Salman Rushdie: "Shalimar the Clown"

Salman Rushdie has been the most outstanding writer associated with the Indian subcontinent ever since he received the Booker Prize for Midnight Children in 1981. In 2008 the Booker of Bookers went again to this novel. However, Rushdie became a celebrity and entered the popular imagination not because so many people read his book but because Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death in response to the 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. It seems that any novel that Rushdie writes is bound to succeed with critics - his latest Enchantress of Florence was longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize (didn't get on the Man Booker Prize short list, though). Instead of reaching for this novel, I read Shalimar the Clown, which also did very well in the run up to the 2005 Whitbread (Costa) Book Awards.

The novel (the Polish edition is 485 pages long) starts in Los Angeles, where a very popular ambassador Ophuls is killed by his driver, the titular Shalimar the Clown. The ambassador is introduced as a father to India aka Kashmira, and it is from her perspective that the reader enters this, well, crime story. The subsequent chapters are set in the past - in Kashmir, where the love story of India's mother Boonyi and Shalimar the Clown unravels. It is later in the novel that the reader finds out the motives for the original crime, which is perceived first as a terrorist act of political character and later turns out to be a revenge of a lover spurned.

Rushdie's novel seems to be a pean to the paradisiacal past of the troubled region of Kashmir, where Indian and Pakistani ambitions were bound to enter into conflict. Shalimar the Clown and Boonyi's love story seals the peaceful coexistence of the two communities, Hindu and Muslim, living as neighbors in Kashmir. And then an American ambassador arrives and the woman successfully tempts him with her dance and finally lands with him in America as his, well, call it: misstress. Shalimar the Clown, her husband, is left behind, dishonored and vengeful. Rushdie deftly combines here an individual lost-love tragedy with the subject of Islamic radicalism - the titular hero joins a Jihadist training camp and becomes a famous terrorist because of the desire for personal vendetta. Thanks to this the novelist seems to have given a face and a life and even a tragic story to the figure of a terrorist, usually perceived as anonymous and veiled.

The novel is not an easy read - it devotes a lot of space to the portrayal of the complex situation in Kashmir, contains frequent historical references (for example, the 1965 India-Pakistan war and the acts of cruelty perpetrated on the Kashmiri people) and delves in the issue of religious fanaticism and causes of terrorism. However, Rushdie is a wonderful storyteller, craftily combining the historical-political content with a gripping story of love, betrayal and revenge. It took me a few days to read the book, including 14 hours on the train to Cracow and back, and it was definitely time well spent.

Alexandra Potter: "Me and Mr Darcy"

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman must sometimes commit an act of pure and utter indulgence in her choice of the book to read. Especially that she might be right in the middle of reading an award-winning product of a literary genius which she finds a bit gloomy and quite heavy going. And so I did. And now I wish I had not. Being a fan of Bridget Jones's Diary (especially its filmed version - and this does not happen often with me, who thinks films ruin books), I expected the book to be something similar to now common chic lit. sequels or variations of Pride and Prejudice - quite light and uproariously funny. But, er HELLO, not THAT LIGHT and not SO UNentertaining. 

Given that the main character Emily is a bookworm and works in a bookshop, I was especially disappointed by virtually non-existent literary allusions (if you cross out the names and a few quotes from Pride and Prejudice) and generally very feeble play on Austen's novel (well, it was rather an attempt at re-writing the two episodes of Bridget Jones as far as I could tell and I must admit that the narrator's voice did sound to me like Renee Zellweger - something that definitely helped me go through the book till its ending.) Finally, the weak story line was nothing surprising, as based-ons tend to be predictable. 

I was actually willing to forgive the author the book's weaknesses but there were moments - and quite a few of them I must admit - that reading this book I felt I was being offended. Not only weren't the situations funny enough to make you smile, but the narrator explained them to you just in case you did not get the "subtle joke". This is precisely what makes one a lousy joke teller. 

So, instead of wasting time thinking about Me and Mr Darcy, I... switched on Bridget Jones's Diary for the umpteenth time this year. And this would be my recommendation except that what I recommend here is literature, not film. Potter came up with an idea of getting her character involved in a fictional story from the 19th century. I think Antonia S. Byatt came up with something rather similar a few years ago in her wonderful novel Possession, which is my recommendation - instead of Potter's book. 

Armistead Maupin: "Michael Tolliver Lives."

There are at least three major reasons why I reached for Maupin's latest novel:

First, I decided to answer Padma's challenge and read at least one book in which a town/city is a protagonist (by the way, I am a regular visitor to her great blog), and this book is the latest (seventh) installment of Maupin's extremely popular Tales of the City series turned into a TV soap opera, the city being San Francisco. 

Second, I happened to visit San Francisco's Barnes and Noble bookstore, which was at the time promoting Michael Tolliver Lives as one of the recent popular paperback releases and I saw it as a lucky coincidence. Plus, having read the previous episodes of the series, I was happy to be able to meet Maupin's characters again - it feels like catching up with the news from your old friends (well, that's the trick soap operas play, after all). 

Last but not least, I am a great fan of Maupin's prose and I would have bought the book sooner or later anyway - I just love the way he writes. Take the following passage, which is a description of a love relationship: We lay on the sofa after supper, intertwined and swapping endearments. I won't bother to repeat them here. Whoever named them sweet nothings was right. They really are nothing; they're little more than footnotes to a feeling, almost useless out of context. - Perfectly worded, subtle and yet so intimate that one might blush reading it. 

Armistead Maupin himself seems to have obtained a status of a cult writer as he was one of the first gay pop-culture figures, who already in the 1970s introduced homosexual characters and their world in a mainstream newspaper. Maupin is a master of characters - they are so flesh and blood that they are almost tangible. Apart from being a great humorist, Maupin is also simply a master of sentiments and of the English language - dialogues between his campy characters are little pearls to be learned by heart. (Sometimes, when I read a book by Maupin or Andrew Holleran, for that matter, I think that those writers have a way with words comparable to that of Shakespeare - never mind the proportions - whose protagonists utter epigrams whenever they open their mouths. Of course, Maupin's predecessor is rather Oscar Wilde with his witticism).  No wonder then that Starbucks printed a quote of his on its cups in 2005: "Life is too short to hide being gay", which may have served as Maupin's contribution to gay activism. 

Although the book can be classified as melodrama verging on comedy, Maupin continues to be the first to cunningly familiarize both gay and mainstream audiences with topics which might be considered breakthrough (in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was labeled as a "gay disease", he introduced a woman character who had AIDS - quite a prophetic gesture, one might say). Michael Tolliver Lives  is another breakthrough moment as it treats about love between an HIV-positive fifty-five year old man with someone who could be his son, thus initiating a discussion concerning for example ageism (a problem which is common to heterosexual women and homosexual men), also by depicting sex life when the body is old, sagging and no longer beautiful. 

This paperback HarperCollins edition has a P.S. which contains an interview with the author. Asked what he was proudest of having written, Maupin indicated Michael Tolliver's coming-out letter to his parents from More Tales of the City (1980), which was the writer's coming-out letter at the same time and which people still use for their coming-out purposes. I can't help taking a look at the confession again: You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends - all kinds of friends - who don't give a damn who you go to bed with. Most of all, though, you can love and be loved, without hating yourself for it. But no one ever said that to me, Mama. I had to find it out on my own, with the help of the city that has become my home. I know this may be hard for you to believe, but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay ... they aren't radicals or weirdoes ... their message is so simple: yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it's all right for you to like me too.

Well, finally, the city itself. San Francisco is celebrated in the whole series as a liberal and tolerant city, whose grass-scenting streets (it's actually hard to believe how ubiquitous the scent is) will embrace anyone seeking an asylum - it is home. 

For Mrs Madrigal, for San Francisco, finally, for the beauty of Maupin's prose - a little pearl;)

Lionel Shriver: "We Need to Talk About Kevin"

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a novel by an American-born writer currently living in London, Lionel Shriver, who assumed a male name to match her tomboy personality. The novel won the Orange Prize in 2005. The book is written in the form of letters (though the adjective "epistolary" somehow sounds too 18th century here) from Eva to her absent and mute husband Franklin. The narrator states that it is not co-respondence but respondence. 

As the name suggests, Eva is the mother of the titular hero, who is currently in jail for staging a school massacre and murdering a dozen or so people with... a cross-bow (so, the novel is not a statement against the American law respecting citizens' right to possess guns). It is not even about Kevin - its dense, psychological prose would resemble patient's discourse if the letters to Franklin weren't so methodically written. The letters do function as therapy - Eva tries to understand why the tragedy happened. It is actually tempting to try applying a Freudian interpretation here. (I found a nice set of questions which might serve as discussion points )

The novel is considered to be feminist but - given such popular series as "Desperate Housewives" or "Sex and the City" - I wonder if the topic of maternal ambivalence is still controversial enough to earn the label for the book. Well, true, the conclusion that being a mother... turned my days  into an unending stream of shit and piss and cookies that Kevin didn't even like, or (this one is a diamond) that the real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness justly deserves the blurb motherhood gone awry. But then: really?

Eva narrates a situation from the prison, where she is waiting to pay the weekly visit to her son and starts talking to another delinquent's mother, Loretta. When Eva blames herself for the crime by admitting that she wasn't a very good mother, Loretta squeezes her hand, saying: It's always the mother's fault, ain't it? That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or a she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don't teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean.  This is a very important moment - two women, victimized by their sons, blamed for the catastrophe by society, supporting each other by just being together and understanding. Maybe that is why the novel deserves to be called feminist? 

Anyway, though not an easy read, the book is definitely worth the effort, especially that the discovery at the end comes as a shock. The novel at times reminds me of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, which I wish I had not almost completely forgotten. Shriver's narrative will surely stay in my memory much longer.