Rushdie, Salman

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Salman Rushdie

Personal

Born June 19, 1947, in Bombay, Maharashtra, India; son of Anis Ahmed (in business) and Negin (Butt) Rushdie; married Clarissa Luard (in publishing), May 22, 1976 (divorced, 1987); married Marianne Wiggins (an author), 1988 (divorced, 1990); married Elizabeth West, 1997 (divorced, 2004); married Padma Lakshmi (an actress), 2004; children: (first marriage) Zafar (son); (second marriage) Milan (daughter). Education: King's College, Cambridge, M.A., 1968.

Addresses

Home—New York, NY. Agent—Wylie Agency Ltd., 17 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA, England.

Career

Writer. Fringe Theatre, London, England, actor, 1968-69; freelance advertising copywriter, 1970-73, 1976-80; writer, 1975-. Executive member of Camden Committee for Community Relations, 1976-83; member of advisory board, Institute of Contemporary Arts, beginning 1985; member of British Film Institute Production Board, beginning 1986. Honorary visiting professor of humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993.

Member

International PEN, International Parliament of Writers (founder), PEN American Center (president, 2004-06), Royal Society of Literature (fellow; president, 2004-), Society of Authors, National Book League (member of executive committee).

Awards, Honors

Booker McConnell Prize for fiction, and English-speaking Union Literary Award, both 1981, and James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1982, all for Midnight's Children; British Arts Council grant, 1981; Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, 1984, for Shame; Whitbread Prize, and Booker McConnell Prize shortlist, 1988, for The Satanic Verses, and 1995, for The Moor's Last Sigh; Kurt Tucholsky Prize, 1992; "Booker of Bookers" Prize for best novel to win the Booker Prize in its first twenty-five years, 1993, for Midnight's Children; British Book Awards Author of the Year, 1995; Aristeion Literary Prize, 1996; Man-tova Literary Prize, 1997; Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, 1998; named commandeur, French Order of Arts and Letters, 1999; Janet Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters, Bucknell University, 2004; Justice in Action Award, 2005.

Writings

NOVELS

Grimus, Gollancz (London, England), 1975, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2003.

Midnight's Children, Knopf (New York, NY), 1981.

Shame, Knopf (New York, NY), 1983.

The Satanic Verses, Viking (New York, NY), 1988.

The Moor's Last Sigh, J. Cape (London, England), 1995, Knopf (New York, NY), 1996.

The Ground beneath Her Feet, Holt (New York, NY), 1999.

Fury, Random House (New York, NY), 2001.

Shalimar the Clown, Random House (New York, NY), 2005.

OTHER

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, Viking (New York, NY), 1987.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories (juvenile), Granta Books (London, England), 1990.

Imaginary Homelands: The Collected Essays, Viking (London, England), 1991, published as Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991, Viking (New York, NY), 1992.

The Wizard of Oz: BFI Film Classics, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1992.

Soldiers Three & In Black & White, Viking Penguin (London, England), 1993.

The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write, edited by Steve MacDonogh, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1993.

East, West (short stories), Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 1994.

(Editor with Elizabeth West) Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing, 1947-1997, Holt (New York, NY), 1997.

Conversations with Salman Rushdie, edited by Michael Reder, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2000.

(Adapter, with Simon Reade and Tim Supple) Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (play; produced in London, England, 2004), Modern Library (New York, NY), 2003.

Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002, Random House (New York, NY), 2003.

Also author of television screenplays The Painter and the Pest, 1985, and The Riddle of Midnight, 1988; author of screen adaptation of "The Firebird's Nest." Contributor to Granta Thirty-nine: The Body, Viking Penguin, 1992; contributor to magazines and newspapers, including Atlantic Monthly, Granta, London Times, London Review of Books, New Statesman, and New York Times.

Adaptations

Haroun and the Sea Stories, an opera written by Charles Wuorinen and James Fenton and based on Rushdie's children's book, premiered at the New York City Opera, 2004; The Ground beneath Her Feet was adapted for film by Gemini Films; several of Rushdie's novels have been adapted as audio recordings.

Sidelights

While Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie began his writing career quietly, he has become one of the twentieth century's most well-known writers, not only for the ire he attracted from Islamic fundamentalists after publication of his 1988 work, The Satanic Verses, but also for his thought-provoking examinations of a changing sociopolitical world landscape in works like Midnight's Children and Shame. "Rushdie embodies in his own life and in his writings the conundrums of the postcolonial author, writing within the tradition of Indo-English literature while simultaneously appealing to the conventions and tastes of a worldwide, especially Western, audience," observed Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Cynthia Ho. "In the role of the South Asian expatriate author Rushdie also finds himself a spokesman for the peoples of the subcontinent, whether he or they would wish it so," Ho added. "Throughout his career Rushdie has struggled to speak to the mainstream in both Britain and Asia while mimicking and critiquing that same mainstream from the margins. The culturally and religiously diverse worlds of both India and Great Britain offer Rushdie a wealth of concerns and themes that consistently reflect and refract throughout his works."

Born on June 19, 1947, into a middle-class Muslim family in Bombay, India, Rushdie attended the Cathedral Boys' High School. His education continued in England at the Rugby School, which he began at-tending at age fourteen. Discussing his years at the Rugby School, Rushdie told New Yorker contributor Ian Hamilton that he "had a pretty hideous time from my own age group: minor persecutions and racist attacks which felt major at the time … I never had any friends at school, and I don't now know a single person I was at school with." Rushdie's family joined him in England in 1962, and two years later they moved to Karachi, Pakistan, to start a family business. In 1965 Rushdie enrolled at King's College, Cambridge. After earning a master's degree with honors in 1968, he acted for one year at an experimental theater, and then worked as a freelance advertising copywriter during the 1970s.

Gains Critical Attention with Fiction Debut

Rushdie's first published novel, Grimus, which tells of a Native American who receives the gift of immortality and begins an odyssey to find life's meaning, initially attracted attention among sciencefiction readers. Discovering the novel, Mel Tilden called the book "engrossing and often wonderful" in a Times Literary Supplement review. Tilden determined the book to be "science of the word," recognizing at the same time that it "is one of those novels some people will say is too good to be science fiction, even though it contains other universes, dimensional doorways, alien creatures and more than one madman." Though critics variously called the work a fable, fantasy, political satire, or magical realism, most agreed with David Wilson's assessment in Times Literary Supplement that Grimus is "an ambitious, strikingly confident first novel."

In 1976 Rushdie joined the Camden Committee for Community Relations, which assisted emigrants from Bangladesh, and served as the executive member of the committee until 1983. According to Oh, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "This experience in dealing with others' cultural displacement, along with other incidents about this time, sensitized him to the problem of racism in Britain. Here he saw the fractured identity of exiles, emigrants, and expatriates, their sense of loss. Their uncertainties confirmed his own questions about what he calls 'the provisional nature of all truths.' Rushdie also became sensitive to his own designation as 'Indian,' which simultaneously places him inside and outside of British culture." Oh continued, "Aware that his English accent and what he has called his 'freakishly light skin' ironically made him seem less Indian than others, he battled with his Indo-English identity and his strong identification with his life in Britain."

Rushdie turns to India, his birthplace, for the subject of his second book. An allegory, Midnight's Children chronicles the history of modern India throughout the lives of 1,001 children born within the country's first hour of independence from Great Britain on August 15, 1947. Saleem Sinai, the novel's protagonist and narrator, is one of two males born at the precise moment of India's independence—the stroke of midnight—in a Bombay nursing home. Moonfaced, stained with birthmarks, and possessed of a "huge cucumber of a nose," Sinai becomes by a twist of fate "the chosen child of midnight." He later explains to the reader that a nurse, in "her own revolutionary act," switched the new born infants. Actually the illegitimate son of a Hindu street singer's wife and a departing British colonist, he was given to a prosperous Muslim couple and raised as Saleem Sinai. His midnight twin, Shiva, was given to the impoverished Hindu street singer who, first cuckolded and then widowed by childbirth, was left to raise her son on the streets of Bombay. Thus, in accordance with class privilege unrightfully bestowed, Sinai's birth was heralded by fireworks and celebrated in newspapers; a congratulatory letter from Jawaharlal Nehru portended his future. "You are the newest bearer of the ancient face of India which is also eternally young," wrote the prime minister. "We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own."

Midnight's Children begins more than thirty years after the simultaneous births of Sinai and independent India. Awaiting death in the corner of a Bombay pickle factory where he is employed, Sinai—prematurely aged, impotent, and mutilated by a personal history that parallels that of his country— tells his life story to Padma, an illiterate working girl who loves and tends him. All of midnight's children, Sinai discloses, possess magical gifts, including prophecy and wizardy.

Sinai and the rest of midnight's children "incorporate the stupendous Indian past, with its pantheon, its epics, and its wealth of folklore," summarized New York Times critic Robert Towers, "while at the same time playing a role in the tumultuous Indian present." "The plot of this novel is complicated enough, and flexible enough, to smuggle Saleem into every major event in the subcontinent's past thirty years," wrote Clark Blaise in New York Times Book Review. "It is … a novel of India's growing up; from its special, gifted infancy to its very ordinary, drained adulthood. It is a record of betrayal and corruption, the loss of ideals, culminating with 'the Widow's' Emergency rule." Although Midnight's Children "spans the recent history, both told and untold, of both India and Pakistan as well as the birth of Bangladesh," commented Anita Desai in the Washington Post Book World, "one hesitates to call the novel 'historical' for Rushdie believes … that while individual history does not make sense unless seen against its national background, neither does national history make sense unless seen in the form of individual lives and histories."

Wins Booker Prize

Midnight's Children was almost unanimously well received and won England's most exalted literary award, the Booker McConnell Prize for fiction, in 1981. The novel also elicited favorable comparisons to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Gabriel García Marquéz's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Death on the Installment Plan, and V. S. Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization. And yet, opined Blaise, "It would be a disservice to Salman Rushdie's very original genius to dwell on literary analogues and ancestors. This is a book to accept on its own terms, and an author to welcome into world company."

In 2003 Rushdie collaborated with Simon Reade and Tim Supple to adapt Midnight's Children for the stage. Writing in Back Stage, Simi Horwitz describes the three-plus-hours play as "a frenetic work punctuated by video projections—including fantasy sequences and historical film clips—and brightly flashing lights." In a review of the London staging of the play, Matt Wolf commented in Variety, "Within minutes a narrative is set in motion that weds the personal to the political, the past to the present, and some surprisingly crude stagecraft to a use of video and film that after a while makes one wonder whether Rushdie's source novel wouldn't have been better off as the BBC miniseries he has long wanted it to be."

Like Midnight's Children, Rushdie's third book, Shame, blends history, myth, politics, and fantasy in a novel that is both serious and comic. Shame explores such issues as the uses and abuses of power and the relationship between shame and violence. The idea for the novel, reported Ronald Hayman in Books and Bookmen, grew out of Rushdie's interest in the Pakistani concept of sharam. An Urdu word, sharam conveys a hybrid of sentiments, including embarrassment, modesty, and the sense of having an ordained place in the world. It speaks to a long tradition of honor that permits, and at times even insists upon, seemingly unconscionable acts. In developing this concept, Rushdie told Hayman, he began "seeing shame in places where I hadn't originally seen it." He explained: "I'd be thinking about Pakistani politics; and I'd find there were elements there that I could use. I had a feeling of stumbling on something quite central to the codes by which we live." Rushdie elaborated in a New York Times Book Review interview with Michael T. Kaufman: "There are two axes—honor and shame, which is the conventional axis, the one along which the culture moves, and this other axis of shame and shamelessness, which deals with morality and the lack of morality. Shame is at the hub of both axes."

Examines Complexities of Human Nature

Rushdie develops his theme of shame and violence in a plot so complex and densely populated with characters that, as Towers commented in the New York Times, "it is probably easier to play croquet (as in Alice in Wonderland) with flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls than to give a coherent plot summary of Shame." The novel's story line spans three generations and centers on the families of two men: Raza Hyder, a celebrated general, and Iskander Harappa, a millionaire playboy. Their life-and-death struggle, played out against the political backdrop of their country, is based on late twentieth-century Pakistani history. The two characters themselves are based on real-life Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq and former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was deposed by Zia in 1977 and later executed.

Sufiya Zinobia, the novel's heroine, is the embodiment of both shame and violence. Her shame is born with her and is evidenced by her crimson blush. Later, as she absorbs the unfelt shame of others, Sufiya's blushes take on such intensity that they boil her bath water and burn the lips of those who kiss her. Eventually the heat of her shame incubates violence, turning Sufiya into a monster capable of wrenching the heads off of grown men. As the incarnation of an entire nation's shame, wrote Una Chaudhuri, "Sufiya Zinobia is the utterly convincing and terrifying product of a culture lost in falsehood and corruption."

The novel's marginal hero is Sufiya Zinobia's husband, Omar Khayyam Shakil. Introduced at length at the beginning of the book, he disappears for long periods of time thereafter. "I am a peripheral man," he admits shamelessly; "other people have been the principal actors in my life story." The son of an unknown father and one of three sisters, all claiming to be his mother, Shakil was "scorned by the townspeople for his shameful origins," observed Margo Jefferson in Voice Literary Supplement, and "he developed a defensive shamelessness." Omar Khayyam Shakil feels himself "a fellow who is not even the hero of his own life; a man born and raised in the condition of being out of things."

Rushdie's choice of a "not-quite hero" for a "not-quite country" addresses an issue Chaudhuri cited as central to the book. "Peripherality," she postulated, "is the essence of this land's deepest psychology and the novel's true hero: Shame. It is the doom of those who cannot exist except as reflections of other's perceptions, of those who are unable to credit the notion of individual moral autonomy." New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt concluded that "the tragedy of Shame lies both in the evasion of historical destiny and in embracing that destiny too violently."

Satanic Verses Controversy

Following Shame and the publication of The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, a nonfiction account of the political and social conditions Rushdie observed during his 1986 trip to Nicaragua, the author published the novel that made his name known even to non-readers. The Satanic Verses outraged Muslims around the world due to what they believed to be insults to their religion. The book was banned in a dozen countries and caused demonstrations and riots in India, Pakistan, and South Africa, during which a number of people were killed or injured. Charging Rushdie with blasphemy, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed that the author and his publisher should be executed; multi-million dollar bounties were offered to anyone who could carry out this decree. Three people involved with the book's publication were subsequently attacked and one, Rushdie's Japanese translator, was fatally injured.

Religious objections to The Satanic Verses stem from sections of the book that concern a religion resembling Islam and whose prophet is named Mahound—a derisive epithet for Mohammed. Offense was taken to scenes in which a scribe named Salman alters the prophet's dictation, thus bringing into question the validity of the Koran, the holy book of Islam. In addition, many Muslims claim that Rushdie repeatedly makes irreverent use of sacred names throughout the book. London Observer contributor Blake Morrison explained that to many Muslims Rushdie "has transgressed by treating the Holy Word as myth … not truth; by treating the Prophet as a fallible human rather than as a deity; and above all by bringing a skeptical, playful, punning intelligence to bear on a religion which, in these fundamentalist times, is not prepared to entertain doubts or jokes about itself."

For his part, Rushdie has argued that The Satanic Verses are not meant to be an attack on the Islamic religion, but that it has been interpreted as such by what he called in the Observer "the contemporary Thought Police" of Islam who have erected taboos in which one "may not discuss Muhammed as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time." Rushdie explained that in Islam Muhammed, unlike Jesus in the Christian religion, "is not granted divine status, but the text is." A number of critics pointed out that the whole controversy could have been avoided if Rushdie's detractors took into consideration that all of the objectionable scenes take place in the character Gibreel Farishta's dreams, and are part of his insanity-inspired delusions. "It must be added," remarked Time critic Paul Gray, "that few of those outraged by The Satanic Verses have ever seen it, much less opened it."

The Satanic Verses is a complex narrative that tells several stories within a story in a manner that has been compared to A Thousand and One Nights. The central story concerns two men who miraculously survive a terrorist attack on an Air India flight. Gibreel Farishta, a famous Indian actor, acquires a halo; Saladin Chamcha, whose occupation involves providing voices for radio and television programs, metamorphoses into a satyr-like creature. Gibreel becomes deluded into thinking he is the archangel Gabriel, and much of the novel is preoccupied with a number of his dreams, which take on the form of "enigmatic and engrossing" parables, according to Times Literary Supplement contributor Robert Irwin. Each story, including the controversial tale concerning Mahound, comments on "the theme of religion and its inexorable, unwelcome and dubious demands." The novel concludes with a confrontation between Gibreel and Saladin, but at this point the distinction between which character is good and which is evil has been blurred beyond distinction. Michael Wood remarked in New Republic that The Satanic Verses gives the reader the feeling that the writer is "trying to fill out a Big Book. But the pervading intelligence of the novel is so acute, the distress it explores so thoroughly understood, that the dullness doesn't settle, can't keep away the urgent questions and images that beset it. This is Rushdie's most bewildered book, but it is also his most thoughtful."

After being forced into hiding to escape the ire of Islamic fundamentalists, Rushdie penned a fairy tale for children that appeared in the United States early in 1991. Haroun and the Sea of Stories, conceived by the author as a bedtime story for his son, is a fanciful tale with an important underlying message for adults. A talented storyteller, Rashid receives his gift from the Sea of Stories located on a moon called Kahina. When a water genie's error disconnects Rashid's invisible water faucet, the storyteller loses his abilities. His son Haroun, however, resolves to help his father and journeys to Kahina to meet Walrus, ruler of Gup and controller of the Sea of Stories. Haroun arrives to find the people of Gup at war with Chub and its wicked ruler, Khattam-Shud. Khattam-Shud is poisoning the sea with his factory-ship in an effort to destroy all stories because within each story is a world that he cannot control. After many adventures, Haroun and his allies from Gup destroy Khattam-Shud, saving the Sea of Stories and restoring Rashid's storytelling powers.

Underlying the fantastical plot of Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a clear message against the stifling of artistic freedom by figures like Khomeini, whom several reviewers pointed out to be represented by Khattam-Shud. But the Khomeinis of the world are not the only problem; Rushdie's book also tells how the Walrus hordes sunlight for the Sea of Stories by stopping the moon's rotation, thus unwittingly giv-ing Khattam-Shud his power because the evil ruler thrives on darkness. "If a Khomeini can come to power," explained Richard Eder in Los Angeles Times Book Review, "it is in part because the West has arrogated sunlight to itself, and left much of the globe bereft of it. Rushdie defies the Ayatollah's curse. It is he, not his persecutor, who is the true defender of the Third World."

Moves to Short Fiction

In 1995, six years after Khomeini ordered Rushdie's death, the writer published a collection of short fiction titled East, West. Composed of nine short stories divided into three sections—"East," set in India; "West," set in Europe; and "East-West," set in England—the book's central theme is what the author described to Newsweek interviewer Sarah Crichton as "cultural movement and mongrelization and hybridity," a reflection, in fact, of Rushdie's own background. Rushdie's "heritage was derived from the polyglot tumult of multi-ethnic, post-colonial India," Shashi Tharoor explained in the Washington Post Book World. "His style combined a formal English education with the cadences of the Indian oral story-telling tradition…. He brought a larger world—a teeming, myth-infused, gaudy, exuberant, many-hued and restless world—past the immigration inspectors of English literature. And he enriched this new homeland with breathtaking, risk-ridden, imaginative prose of rare beauty and originality." Each story contains characters embodying diverse cultures who interact on a variety of social and emotional planes. Most of them are "a pleasure to read," wrote John Bemrose in Maclean's. "Like his great master, Charles Dickens, Rushdie goes in for encyclopedic comedy, with rich people and beggars rubbing shoulders across his pages. His language has something of Dickens's energetic verbosity, while his characters like to wear, for the most part, the gaudy clothes of caricature." Bemrose noted that while most of Rushdie's novels are long, sprawling works, "the stories in East, West have the careful precision of ivory miniatures. And all of them, beneath their infectiously playful surfaces, ponder the imponderables of human fate."

Continues Examination of Modern-Day India

Rushdie's name was back on bestseller lists in 1995 with The Moor's Last Sigh. A novel that offers a satirical view of the politics of India, its publication seemed almost to mirror that of The Satanic Verses. Containing an undisguised parody of powerful Hindu fundamentalist leader Bal Thackeray and making gentle fun of India's first prime minister, Nehru—a stuffed dog bears the leader's first name, Jawaharlal—The Moor's Last Sigh was quickly yanked from bookstore shelves in India's capital city and subjected to an embargo by the Indian government.

Narrated by Moraes "the Moor" Zogoiby, The Moor's Last Sigh is framed by a dilemma reminiscent of that of the storyteller Scheherazade. The Moor's deranged captor, who was an acquaintance of Moraes's late, famous mother, demands to know the woman's family history. The Moor extends his life by cushioning his tale with a thousand incidental facts—some true, some imagined—and follows the thread of narrative from ancestor and Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama through the rise and fall of a Portuguese trade dynasty, the meeting of his parents in the 1950s, childhood memories of his flamboyant artist mother, Aurora, and his own exile from India. As a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted, the novel hints at a dark fate for India: "The society Rushdie portrays so powerfully is rife with corruption; pluralism is dying and a dangerous separatism is on the rise, encouraging hatred and despair."

Although many critics have interpreted everything Rushdie wrote following the imposition of the fatwa as a cloaked reference to the author's unfortunate personal dilemma, Paul Gray maintained in Time that The Moor's Last Sigh "is much too teeming and turbulent, too crammed with history and dreams, to fit into any imaginable category, except that of the magically comic and sad…. The true subject of The Moor's Last Sigh is language in all its uninhibited and unpredictable power to go reality one better and rescue humans from the fate of suffering in silence." Rushdie remained ambivalent on the place of the novel within his own body of work, telling Maya Jaggi in New Statesman that The Moor's Last Sigh is a "completion of what I began in Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses—the story of myself, where I came from, a story of origins and memory. But it's also a public project that forms an arc, my response to an age in history that began in 1947 [when India formed a democratic socialist state]. That cycle of novels is now complete."

Rushdie's novel The Ground beneath Her Feet is a modern-day retelling of the Orpheus myth, with the hero and heroine cast as rock stars. Ormus Cama, a pop star reminiscent of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, seeks to bring back to life the divine Vina Apsara, a celebrity icon on par with Madonna and Princess Diana, who is swallowed up by an earthquake on Valentine's Day, 1989. Their tragic love story is narrated by the power couple's close friend, the photographer Rai Merchant, who has long been obsessed with Vina himself. Ormus' grief leads him to seek out Vina's slavish fans who painstakingly emulate the star. He latches on to one—Mira Celano—who accompanies him on his "Into the Underworld" tour in search of Vina. Many of the issues prominent in Rushdie's earlier novels appear in The Ground beneath Her Feet as well: the novel "addresses the themes of exile, metamorphosis and flux," wrote Michiko Kakutani in New York Times, "and like those earlier books it examines such issues through the prism of multiple dichotomies: between home and rootlessness, love and death, East and West, reason and the irrational."

Complicated and many-layered, the book brought criticism from some reviewers, including Michael Gorra in Times Literary Supplement. "There is too much too-muchness" Gorra noted, with "so many characters, so many incidents—and in all that prosy batter something gets lost." Specifically, wrote James Gardner in the National Review, the novel's main characters are not "compelling." "He makes the fatal mistake of being too impressed by their rock-star glamour," the critic continued, "and despite the arbitrary complexities that he attributes to them, he never succeeds in animating them with the emotional vitality that has so memorably enlivened his characters in the past." Other critics appreciated Rushdie's intended message. The author's theme, said a reviewer in Economist, "is that the ground beneath our feet is always shifting. Modern culture is in a permanent state of fragmentation…. Reality exists on many planes." Sven Birkerts, writing in Esquire, compared Rushdie's storytelling abilities to those of Ovid and Scheherazade. "Rushdie roves the world like one in mad pursuit of tale and theme," Birkerts wrote, and The Ground beneath Her Feet "tells a grand story—a kind of urstory—of the age of rock 'n' roll, but in the process spins around

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it half a hundred veils of myth and hidden meaning." Troy Patterson praised the novel in Entertainment Weekly as being "about the power of song itself," noting that "the Ulysses-like name-dropping also evokes memories of dreams dreamt and heroes adored."

Turns to More Mainstream Fiction

Fury at first appears to be more straightforward than many of Rushdie's previous novels. The book follows Malik Solanka, the Indian-born, Cambridge-educated philosopher and creator of the pop-culture phenomenon of the "Little Brain," a philosophically minded doll who becomes the star of a successful television show. Malik succumbs to a serious midlife crisis, hastily leaves his wife and child in London, and attempts to begin anew as an academic at a Manhattan university. Malik is uncomfortable with modern society and is subject to fits of rage, which increasingly come to dominate his life. In Malik's quest for renewal he becomes involved with two women, the second of which, the beautiful Neela, forces Malik into an epiphany of sorts as the narrative veers into the magic realism for which Rushdie has come to be known. Complicating matters is Malik's resemblance to a Panama hat-wearing serial killer, who is murdering young women from the city's society elite. Millennial paranoia, the Internet, American consumerism, and civil war in a small third world country are all elements of Rushdie's canvas in Fury.

Some critics took issue with Rushdie's portrayal of American society in Fury. By date-stamping the book with names like Monica Lewinsky, Tommy Hilfiger, and Courtney Love, "Fury is immediately obsolete," maintained James Wood in New Republic. A reviewer for Economist said that "Rushdie is usually too effervescent a writer to be pompous, but here he is drawn into making overwrought and grandiose pronouncements on the state of America." Michiko Kakutani in New York Times claimed that Rushdie's portrayal of New York "fails not only because it's based on a false observation—the city in 2000 was reeling more from a surfeit of greed and complacency than from free-floating anxiety and anger—but also because Solanka never seems intimately connected to the events he is witnessing in America." Other critics commended Rushdie's scathing view of American society. As Malik attempts to conquer his fury, his story becomes "a fantastic, humorous, and gravely serious tale about the torments of love," wrote Brad Hooper in Booklist, "but, even more than that, the abrasions on the soul inflicted by today's cellphone society." Barbara Hof-fert in Library Journal likewise commended the novel for its evocation of a frantic, skin-deep society: Fury "veers precariously through our obsessive times, capturing every nuance exactly."

Other critics focused on different aspects of the novel. Paul Evans, reviewing Fury in Book, praised Rushdie's fiction as "a metaphysical thriller and a sci-fi-tinged fantasy, a treatise on gender politics and a farce about academia." Evans further concentrated on the idea that to transcend his anger, "Malik must endure the demise of his old self in order to live anew." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote that Rushdie "catches roiling undercurrents of incivility and inchoate anger" in "prose crackling with irony." In regards to the book's language, which other critics have compared to that of Vladimir Nabokov, Publishers Weekly reviewer said that "his relatively narrow focus results in a crisper narrative; there are fewer puns and a deeper emotional involvement with his characters."

In late 2005 Rushdie published his novel Shalimar the Clown, the story of a former U.S. Ambassador to India who is murdered by his Muslim driver. Known as Shalimar the Clown when he worked as a circus acrobat, the driver may not be a political assassin. He may have more personal reasons for the murder of his employer. Mixing in elements from the Ramayana, a classic work of Indian literature, Rushdie creates what the critic for Kirkus Reviews called "a magical-realist masterpiece."

In addition to fiction, Rushdie has published a number of essay collections. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 is a selection of essays and other short journalistic pieces. Some of the essays, such as "One Thousand Days in a Balloon," which Rushdie presented at an unannounced appearance at Columbia University in 1991, and "Why I Have Embraced Islam," an explanation of his commitment to the religion whose popular leaders violently reject and continue to persecute him, were written after he was forced into hiding. Others, dating from before the fatwa, picture a writer gradually forming his own concepts of what constitutes truth and beauty in literature. These works, Commonweal reviewer Paul Elie elaborated, "serve as a reminder that once upon a time"—before the wrath of fundamentalist Islam fell upon the author's head—"he was just another middling British writer, holding forth on this and that with more intelligence and enthusiasm than was required of him."

In September of 1998, the fatwa against Rushdie was lifted by the Iranian government, though certain fundamentalist Muslim groups, claiming that a fatwa cannot be lifted, increased the reward for killing him to $2.8 million. In addition, in 2004 an Iranian extremist Islamic group calling itself the General Staff for the Glorification of Martyrs of the Islamic World offered another $100,000 reward for Rushdie. As a result, the author has continued to keep security tight, although he frequently travels between his homes in London, New York, and India, gives interviews, and makes public appearances. In 1999 he even joined the rock group U2 on stage to perform the song "The Ground beneath Her Feet," which was inspired by Rushdie's book. A short time later, he was finally granted a visa to return to India; he was quoted in Time as saying that the lifting of this restriction "feels like another step back into the light."

If you enjoy the works of Salman Rushdie

If you enjoy the works of Salman Rushdie, you may also want to check out the following books:

Don DeLillo, White Noise, 1985.

Anita Desai, Fasting, Feasting, 1999.

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies, 1999.

Journalist Christopher Hitchens commented in Progressive that Rushdie "has raised a body of fiction that explores the world of the post-colonial multiethnic and the multi-identity exile or emigrant. He has done so, moreover … by making experiments in language that recall those of [James] Joyce." "All of his works," continued Hitchens, "are designed to show that there is no mastery of language unless it is conceded that language is master."

Discussing the vital role storytelling plays in his life, Rushdie told American Theatre interviewers Davia Nelson and Shazia Ahmad, "What does it mean, that we like to tell stories? It struck me that, if you're in a family, one of the definitions of that family is the stories of that family." Rushdie continued, "When somebody joins the family … one of the ways in which they become members of the family is that they are told the stories of the family. When they know the family stories, then they're in. So we start off telling the stories of other people, and in the end we become part of a story that somebody tells. It seems such an important part of how we describe ourselves in the world—and it's not just because it's my job. In a way it's part of all our jobs."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Appignanesi, Lisa, and Sara Maitland, editors, The Rushdie File, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1990.

Brennan, Timothy, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 23, 1983, Volume 31, 1985, Volume 55, 1989, Volume 100, 1997.

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 194: British Novelists since 1960, Second Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Khan, Fawzia Afzal, Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1993.

Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A., Salman Rushdie, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Gorra, Michael Edward, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1997.

Kuortti, Joel, Place of the Sacred: The Rhetoric of the Satanic Verses Affair, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1997.

Kuortti, Joel, The Salman Rushdie Bibliography: A Bibliography of Salman Rushdie's Work and Rushdie Criticism, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1997.

Kuortti, Joel, Fictions to Live in: Narration as an Argument for Fiction in Salman Rushdie's Novels, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1998.

Levy, Leonard Williams, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie, Knopf (New York, NY), 1993.

Modern British Literature, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

PERIODICALS

American Theatre, March 1, 2003, Davia Nelson and Shazia Ahmad, "Salman Rushdie and the Sea of Stories," pp. 26-30.

Atlanta Journal Constitution, January 21, 1996, Alan Ryan, review of The Moor's Last Sigh, p. L11.

Atlantic Monthly, February, 1996, Phoebe-Lou Adams, review of The Moor's Last Sigh, p. 114.

Back Stage, April 4, 2003, Simi Horwitz, review of Midnight's Children (play), p. 3.

Biography, summer, 2003, Ruchir Joshi, review of Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002, p. 554.

Book, September, 2001, Paul Evans, review of Fury, p. 67.

Booklist, November 1, 1995, Brad Hooper, review of The Moor's Last Sigh, p. 435; June 1, 2001, Brad Hooper, review of Fury, p. 1798; September 15, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of of Step across This Line, p. 194.

Books and Bookmen, September, 1983, Ronald Hayman.

Boston Globe, January 14, 1996, Gail Caldwell, "For Love of Mother," p. B43.

Chicago Tribune, February 17, 1989; September 24, 1990.

Chicago Tribune Book World, March 15, 1981; April 26, 1981; January 22, 1984; January 22, 1995, p. 3; January 14, 1996, Beverly Fields, "Salman Rushdie Returns," pp. 1, 4; January 28, 1996, John Blades, interview with Rushdie, p. 3.

Christian Century, October 14, 1998, "Rushdie Hails End of 'Terrorist Threat,'" p. 931.

Christian Science Monitor, March 2, 1989; January 26, 1995, p. B1, B4; February 7, 1996, Merle Rubin, "Extravagant, Madcap Vision of an Indian Clan," p. 13; July 21, 2005, Andrew Downie, "Salman Rushdie Savors a Touch of Normalcy."

Commonweal, September 25, 1981; December 4, 1981; November 4, 1983, Una Chaudhuri, review of Shame, p. 590; December 4, 1992; February 9, 1996, Sara Maitland, "The Author Is Too Much with Us," pp. 22-23.

Economist, October 3, 1998, "The Lifting of an Unliftable Fatwa: Iran," p. 49; May 15, 1999, "Boys' Toys," p. 12; August 25, 2001, "Signifying Nothing."

Encounter, February, 1982.

Entertainment Weekly, April 16, 1999, Troy Patterson, "What a Rushdie! The Majestic New Novel from the Author of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, Takes on Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll. And Don't Be Surprised if You Hear Some of the Lyrics in a U2 Song," p. 52.

Esquire, May 1, 1999, Sven Birkerts, "Sex, Drugs, and That Other Thing," p. 60.

Harper's, February, 1998, "The Pen Is Crueler than the Sword," p. 18.

Illustrated London News, October, 1988.

India Today, September 15, 1988; October 31, 1988; March 15, 1989.

Interview, May, 1999, Deborah Treisman, "Salman Rushdie's Rock 'n' Roll," p. 122.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2005, review of Shalimar the Clown, p. 608.

Library Journal, August, 2001, Barbara Hoffert, review of Fury, p. 166; October 15, 2002, Shelly Cox, review of Step across This Line, p. 73; May 1, 2002, Ali Houissa, review of The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, pp. 102-103.

London Review of Books, September 29, 1988; July 9, 1992, p. 17; September 7, 1995, Michael Wood, "Shenanigans," pp. 3, 5.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 26, 1979; December 25, 1983; November 11, 1990; January 7, 1996, Richard Eder, "English as a Wicked Weapon," pp. 3, 13.

Maclean's, March 6, 1995, p. 86; October 9, 1995, John Bemrose, "Tower of Babble," p. 85; May 24, 1999, Anthony Wilson-Smith, "The Revival of Salman Rushdie: While Still Wary, the Author Is Gradually Emerging from the Shadow of a Death Sentence," p. 54; October 7, 2002, "'Freedoms Are Very Easily Lost,'" p. 34.

Mother Jones, April-May, 1990; July, 1999, p. 78.

Nation, January 1, 1996, Jessica Hagedorn, "They Came for the Hot Stuff," pp. 25-27; December 22, 1997, Christopher Hitchens, "Satanic Curses," p. 8.

National Review, December 31, 1995, James Bowman, "Absolutely Fabulist," pp. 46-47; May 17, 1999, James Gardner, "Rock and Rushdie," p. 61.

New Republic, May 23, 1981; March 6, 1989; March 13, 1989; December 10, 1990; March 18, 1996, James Wood, "Salaam Bombay," pp. 38-41; April 26, 1999, James Wood, "Lost in the Punhouse," p. 94; September 24, 2001, James Wood, "The Nobu Novel," p. 32; April 14, 2003, Robert Brustein, "Why Plays Fail," p. 25.

New Statesman, May 1, 1981; September 23, 1994, p. 40; September 8, 1995, Maya Jaggi, "The Last Laugh," pp. 20-21; September 8, 1995, Aamer Hussein, "City of Mongrel Joy," pp. 39-40; February 17, 2003, Sheridan Morley, "Through Indian Eyes," p. 48.

New Statesman & Society, September 30, 1988; March 29, 1991; May 29, 1992, pp. 39-40.

Newsweek, April 20, 1981; February 12, 1990, December 9, 1991, p. 79; February 6, 1995, Sarah Crichton, review of East, West, pp. 59-60; January 8, 1996, "The Prisoner in the Tower," p. 70; September 17, 2001, David Gates, "Raging Bull by Rushdie," p. 68.

New Yorker, July 27, 1981; January 9, 1984; December 25, 1995, Ian Hamilton, "The First Life of Salman Rushdie," pp. 90-119.

New York Press, April 20, 2005, Kate Crane, interview with Rushdie.

New York Review of Books, September 24, 1981; March 2, 1989; March 21, 1996, J. M. Coetzee, "Palimpsest Regained," pp. 13-16.

New York Times, April 23, 1981, Robert Towers, review of Midnight's Children; November 2, 1983; January 27, 1989; February 13, 1989; February 15, 1989; February 16, 1989; February 17, 1989; February 18, 1989; February 20, 1989; February 21, 1989; February 22, 1989; February 23, 1989; February 24, 1989; February 25, 1989; March 1, 1989; March 28, 1991, p. 26; December 2, 1995, John F. Burns, "Another Rushdie Novel, Another Bitter Epilogue;" December 28, 1995, Michiko Kakutani, "Rushdie on India: Serious, Crammed yet Light," pp. C13, C20; January 14, 1996, Norman Rush, "Doomed in Bombay," p. 7; January 17, 1996, Nina Barnton, "Sentenced to Death but Recalled to Life," pp. C1-C2; April 13, 1999, Michiko Kakutani, "Turning Rock-and-Roll into Quakes"; August 31, 2001, Michiko Kakutani, "A Dollmaker and His Demons in the Big City."

New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1981, Clark Blaise, review of Midnight's Children, p. 1; March 28, 1982; November 13, 1983, Michael T. Kaufman, "Author from Three Countries" (interview), p. 3; January 29, 1989; November 11, 1990; June 2, 1991, p. 15; January 15, 1995, pp. 1, 16-17; January 14, 1996, p. 7; April 18, 1999, Charles McGrath, "Rushdie Unplugged."

Observer (London, England), February 9, 1975; July 19, 1981; September 25, 1988; January 22, 1989; February 19, 1989; November 11, 1990, pp. 1.

Opera News, September, 2004, Leighton Kerner, "Fearsome Fairyland," pp. 44-45.

Progressive, October, 1997, Christopher Hitchens, "Salman Rushdie: 'Even This Colossal Threat Did Not Work. Life Goes On,'" p. 34.

Publishers Weekly, November 11, 1983; January 30, 1995, Sybil Steinberg, "A Talk with Salman Rushdie: Six Years into the Fatwa," pp. 80-82; October 2, 1995, review of The Moor's Last Sigh, p. 52; July 16, 2001, Sybil Steinberg, interview with Rushdie, p. 165, and review of Fury, p. 166; July 22, 2002, review of Step across This Line, p. 166.

Quill and Quire, April, 1996, Nancy Wigston, review of The Moor's Last Sigh, p. 25.

Saturday Review, March, 1981.

Spectator, June 13, 1981.

Time, February 13, 1989; February 27, 1989; September 11, 1995; January 15, 1996, Paul Gray, "Rushdie: Caught on the Fly," p. 70, "Writing to Save His Life," pp. 70-71; February 22, 1999, Maseeh Rahman, "Homecoming to What? Rushdie's Planned Return to India Is of Symbolic Value to Him but an Opportunity for Vengeance to Many," p. 24l; April 26, 1999, Paul Gray, "Ganja Growing in the Tin: Salman Rushdie Reimagines Orpheus as a Modern Rock Star, and Almost Brings It Off," p. 99.

Time International, December 23, 2002, Donal Morrison, "You Can't Make This Up," p. 63.

Times (London, England), October 5, 1995.

Times Literary Supplement, February 21, 1975; May 15, 1981; September 9, 1983; September 30, 1988; September 28, 1990; April 9, 1999, Michael Gorra, "It's Only Rock and Roll but I Like It," p. 25.

Variety, February 10, 2003, Matt Wolf, review of Midnight's Children (play), p. 43.

Vogue, November, 1983.

Voice Literary Supplement, November, 1983, Margo Jefferson, review of Shame.

Washington Post, January 18, 1989; February 15, 1989; February 17, 1989; February 18, 1989; January 20, 1996, Linton Weeks, "Salman Rushdie, Out and About," p. C1.

Washington Post Book World, March 15, 1981; November 20, 1983; January 29, 1989; January 8, 1995, pp. 1, 11; January 7, 1996, Michael Dirda, "Where the Wonders Never Cease," pp. 1-2.

Weekend Australian, July 9, 2005, John Freeman, "Freedom Fighter."

World Literature Today, winter, 1982.