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Shalimar the Clown: A Novel | |||||||
 
| 80% Recommended by our customers. Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Catalog: Book Release date: 2006-10-10 Media: Paperback Number of pages: 416 Ean: 9780679783480 Book Isbn: 0679783482  Tip: compare prices with similar booksAuthor:
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“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 |
| User Reviews: |
 Written on May 13, 2007 Summary: More dimensions than the cosmos! In this book, Salman Rushdie not only tells a story about love, hate, revenge and murder, but he also draws connections with political and religious issues throughout history. The relationship between the characters in this book represent the relationships between India and Pakistan towards Kashmir. It also tells the tale of the imbalance between civilizations. For example, the character of Boonyi, except from being the role of the female character of seduction and lust, is also the representation of the Third World. She at first is in harmony within her own innocent world (Kashmir), but then dreams of the things beyond her own village. The moment she deceives her own rural life and her own values, hell breaks loose. This storyline actually says that it is the greed of mankind, that causes devaluation and moral bankruptcy. The fact that Boonyi followed Max to the big city and allowed herself to be used in order to live in a neon-lit apartment where she starts overeating after admitting to herself her inability to excel in dance, reflects the seduction of the Western material civilization that exhausts and exploits the Third World in order to indulge in their own whims and desires. The fact that Boonyi devours all the food she can get her hands on shows how much the Third World has become disillusioned by the failure of their dreams by allowing their own exploitation. She eats and eats to fill the emptiness she feels inside that was left after she had sold her soul to materialism. Boonyi/ the Third World then becomes addicted to drugs/materialism that makes her weaker and weaker. The second story line of Shalimar, who turns to Islamic terrorism as a revenge to Boonyi's deceit, actually is a result of Boonyi's deads. Shalimar who started out as a goodhearted and talented boy, dreamed of a peaceful life with his wife, but was crushed by her sudden infidelity. Shalimar represents the pride and honor of the Third World who want revenge for their stolen innocence. Shalimar's bloody revenge shows a desperate reaction of the embarrassed East who want to win back their honor by performing the ultimate honor killing. Kashmira's vengeance on Shalimar represents the current generation of the Third World. They are educated, independent and strong. Their search for identity collides with their sense of loss. Her paranormal power to drive Shalimar insane shows how the only power today's generation has against the rage of madness: the power of thought and strong will. This book has more layers and dimensions than the cosmos. A great and intelligent book.  Written on March 25, 2007 Summary: Dexterous manipulation Salman Rushdie's latest novel bears the fingerprint of its author: like his previous works, it is an expertly implemented, well paced story that swings dexterously between different times, places, and people, and yet maintains a continuity. I read the book quite rapidly, in a few long sessions. The novel certainly grips the reader. Like always, Rushdie has done his homework well: the book is full of minute detail and paints a vivid and life-like picture of its multiple scenes. Yet, after completing the book I was dissatisfied. Why is that? At surface, the book is a story of a triangle of people: a man, his daughter, and the mother's deceived and furious husband, Shalimar the Clown. A bit deeper it is a story of India and Kashmir, a lost paradise utterly devastated by both external and internal actors. The man is one of the forces: while acting as the USA ambassador to India, he meets a Kashmir dancer and falls in love with her; thus, the daughter is born. Of cosmopolitan middle-European origin, the ambassador is painted a man of many admirable qualities: he is a hero of French resistance during WWII, he is an accomplished economist connected with creating the post-war western world from ashes, he is a star diplomat, he is a spy-master par excellence. Yet he also is an amoral womaniser whose love to the Kashmiri woman rapidly causes her ruin. The subtext of the ambassador as a representative of the entire Western world is easy to read: his compassion and love to India and Kashmir, even if genuine, is shallow and ultimately empty. What puzzles me, nevertheless, is why the author chooses to call him Max Ophuls. I know who the real Max Ophüls was, and I know some of his work. I expect that those readers who are not movie freaks will not know the late 40's-early 50's movies of the German-French director, semi-obscure if influential as he was. So why this name? Is Rushdie under-estimating, or over-estimating the reader? I cannot see his point here, unless it is to create confusion in some readers. The deceived husband, Shalimar, is the bête noir of the story. The actor-acrobat turns to an international terrorist who kills his targets with skill and vengeance. He is pictured as the mirror image of the ambassador, his eventual victim. He is fanatical, skilful, strong and dangerous. In his single-minded devotion, he is more like the Terminator character than a real human being. All in all, Rushdie makes little attempt to explain or understand Shallimar. Perhaps this would have been too much to expect from an author who was himself for years a living target of religious fanatics. In my reading, the daughter, India Ophüls. also becomes more an amalgam of ideas than a real novel character. Cast in Los Angeles, the city with no center or sense of proportion, she is depicted as rootless and uncertain of what she is. Only after she reaches out to her hidden past, to her mother and Kashmir, does the find the strength to face Shalimar in the eventual and predictable showdown. To underline this, Rushdie makes her adopt the name her mother had whispered in her ear after birth, Kashmira. Indeed it may be that Kashmir itself is the only genuine character of the novel: her nature and landscapes; her trees, flowers, and animals; her villages and customs; and her suffering people. Only here Rushdie is expressing real compassion and warmth towards his creation. Perhaps there are more sophisticated ways to read Shalimar the Clown; I don't know. For me, nevertheless, the shallowness of its characters left a unpleasant feeling. They did not stand for themselves; instead, they stood for something else. I felt manipulated, and I do not like that feeling, irrespective of the direction I'm manipulated to. I could not help comparing this reading experience to the recent novel of another popular and skilled author, the Until I Find You by John Irving. Like Rushdie, Irving too is a story-teller who likes to spread his novels over wide distances in time and space. However, Irving's characters, even if fantastic, are more complex and less easy to explain. More than that, I sense more warmth and compassion in his work. He likes his characters, and wants the reader to like them too. Written on February 25, 2007 Summary: Another great artistic triumph from Rushdie "Shalimar The Clown (STC)" is a great work of fiction and a clear artistic triumph, affirming unequivocally Rushdie's status as one of today's great contemporary fiction writers. His Booker Prize winning "Midnight's Children" which critics now refer to as the "Booker of Booker's" for towering head and shoulders over all other Booker winners, may have been the high point of his career so far, but STC shows that Rushdie has lost none of his magical touch, his ability to fire the reader's imagination with a sweeping transnational tale of love, lust, honour and murder that is no less intriguing as a personal revenge drama than as an allegorical take on how a once idyllic enclave (Kashmir) where Hindus and Muslims lived and co-existed peacefully with one another has become a tension ridden no man's land where competing political interests fight for dominance and influence. The cuckolded Shalimar's murderous fixation on revenge to redeem his honour may be a personal mission but surely it taps into the same vein that turns those imbibing the teachings of the iron mullahs into terrorists. Then there's Max, the blue-eyed cosmopolitan diplomat and the sexually progressive but doomed Boonyi's seducer, whose Jewish-ness must seem like the proverbial vial of Molotov cocktail that sets the cauldron aflame, dragging the rest of the world into the threatening war of civilizations. The three stories - all interlinked across different times and continents - are never less than compelling. Even the telling of Max's early years in Nazi-torn Europe, his escape to America and arrival on the world political stage fit hand in glove into the novel's narrative sequence. The characterization is full and believable, except perhaps for India - Max's and Boonyi's love child - who is a bit of a blank, neither likeable nor comprehending of the circumstances that led to her own beginning...but in a way, that's how it is, isn't it ? Thankfully, the young never truly understand nor see the past through the same prism as their parents. Otherwise, what hope is there for mankind ? "Shalimar The Clown" is an exceptional literary achievement, a thing of enormous richness, breadth and beauty, one that resonates with truth, wisdom, insight and all the finest qualities you'd expect to find in a Rushdie novel. I count it among my top 3 reads in the past year. Written on January 16, 2007 Summary: Shalimar the Clown This is a well-written novel but it is quite dark and is brutally ugly at times. Eventhough it kept my interest, parts of it were disturbing and difficult to read. I suppose the tenor reflects the subject matter, which involves the recent history of Kashmir. There are moments of beauty (and Kashmir is described as a paradise in the past) contrasted with an over-riding sense of the grotesque (as Kashmir is destroyed through war and political wrangling). I was bothered that there was no sense of mercy or humanity towards the end but this, perhaps, is indicative of the situation in Kashmir today. It is well-written with some powerful themes that echo some of our current events. However, it was different than I expected and I found it unsettling. Written on January 3, 2007 Summary: Ya Kashmir! Hai-hai! Ya Kashmir! "Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore," wrote Stendhal in The Charterhouse of Parma. Usually I find attempts at political statements in literature to be very bad for the literature. This book is an exception. Although blurb on the back cover of the paperback states that the murder with which the book's opening section ends "looks at first like a political assassination but turns out to be passionately personal," the book can be - and I'm sure was intended by the author to be - read on several levels. One is indeed the story of a few individuals, a story of love, betrayal and revenge, but there are two other dimensions: first, this is the tragic story of the region of Kashmir, and second, it is the tragic story of the relations of the United States with the Islamic world which began in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and continues today in the "war on terror" and the activities of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. The author makes some careless mistakes, such as the anomaly of a dot-com in the early 1990s, before any such firms existed, and I found the first section, set in Los Angeles, lacking. But as soon as I began reading the second section, set in India, I once again found the magic of Midnight's Children. Rushdie is in top form here. It would be easy to try to carry an allegorical interpretation too far, but I think it is clear that the way that Ambassador Max Ophuls used Boonyi Kaul for his purposes and then disposed of her when her self-destruction rendered her no longer fit for those purposes bears a resemblance to the way the United States used, and then cast aside, its Afghan pawns, which is too strong to be ignored. (The book makes it clear, moreover, how the terrorist wave of Islamic fundamentalism which the US, in conjunction with its Pakistani and Saudi allies, created in Afghanistan, washed over Kashmir in 1989, turning it into the hell it is today, as it rippled out to the rest of the world, eventually reaching New York in 2001.) Similarly, the rage with which Boonyi's husband, the title character, becomes a terrorist and eventually kills Ophuls, is clearly also the rage of the pawn turning on the power that had created and discarded it. And knowing how one of the most beautiful places on earth, an example of the peaceful coexistence of practitioners of different religions, has been turned into a hell in which 5 million inhabitants are terrorized by over half a million members of India's uniformed services and a few thousand insurgents, one might feel the urge to join in the cry of anguish of one of the characters: "Ya Kashmir! Hai-hai! Ya Kashmir!" |
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| Our price | $10.17 | - | $10.17 | $17.16 | $10.20 | $12.81 |
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| Collectible price | $14.95 | $29.94 | $150.00 | $25.00 | - | $15.81 |
| Catalog | Book | Book | Book | Book | Book | Book |
| Release date | 2006-10-10 | 1989-02-22 | 2006-04-04 | 2008-05-27 | 2008-03-11 | 1998-01-03 |
| Media | Paperback | Hardcover | Paperback | Hardcover | Paperback | Paperback |
| Format | - | Bargain Price | - | - | - | - |
| Number of pages | 416 | 560 | 560 | 368 | 320 | 448 |
| Ean | 9780679783480 | - | 9780812976533 | 9780375504334 | 9780812976700 | 9780099592419 |
| Book Isbn | 0679783482 | - | 0812976533 | 0375504338 | 0812976703 | 009959241X |
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