Shalimar the Clown

Esta é a primeira obra que leio do autor. Gostei bastante da escrita e da estrutura da narrativa. Gostei de "passear" por Caxemira e do contexto socio-politico que foi explicado ao leitor. Também gostei das várias menções aos rituais e deuseus hindus que é uma religião que me fascina.
Não gostei do final.

"Клоун Шалімар" - це якісний приклад художньої прози, яка допомагає дізнатись та спробувати зрозуміти складну ситуацію та розклад міжнародних сил в далеких від нас країнах. Це книга про особисту війну на тлі одного з найбільш кривавих конфліктів в Кашмірі. Конфлікт, який росте, ускладнюється, втягує все більше учасників, "підтягує" релігію та традиції, пожирає своїх "героїв" та є глибокою травмою вже декількох поколінь кашмірців. Головними героями цього роману є почуття та помилки, (не)каяття та (не)прощення, жага помсти та справедливості, гідність та жертовність. Війни легко почати, але дуже важко закінчити, і ненависть передати у спадок в рази легше, ніж передати любов та повагу. І поки що людство не надто добре вчиться на власних помилках.
Хороша динамічна книга з яскравими персонажами, широкою географією та складними подіями довгого XX століття. Рекомендую!

What starts as a story of two villages, one Hindu and one Muslim, of two young people in love, one Hindu and one Muslim, gradually transforms into the depiction of the territorial conflict between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region. This novel is very complex and revolves around many topics: religion, family, clash between tradition and modern lifestyle, tolerance turning into extremism and fundamentalist violence, consequences and effects of blind ambition and more. Yet the storyline never gets confused or too complicated to follow. And although I find it disturbing how Rushdie narrates the scenes of brutal violance and cruelty, at the same time it fascinates me how such a dark and violant book can feel almost magical and dreamlike.

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’Kill one, scare ten. Kill one, scare ten’. Hindu community houses, temples, private homes and whole neighborhoods were being destroyed. ‘Kill one, scare ten’, the Muslim mobs chanted, and ten were indeed, scared. More than ten. 350 000 pandits, almost entire pandit population of Kashmir, fled from their homes and headed south to the refugee camps where they would rot, like bitter fallen apples, like the unloved, undead dead they had become. <…> There were 600 000 Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters of relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for 6000 families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country, where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in where often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of the inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the Pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.

What happend that day in Pachigam need not be set down here in full detail, because brutality is brutality and excess is excess and that’s all there is to it. There are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun. So, to repeat: there was no Pachigam anymore. Pachigam was destroyed. Imagine it for yourself.

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Marriage is now what, a car rental. Thank you for using our services, we’ll pick you up, when you’re done with the vehicle we’ll take you home again. Get all insurance you can get up front, loss damage waiver, whatever, and the risk is nothing. You crash the car, you walk away without nothing to pay. Go for it, baby, who you gonna save it for? They don’t make no glass slippers no more. They already closed the factory. They don’t make no princes neither. They shot the Romanovs in a cellar and Anastasia too is dead.

Dincolo de povestea de dragoste și ură, cel mai mult am apreciat că, deși este un roman de ficțiune, cartea explică pe înțelesul unui cititor obișnuit originea și cauzele nici până azi rezolvatului conflict din Cașmir, nașterea diverselor grupări teroriste cu fundament religios finanțate și înarmate de Pakistan cu ajutorul puterilor angrenate în Războiul Rece, cum au fost eliminați treptat naționaliștii laici, abuzurile și manipulările trupelor indiene, apariția taberelor de antrenament pentru atentatori sinucigași, precum și crimele și violențele ce au decurs din toate acestea.
Ultimul capitol mi s-a părut comercial, grăbit, cinematografic și cumva nepotrivit cu restul cărții.

В начале иногда хочется отложить книгу, как какой-то дешевый роман. Потом втягиваешься — и уже плывешь по волнам этой запутанной истории. А потом, к сожалению для меня как читателя, наступает финал — и последние страницы разочаровывают, как будто автору просто тоже захотелось избавиться от книги.

Tiene lo mejor (Cachemira) y lo peor (L.A.) de Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie at what he excels: sprawling, intertwining narratives that do not shy away from melodrama and fanciful hyperbole, a battery of cinematographic techniques put to good use and knotty plot structures, a gallery of over the top characters that go through the most sensational of situations and transformations, and a dazzling – if occasionally wearisome – command of lavish literary language. Couldn’t shake the feeling that some bits were extraneous, and thus detrimental to the novel’s rhythm, and that the ending felt a bit cheap, with its sudden shift toward pulp and facile Hollywoodian resolutions, but the novel’s rich and exciting blend of history, myth and politics is so ambitious that one may peacefully turn a blind eye to some of its excesses.

a smart young lady trying to find herself in California. the assassination of her father - America's counterterrorism chief. a portrait of Kashmir before all the ugliness and horror. the life of a man: lawyer, Jew, printer, resistance fighter, diplomat, husband, lover, father. a portrait of Kashmir - the ugliness, the horror. the life of a man: acrobat, actor, husband, freedom fighter, terrorist, chauffeur, assassin. a courtroom drama. a tale of a guy who really knows how to handle himself in prison. a troubled young lady finding love and thirsting for revenge. a miniature epic. a work that is sublime and transcendent. a frustrating book. a masterpiece!

the first section of the novel follows the life of young urban sophisticate India, a documentarian and the daughter of a famous father. right off the bat, i had issues. Rushdie's voice is justly famous for its idiosyncracy. he is a "witty" writer. his voice is polished, erudite, disarmingly casual, sometimes dry, sometimes broad, intellectual, political, personal. Shalimar is full of sharp, wry characterization that is delivered in prose that is complicated, flowing, detailed in long sentences and even longer paragraphs, with much use of striking bits of offbeat imagery. the dialogue can be realistic but just as often feels archly stylized. i couldn't help but think that many characters spoke like Rushdie himself must speak. all of this became rather off-putting, as if Rushdie was oh such a clever man - like that oh so clever gent who goes on and on at a cocktail party, entranced with being the center of attention while never noticing how genuinely pretentious and condescending he sounds (i'll admit here that that dreary kind of cocktail party person is frequently... myself. sigh). this is not to say that the first section wasn't often funny. it was. particularly in Rushdie's depiction of the all-american boy-next-door type, and that type's glorified kind of anonymity. but you can still really want to smack a funny person upside the head if their humor comes wrapped in up-his-own-ass cleverness. at least i did. and all that said, the last part of the section - an assassination and a daughter's removal from reality: brilliant. just brilliant.

the second section takes us into the past, to a Kashmiri village named Pachigam. my God, this section was beautiful! Rushdie's prose sings. the story of this village, its wonderful characters, two young people in love, the myths and legends, the magic, the rivalries, the coming of military types from India and revolutionary types from Pakistan, the stories within stories, the feeling of time moving inexorably forward, the troubling hints of bad times on the horizon, the grand passions, the small things, the humanity, the color and light and life and all the glorious details of a world that is no more... marvelous! just marvelous. i wanted to live in this world. here is also where it becomes absolutely clear how much Rushdie respects the strength of women and the power of art (art in cooking, acting, theatre; art as a tradition and a lifestyle). there is a dreamy kind of wish fulfillment happening in this section. things are not idealized and the narrative is not a sentimental one and characters are not one-dimensional - and yet this section is so full of people surviving in hard times, people living their lives to the fullest, people standing up for each other and being brave and being honest and being utterly themselves - i read this novella-sized section in a state of bliss. it is beauty on the page. i could read the story of this village over and again. swoon!

the third section is the story of Max Ophuls. his name is that of a brilliant, classic director. he has a sinister, cringing assistant named Ed(gar) Wood(s). hey that's the name of another brilliant, classic director, a low-rent one, one who exists on the exact opposite part of the film spectrum as Ophuls. is this another example of Rushdie being clever for the sake of cleverness? perhaps. it doesn't matter. this section is also fantastic. Rushdie knows how to write thrilling wartime drama. Rushdie knows how to write tales of escape and derring-do and brave flights across troubled waters. is there anything the man can't write? this section starts in World War 2-era France, the life before the war, the resistance during, the politics and the spies and the lives lived in hiding. it gives you a brave heroine as well - complicated, butch, tender, merciless, independent, an incredibly sympathetic lady, and - much later - a stone-cold bitch. then Rushdie takes you out of France, into India, and into a disturbing affair. the fall of a Kashmiri villlager turned mistress. Rushdie writes of great events but keeps the personal front and center. he keeps things intimate and he keeps his characters real. Rushdie knows how to write.

some serious spoilers follow!

the fourth section returns to the Kashmiri village of Pachigam and is a tale of horror, why is that. it details the ruthlessness of religious fundamentalism and the madness of mindless militarism and the bloodthirstiness that occurs when the two meet, why is that. it shows us traditions dying, traditions being slaughtered, small things ground under the boots of smaller minds, villages burning and women raped and people tortured and beloved characters being hurt and broken and tormented and demeaned and killed, why is that. the authorial voice remains stylized and that should lead to some distance between story and reader but if anything the wryness and the stylization and the continued use of magic make the brutality even more stark and horrible, why is that. humans are fucking miserable bugs to treat each other this way and yet that's how it is and people die and people don't care and people live to rationalize their disgusting lack of humanity and people die who only want to live and people die and people die and people die, why is that. i hate people, why is that. i read this in an airport terminal while my flight was delayed for hours and it was hard not to cry and so i took many smoke breaks to try and let the heaviness lift a little and i kept returning to the book and i started to feel a strange feeling of being altered, of looking at things from very far away, of wanting to be far away, and yeah i did start crying, why is that. i'm writing this now and for some reason the tears are flowing again, why is that. why the fuck are people so fucking cruel and why is history a record of cruelty and why should humans be alive anyway, why do they do the things they do, i will never understand that, just thinking of what humans do to each other fills me with such sadness and rage and confusing feelings that i barely understand, why is that. people are so fucked up, why is that why is that why is that why is that.

the fifth section returns us to modern day California. tale of a troubled young woman trying to be strong. tale of a man so hollowed out by his lack of love that he is nothing but a terrible shell with a terrible purpose. tale of some courtroom shenanigans. tale of a prison break. tale of a tale of a tale of a tale. things come together; things come apart. Kashmir is more than Kashmir - it is a living symbol for so many things. there is always room for love, even in the middle of vengeance. sometimes the lack of love is replaced by something else. sometimes hate is like love. sometimes things just can't be understood or explained. Rushdie tries, he really does, he tries brilliantly. his sentimental humanism is obvious in the very motivation of Shalimar the clown, who is not your typical terrorist. i don't mind the sentimental humanism; sometimes i crave it. Rushdie is a humanist who has not let the fatwa destroy his sense of decency or fairness, his need to see a person's tale from all angles, to see the why and the how of humans turning into monsters. Rushdie understands both the futility and the necessity of revenge, different forms of revenge. Shalimar the Clown ends on an exciting note. Shalimar the Clown ends on a mysterious note. what will happen next? is there any hope? perhaps i am more of a pessimist than Rushdie because he clearly has hope while i think of humans and often feel hopeless. Humans Off Earth Now! but maybe not. there's hope yet, right? it is a strange and terrible and wonderful feeling to read a book that gives and then takes away and then gives back - just a little - a kind of faith in humanity. hey look the book is bigger on the inside than the little thing you are holding in your hands.