Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

This is the first Salman Rushdie book I've read. My friend T. had recommended him years ago, but I got bogged down. But now it's summer again, and I'm back to hitting up the Georgia Tech Library (probably for the last few times!). And I'd read a great review of the book, and decided it was time.

The first 40 or so pages of the book are slow. The story is told in pieces by characters, and the first seems self-indulgent, but unfortunately, not in an interesting way. However, the book moves on and picks up after that. It's a beautiful story, about how tiny pieces of peoples emotions create a perfect storm of events. It's about Kashmir, WWII France, India, and Hollywood. There's this idea in there that people are a function of their place, which I find particularly interesting as I try to decide on a place to live. It's a wonderful story about how people's flaws knit together into disaster, but in a way it also points out that their strengths could have knit together (had the stage been set as a comedy instead of a tragedy) to become their salvation. The book has a lot to say about the roots of terrorism, and the author does have a lovely turn of phrase. But I think that what will stay with me is how everyone thinks that they're doing the best that they can under the circumstance, and the reader can feel and understand how limited they think their options are. Lesser writers leave you unconvinced about a characters actions, you feel they should have known better, or surely they could have seen how this could go badly. But these poor people were doing what we all do, muddling through imperfect situations.

"The Indian army had poured military hardware of all kinds into the valley, and scrap metal junkyards sprang up everywhere, scarring the valley's pristine beauty, like small mountain ranges made up of malfuctioning truck exhausts, jammed weaponry and broken tank treads. Then one day by the grace of God the junk began to stir. It cme to life and took on human form. The men who were miraculously born from these rusting war metals, who went out intino the valley to preach resistance and revenge, were saints of an antirely new kind. They were the iron mullahs. It was said that if you dared to knock on their bodies you would here a hollow metallic ring. Because they were made of armor they could not be shot but they were too heavy to swim nd so if they fell into the water they would drown. Their breath was hot and smoky, like burning rubber tires, or the exhalations of dragons. They were to be honored, feared, and obeyed."

"As a result of Max's unexpected romantic infatuation - and also because Boonyi was every bit as attentive as promised - he failed to sense what she had silently been telling him from the beginning, what she assumed he knew to be a part of their hard-nosed agreement: Don't ask for my heart, because I am tearing it out and breaking it into little bits and thworing it away so I will be heartless but you will not know it because I will be the perfect counterfeit of a loving woman and you will receive from me a perfect forgery of love.

So there were two unspoken clauses in the Understanding, one regarding the giving of love and the other concerinin the withhoding of it, codicils that were sharply at odds with each other and impossible to reconcile. The result was, as Max had foreseen, trouble; the biggest Indo-American diplomatic rumpus in history. But for a time the master forger was deceived by the forgery he had bought, both deceived and satisfied, s content to possessit as an art collector who discovers a masterpiece concealed in a mound of garbage, as happy to keep it hidden from view as collector who can't resist buying what he knows to be stolen property. And that was how it came about that a faithless wife from the village of the bhand pather began to influence, to complicate and even to shape, American diplomatic activity regarding the vexed matter of Kashmir."