Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Shalimar the Clown

Name: Shalimar the Clown
Author: Salman Rushdie
ISBN: 9780679783480

by Salman Rushdie

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Overview

“Dazzling . . . Modern thriller, Ramayan epic, courtroom drama, slapstick comedy, wartime adventure, political satire, village legend–they’re all blended here magnificently.”
–The Washington Post Book World

This is the story of Maximilian Ophuls, America’s counterterrorism chief, one of the makers of the modern world; his Kashmiri Muslim driver and subsequent killer, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown; Max’s illegitimate daughter India; and a woman who links them, whose revelation finally explains them all. It is an epic narrative that moves from California to Kashmir, France, and England, and back to California again. Along the way there are tales of princesses lured from their homes by demons, legends of kings forced to defend their kingdoms against evil. And there is always love, gained and lost, uncommonly beautiful and mortally dangerous.

“A commanding story . . . [a] harrowing climax . . . Revenge is an ancient and powerful engine of narrative.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“Absorbing . . . Everywhere [Rushdie] takes us there is both love and war, in strange and terrifying combinations, painted in swaying, swirling, world-eating prose that annihilates the borders between East and West, love and hate, private lives and the history they make.”
–Time

“A vast, richly peopled, beautiful and deeply rageful book that serves as a profound and disturbing artifact of our times.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“Marvelous . . . brilliant . . . a story worthy of [Rushdie’s] genius.”
–Detroit Free Press

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
– The Washington Post Book World –Los Angeles Times Book Review –St. Louis Post-Dispatch –Rocky Mountain News

ONE OF THE BEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR
–Time –Chicago Tribune –The Christian Science Monitor

Synopsis

“A commanding story . . . [a] harrowing climax . . . Revenge is an ancient and powerful engine of narrative.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“A vast, richly peopled, beautiful and deeply rageful book that serves as a profound and disturbing artifact of our times.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“Marvelous . . . brilliant . . . a story worthy of [Rushdie’s] genius.”
–Detroit Free Press

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

… Rushdie has written an intensely political novel, infused with recent events, but its emotional scope reaches so far beyond our current crisis and its vision into the vagaries of the heart is so perceptive that one can imagine Shalimar the Clown being read long after this age of sacred terror has faded into history.

About the Author, Salman Rushdie

One of the most celebrated writers of our time, SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of ten previous novels— Grimus, Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and, in 2008, the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, and The Enchantress of Florence. He has also published four works of non-fiction, a collection of short stories, and edited two fiction anthologies. In June 2007, Rushdie was appointed a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. He holds the rank Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France and began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in 2007. In May 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and also in 2008, the London Times ranked Rushdie thirteenth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". For two years he served as president of The PEN American Center, the world's oldest human rights organization, and is the chair of PEN's World Voices Festival of International Literature, an annual literary festival he began in New York in 2001. Rushdie is currently working on the film version of Midnight's Children.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

The lives of two vastly different men intersect for one fatal moment. Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls is stabbed in broad daylight by his Kashmiri Muslim chauffeur, a tragic eccentric who calls himself Shalimar the Clown. To explain how they arrived at that point, Salman Rushdie must reach back into the history of three continents and construct a parable of multiculturalism. A finely textured novel by "a perpetual storyteller."

Ron Charles

Publishers Weekly

For Westerners, Rushdie's latest may be better heard than read. While readers might stumble over the Kashmiri, Indian and Pakistani names and accents, Mandvi glides right through them, allowing us to engage with Rushdie's well-wrought characters and sagas. Mandvi has a calm, quiet storyteller voice, often employing tempo to express emotional states and to make long, complex sentences entirely clear. In fact, one realizes he is nearly invisible (until he reads a few lines in a Romance language), leaving us to relish the sounds and images and rhythms of Rushdie's language. The book begins at the end, with the murder of the former American ambassador to India, Maximilian Ophuls, now a counterterrorist expert, then introduces his murderer, Shalimar the Clown, Kashmiri actor and acrobat-cum-terrorist, and Ophuls's illegitimate daughter, India, who brings the book to a conclusion as terror-filled and ambiguous as our own future. Suspense and tension are superbly built and layered through mythology and plots of lust and jealousy intertwined with cultural, religious, national and international affairs. Rushdie does get polemical for a while, even didactic; his writing in these sections sometimes sounds speechifying. Yet we come away with a mostly lyrical parable that offers us a way of grappling with the realities of our time and place, a way of refracting history through multiple lenses. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Reviews, July 25). (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In 1990s Los Angeles, Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls is murdered in front of his illegitimate daughter, India, by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, a.k.a. Shalimar the Clown. Was it assassination or something more personal? Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Vintage Rushdie, in a sprawling story ripped from today's-and, undoubtedly, tomorrow's-headlines. A presumably political assassination that's in fact deeply "personal," the separate histories of the disputed territories of Strasbourg and Kashmir, and the classical Indian epic Ramayana are all ingeniously conflated and reimagined in Rushdie's dazzling ninth novel. It begins in 1993, when former U.S. Ambassador to India Maximilian Ophuls is murdered and nearly beheaded outside his Los Angeles home by his Muslim driver, who, the world will soon learn, is Kashmiri native Noman Sher Noman, a former traveling player and amateur acrobat known as "Shalimar the Clown." In a masterly deployment of interconnected narratives spanning six decades, we learn of Noman's youthful marriage to beautiful dancer "Boonyi" Kaul and her calculated dalliance with visiting diplomat Ophuls, who takes her (willingly) away, fathers her daughter and sorrowfully permits her disgraced return to Kashmir as Boonyi. Now grossly fat and guilt-ridden, she anticipates either her husband's forgiveness or his righteous vengeance. One parallel story is an extended flashback detailing Max's youth in war-torn Strasbourg, experiences as a Resistance hero and rise in the world of diplomacy. Other narratives recount Kashmir's ongoing victimization by Pakistan and India (notably, stiff-necked military leader Hammirdev Kachhawa and fanatical "iron mullah" Bulbul Fakh). Rushdie introduces numerous vivid characters variously related to Noman and Boonyi and describes Noman's training as a terrorist within an increasingly violent Kashmiri "liberation front." The pattern of the Ramayana-which recalls a hero's "war" waged against the "demon"who steals his beloved-is ingeniously reiterated when "Shalimar" fulfills his mission, eludes the sentence pronounced on him and confronts the woman who may or may not become his final victim. That the threat he incarnates will never go away, and we do not know our story's ending, is unforgettably dramatized, in a magical-realist masterpiece that equals, and arguably surpasses, the achievements of Midnight's Children, Shame and The Moor's Last Sigh. The Swedes won't dare to offend Islam by giving Rushdie the Nobel Prize he deserves more than any other living writer. Injustice rules.