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a CRASH COURSE ON THE WORKS OF
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Salman Rushdie
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by Maylin Scott
Though Salman Rushdie is one of the world's most celebrated
writers, it's easy to feel intimidated by the sheer
heft and breadth of his work. But if you've never read
Rushdie, and know him only as the man who directed Renée
Zellweger and Hugh Grant to the toilets in Bridget
Jones' Diary, you don't know what you're missing.
His work draws on nothing less than the world for his
setting, and history and mythology for his inspirations.
Call him political, post-colonial, or a pop-culture
guru, at his core, he is simply a master storyteller
and one of the funniest writers alive. If you like reading
writers as diverse as John Irving, Angela Carter, Charles
Dickens, David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Gabriel Garcià
Màrquez or Saul Bellow, then Rushdie is right
up your bookshelf alley. Here's a quick primer to get
you started.
There is no better place to start than with his latest.
Shalimar the Clown is the story of
four people — one of whom is murdered —
and how their separate stories connect through several
locations from Kashmir to California, and several decades
from Nazi-occupied Europe to the world of modern terrorism.
He employs intriguing parallel narratives to highlight
the cultural and political tug-of-wars taking place
in Alsace-Lorraine and Kashmir, and then brings us right
into our contemporary world with the beautiful, fiesty
Kashmira — or is it India? This novel is more
fast-paced, more gripping than any of his previous work.
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Midnight's Children not only won the
Booker Prize in 1981, but it was also awarded the "Booker
of Bookers" in 1993 and is one of Rushdie's best. It
is the story of Saleem Sinai, one of 1,001 children
born on the midnight of India's independence. He has
an extraordinary sense of smell, and his life parallels
the events of his country. This is a family saga, a
political allegory, a great example of magic realism
for fans of Rushdie doing what he does best —
writing a page-turning story.
Short stories are always a great introduction to an
author's style. Rushdie's East, West is
a very funny collection of stories that show the roles
culture plays in connecting — or alienating —
different people. From a re-telling of Yorrick's life,
which puts a different spin on Hamlet, to a fast-paced
auction house where Dorothy's ruby slippers are on the
block, to a touching friendship between an Indian ayah
and a Slavic porter based on a love of "The Flintstones,"
these stories are quirky, poignant and utterly unpredictable.
Rushdie is also a wonderful essayist. In his collection
Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction
1992-2002, he covers everything from his love
of The Wizard of Oz (the film he credits with
having "made a writer of me"), to his obsessions with
soccer, to hanging out with U2, to the influences on
his work by artists as diverse as Italo Calvino, Suetonius
and Federico Fellini. He also describes his experiences
living under the Iranian fatwa and his response to militant
Islam.
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Rushdie has a fascination with pop culture and loves
finding creative and humorous ways to incorporate it
into his fiction. The Ground Beneath Her Feet
and Fury are great examples of this
and make perfect reading for any teenager hooked on
music or television. In The Ground Beneath Her
Feet, (yes, the U2 song originates from this
novel), Rushdie retells the mythical story of Orpheus
and Eurydice using two modern-day characters who form
a band that becomes the most popular musical group in
the world. In Fury, Malik Solinka,
a Cambridge professor and doll lover, produces a late-night
television show starring a doll he has created called
Little Brain, who meets all of the world's great thinkers.
The show becomes a hit, but when Solly finds himself
almost killing his wife one night, he flees to New York,
filled with fury and modern angst, and worried he has
become a serial killer. It sounds macabre, but at its
heart this novel is really a satire on celebrity culture
and globalization.
On the more serious side is Rushdie's most infamous
novel, The Satanic Verses, which opens
with a hijacked plane exploding over the English Channel.
Two men survive: Gibreel Farishta, the biggest movie
star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an anglophile and
man of a thousand voices, and they quickly become symbols
of Good and Evil. But which is which? This glorious
imaginative novel, full of Indian mythology, resulted
in a much-publicized fatwa being issued against Rushdie
and sparked censorship debates around the world.
Also check out his first novel, Grimus,
about a young Indian man struggling with immortality;
Shame, about two men and their families,
set in a country that is "not quite Pakistan"; and The
Moor's Last Sigh, about a compulsive storyteller's
journey from India to Spain.
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