Shalimar The PR Man

Okay, there's going to be a lot about Salman Rushdie in the press -- and therefore, in this blog -- for the next couple of weeks. So here goes, with an extract from 10 questions that Time magazine asked the author:

"Isn’t there a school of thought that holds that novelists shouldn’t get their soft, delicate fingers dirty with politics?

This is not my school.

I’ve noticed that about you. Why not?

Well, I'd say they're not exactly political books. They're books about the intersection of private lives and public affairs, and they ask, in a way, time-honored novelistic questions of: To what extent are we the masters of our fate? To what extent do we make our lives, and to what extent are our lives made for us by forces beyond our control? I think the thing that has shifted in the modern era is that the balance of those two elements has been weighted more heavily on the side of loss of control. Our characters are no longer entirely our destinies. When those planes ran into those buildings, it didn't matter what the character of the people inside was."

Of the ten, two of the questions revolve around Padma Lakshmi. Go figure.

What you ought to read, however, is this trenchant review of Shalimar The Clown in The Sunday Express by the ever-insightful Nilanjana S. Roy, who calls the book "a deeply angry, sometimes clownish, often rough novel that marks just a return to form, not a return to the peak of that form." She continues: "Shalimar the Clown is a tightrope walk by a highwire virtuoso who’s not above stumbling; but it’s a powerful parable, a reminder that neither East nor West can sow the seeds of intolerance, hatred and division without reaping the whirlwind."