a childhood nanny and her autumnal romance with an old East European stroke-impaired building porter (she cannot pronounce her p's and so calls him a "courter"), though its principal feature perhaps is its nostalgic recall of the British-American pop culture of the early 1960's. It is a melancholic story, riven by racial violence, but sustained by shrewd observation and a fine ear for dialogue.
It closes (except for an informational coda) with the narrator's declaration that "I, too, have ropes around my neck, I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. . . . Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose."
Robert Coover is the author of "The Public Burning" and "A Night at the Movies," among other works. He teaches electronic writing at Brown University.
THE AUCTION OF THE RUBY SLIPPERS
Let me be frank: my cousin Gale was and is the love of my life. . . . One day, sad to relate, I came home to find her in the arms of a hairy escapee from a caveman movie. I moved out the same day. . . . I caught a glimpse of her recently. She was at the far end of a long, dark, subterranean bar-room. . . . At that time many television channels were devoted to the sad case of the astronaut stranded on Mars without hope of rescue. . . . The condemned man on another planet -- the condemned man on TV -- began to sing a squawky medley of . . . his spaced-out renditions of "Swanee," "Show Me the Way to Go Home" and several numbers from "The Wizard of Oz"; and Gale's shoulders began to shake. She was crying. . . . I first heard about the upcoming auction of the ruby slippers the very next morning, and resolved at once to buy them, whatever the cost. My plan was simple: I would offer the miracle-shoes to Gale in all humility. If she wished, I would say, she could use them to travel to Mars and bring the spaceman back to Earth.
-- From "East, West."

[Credit: The New York Times (Literary Supplement), January 15, 1995.]                          TOP 


Doomed in Bombay
By NORMAN RUSH

Salman Rushdie's new novel, his first since the infamous fatwa issued by the Iranian Government in 1989 as punishment for putatively blasphemous passages in his satire "The Satanic Verses," comes heavily attended by certain inevitable questions. How is Mr. Rushdie holding up after six years in hiding? What kind of story is the world's most famous living author, in this extraordinary situation, going to tell us and, of course, himself? Is this another book that will give offense, and to whom? Will this book comment, directly or otherwise, on the dogma-driven expansion of censorship and persecution affecting writers in so many parts of the world? It's only when we've worked through this vanguard of questions that we're free to ask what we can take from this novel, as opposed to all the novels it competes with -- serious novels whose ambitions are to show us what we urgently need to know or feel in this threatening moment, when alarms and grim forewarnings crowd in on us, making so many of our innocent pastimes feel difficult to justify, fiction reading itself not excepted.
It turns out that the topical questions are easily answered; and it turns out, also, that this novel, looked at as a work of literary art, is a triumph, an intricate and deceptive one. The evidence is that Mr. Rushdie is in good creative health, his imaginative powers undamaged. The story he tells deals analogically and subtly with the shaping of his predicament, and writing it must have been tonic, though not necessarily consoling. It's a work that honorably serves the republic of letters and in the process exposes its author to a new range of potential antagonists.
"The Moor's Last Sigh" is a picaresque recounting of the rise, decline and plunge to extinction of a Portuguese merchant family anciently established in southern India, focusing on the period from 1900 to the present. The hapless narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, born, like Mr. Rushdie, in Bombay (but in 1957, 10 years later), has composed these pages during exile and imprisonment in a replica of the Alhambra built and run by a madman (a former protege of the family) in rural Andalusia. Moraes, nicknamed the Moor, is the last living member of the da Gama-Zogoiby line. Throughout, echoes of Mr. Rushdie's own predicament are hard not to detect. "Here I stand; couldn't've done it differently" is one of the Moor's last thoughts as he roams the Andalusian countryside, following his doomed escape from captivity, annoyed that there are no church doors handy for nailing his screed to.
At the center of the chronicle is the demonically talented painter Aurora Zogoiby, whose career flourishes from the 1940's through the 1980's. Moraes is her son, one of four children who all achieve doom at young ages; he himself is a physical giant who was born with a deformed right hand and with a form of progeria that makes him appear to be twice his actual age. In the course of the novel, the action moves from the family estate on Cabral Island, in Cochin, the site of the family's spice business, to Malabar Hill, the wealthiest suburb of Bombay, where Aurora attains celebrity, and where the family business, under the direction of her common-law Jewish husband, Abraham, grows to fantastic success and exfoliates into the basest criminality. I will resist the temptation to summarize the kinks and jags in the family trajectory since they're too much fun to encounter the first time through, but the reader may be assured that all the weird fruit that family trees produce is here -- betrayals, lunacies, failed crusades, venery, the lot. The watershed events of modern Indian history regularly protrude into the tale -- the independence struggle, partition, the emergency, the B.C.C.I. scandal, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. There is a pyrotechnical denouement. And the story plays out through an elegant double metaphor twinning the expulsion of the Moors from Spain with the symbolic expulsion from India of our set of Iberian colonizers.
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.
As always, Mr. Rushdie writes with brio, vigor and wit. Here, for example, is an offhand, parenthetical characterization -- of a Bombay restaurant, an Iranian restaurant, the Sorryno: "(so called because of the huge blackboard at the entrance reading Sorry, No Liquor, No Answer Given Regarding Addresses in Locality, No Combing of Hair, No Beef, No Haggle, No Water Unless Food Taken, No News or Movie Magazine, No Sharing of Liquid Sustenances, No Taking Smoke, No Match, No Feletone Calls, No Incoming With Own Comestible, No Speaking of Horses, No Sigret, No Taking of Long Time on Premises, No Raising of Voice, No Change, and a crucial last pair, No Turning Down of Volume -- It Is How We Like, and No Musical Request -- All Melodies Selected Are to Taste of Prop)."
The resonances in this adroit aside will not escape most readers.
A novel, as Randall Jarrell put it, is a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it. And there are some imperfections in "The Moor's Last Sigh." Even granting that a point being made in the unscrolling of the family history is that religious identity seems to make not much difference when it encounters the underlying human propensity to do wrong, there's still something off-putting about the casting of Abraham Zogoiby, the patriarch, as a kind of Jewish Professor Moriarty of subcontinental crime, a controller of Muslim gangs, a drug kingpin, a plotter involved in creating the Islamic Bomb, a procurer of little girls. His Jewishness is repeatedly referred to, even though he's not observant and has in the past been blocked in an attempt to convert to Christianity. Maybe this piece of portraiture could have been painted less hyperbolically, in cognizance of the paranoid mythologies of secret Jewish power so widely current.
THIS could be an overreaction on my part, stemming from awareness that "The Turner Diaries" and "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" are underground best sellers in this country and that there is a peculiar general relish in our Christian culture for imagos of the flamboyantly transgressive Jew, from Howard Stern to Philip Roth's Mickey Sabbath. I do understand the requirements of symmetry Mr. Rushdie faced in the peopling of this novel -- moral unattractiveness is everywhere (all the native Indian characters are morally challenged, except for the family cook) -- so I suppose my question should be taken more as venting than as literary criticism. That said, there's not much else to note in a critical way, other than that the ending of the book has a certain dashed-together feel to it, and that there are occasional curlicues here and there, minor instances of ornament overextended.
So, another brave and dazzling fable from Salman Rushdie, one that meets the test of civic usefulness -- broadly conceived -- as certainly as it fulfills the requirements of true art. No retort to tyranny could be more eloquent.

Norman Rush is the author of the novel "Mating," which won the National Book Award in 1991, and the story collection "Whites."

[Credit: The New York Times Literary Supplement; reviews, January 14, 1996.]

 

'The Ground Beneath Her Feet': Turning Rock 'N' Roll Into Quakes
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

The Ground Beneath Her Feet," Salman Rushdie's loose, baggy monster of a new novel, is a retelling of the Orpheus myth that recasts both the doomed musician and his lost lady love as rock stars.
Picture Orpheus (one Ormus Cama, in Rushdie's telling) as a brooding, kitschy combo of Elvis, Dylan and Lennon; and Eurydice (that is, Vina Apsara) as a sort of fairy-tale composite of Madonna and Diana, princess of Wales.
Picture Eurydice not only being condemned to Hades but also being literally swallowed by the ground during an earthquake. Picture Orpheus trying to recapture his beloved (or at least her memory) by going on a worldwide stadium tour titled "Into the Underworld."
Despite Rushdie's myriad talents as a writer, the resulting novel is a decidedly disappointing performance: a handful of dazzling set pieces, bundled together with long-winded digressions, tiresome soliloquizing about love and death and art, and cliched descriptions of the rock 'n' roll business worthy of Jackie Collins.
Like so many of Rushdie's earlier novels "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" addresses the themes of exile, metamorphosis and flux, and like those earlier books it examines such issues through the prism of multiple dichotomies: between home and rootlessness, love and death, East and West, reason and the irrational.
We are once again treated to the story of several characters who leave India to wander the world and invent new identities for themselves abroad. And we are once again urged to read in their story a lesson about our fragmented, chaotic world, a world that this time is on the verge of cracking apart from tectonic cultural shifts and political and social tremors.
The earthquake that takes Vina's life, along with Ormus' famous cycle of "quake songs," becomes a presiding metaphor for Rushdie's vision of our tumultuous age: a time in which both nations and families are being flung apart by the centrifugal forces of history, a time in which everything seems to be "shifting, changing, getting partitioned, separated by frontiers, splitting, re-splitting, coming apart."

Sadly for the reader, Rushdie seems to have misplaced his magician's ability to fuse the mythic and the mundane, the surreal and the authentic, into a seamless whole.
His earlier novels tended to be allegories about a particular set of historical circumstances: "Midnight's Children" used the story of its hero's spiritual decline as a parable of Indian history since independence; "Shame" grounded its phantasmagorical imaginings in the history of a country that was "not quite Pakistan," and "The Moor's Last Sigh" effortlessly turned the fate of its hero's family into a metaphor for India's recent ups and downs.
"The Ground Beneath Her Feet," in contrast, exchanges concrete context for a fuzzy internationalism, making a host of vague allusions to events meant to evoke "the uncertainty of the modern," from the Vietnam War to the Chinese crackdown at Tiananmen Square to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
At the same time the marvelous Garcia Marquez-like flights of fancy that enlivened Rushdie's earlier work are largely absent: With the exception of the earthquake that devours Vina, there are few miraculous events in this novel, no women metamorphosing into panthers, no people falling out of airplanes, no children who can travel through time.
The few touches of fantasy that do surface in the novel -- Ormus' supposed ability to anticipate the very songs that Elvis, the Beatles and Bob Dylan would make famous 1,001 days later -- feel like gratuitous whimsies dutifully grafted onto generic descriptions of rock concerts and music-business shenanigans.
Although the opening portions of the novel are animated by scenes that conjure up the burbling, Dickensian life of Bombay with Rushdie's patented elan, the novel rapidly winds down to become a plodding chronicle of the intertwined lives of Ormus, Vina and their friend and confidant, Rai, the narrator of this novel.
Ormus, we're told, is "the greatest popular singer of all," "a musical sorcerer whose melodies could make city streets begin to dance and high buildings sway to their rhythm, a golden troubadour the jouncy poetry of whose lyrics could unlock the very gates of hell." Like Elvis, he is known for his pelvic gyrations and curling lip; like Elvis, he is haunted by memories of a dead twin brother, and like John Lennon, he is eventually gunned down by a crazed fan.
Vina, on her part, is described as "a woman in extremis," an outlaw singer who is continually reinventing herself, a troubled woman who is mourned as a goddess by millions around the world after her tragic death.
As for Rai, he's a familiar Rushdie figure, a spiritual relative of Saladin, the displaced hero of "The Satanic Verses," and Moor, the conflicted narrator of "The Moor's Last Sigh." A photographer by vocation, Rai is a professional observer who finds his skepticism sorely tested by his encounters with Ormus and who finds his own detachment dissolving in his love for Vina.
At times Rai demonstrates Rushdie's magpie love of language (his fondness for "whatever sounded bright and shiny"). But all too often his meditations on the story of Ormus and Vina devolve into ponderous pontifications, the babbling of someone in love with the sound of his own voice.
He blathers on about Ormus having double vision, suggesting that the world he and the other characters inhabit is a kind of mirror world of our own. He wonders "if each of us has alternative existences in the other continuum." And he speaks of "a transitional phase" that "only the imperative force of the Immense can force towards completion."
In the end this portentous mumbo jumbo sucks all the air out of this novel and deprives Ormus and Vina of their vitality as characters. By the end of the book they have become nothing but brightly painted puppets, mechanically re-enacting the Orpheus and Eurydice myth while laboring under the weight of their creator's myriad philosophical theses.
As Rai himself suggests, they "had ceased to be real," they had "become little more than signs of the times, lacking true autonomy, to be decoded according to one's own inclination and need."
Instead of turning the Orpheus legend into a compelling postmodern myth, Rushdie has simply freighted an old story with his favorite themes and the random detritus of our current celebrity culture. In trying to write what he has called "an everything novel," he has produced a strangely hollow book, a book that lacks both the specificity and the magic that have enlivened his best work in the past.

[Credit: The New York Times, April 13, 1999.]