Shalimar the Clown is consummate Rushdie although with less magic realism than most of his books, particularly the most recent ‘Two year, eight months and twenty-eight nights’ which was just full on magic! There is so much in this book, starting with an assassination in California, to 1950’s Kashmir to the Second World War and the French resistance in Strasbourg and then back and forth between Kashmir and California.

In Shalimar, Rushdie focuses on the contested land of Kashmir before most of the current troubles began. He focuses on the inhabitants of a small village of theater performers and how one woman leaving that village is the catalyst for the novel; how the rage this causes fuels much of what takes place. It’s difficult to talk too much about it without giving away the story but the book focuses on the rifts between cultures, countries and religions, the ties that bind families, how terrorists are formed, how politics blurs the lines between right and wrong. It also looks at power and colonization in the form of Boonyi and Max Ophuls and of course touches on religion - well ok - criticizes those who distort religion, particularly in the figure of the Iron mullah who says that, ‘When the world is in disarray then God does not send a religion of love.’

His characterization is as wonderful as always, especially when it comes to women –you can always depend on Rushdie for kick arse, intelligent women characters and yes, they may be beautiful too but this is fiction! Rushdie always tells a wonderful story entwined around politics, cultural morays and religion and this book is no different. I particularly enjoyed the parts about the French revolution, not realizing until I looked it up that the Blue Bugatti airplane was real (you have to read the book for an explanation) and the descriptions of Kashmir as this beautiful, magical place made me sad that even today, the fighting goes on. Yet essentially, like all of Rushdie’s novels I’ve read, this is a love story across the decades, love and hate, and masterfully executed as always.

One day a coworker told me she had a copy of The Satanic Verses she was probably never going to read, and she would let me borrow it, and so every day on lunch breaks I read Salman Rushdie’s most famous, and infamous, book, and I was enthralled. I’ve read a number of his work since then, but none of it seemed as inspired. And then Shalimar the Clown.

Shalimar is, perhaps, improbable. The title character is, ultimately, an Islamic terrorist, drafted into the jihad in its formative years. Shalimar was written in the wake of 9/11. It is basically the American version of his boldness in Verses.

Like much of his work, Rushdie draws on the backdrop of his native India, and yet perhaps in this work he finds his ultimate portrait. And it features, although occasionally I found the results plodding and uninspired, truly brilliant writing, including an ending that all but predicts the later popular piffle of The Hunger Games. It is, with some earned exaggeration, Shakespearean.

Rushdie draws a link between the French resistance and Islamic jihad, appreciating the irony of it, as he presents the reader with his cast of characters, as they collide, as they have already collided, in his story, most of it pivoting on the continuing fallout of the split between India and Pakistan, as two villages in Kashmir attempt to salvage their existing relationships. One blurb suggests Romeo & Juliet as a reference point, but that’s too thin a comparison, especially as the climax revolves around a daughter and her would-be father, the reckoning of an age, of a century, of a family torn irreparably apart.

Mythic, all too human, operatic, at times pedestrian, sure, and what? I haven’t found a single story of this kind. Only Rushdie could write it. Contemplating his own desires, perhaps exploding them to epic levels…and at the center, a clown, always just out of view, the most elusive of the cast, walking, as it were, on thin air…

I remember my first foray into Salman Rushie being his then-newly released novel “Fury,” that I quickly forgot and now don’t even faintly remember. I scratched my head, wondering where the momentous literary reputation had come from. And then, merely because it might share certain elective affinities with something else I was reading at the time, I picked up “Shalimar the Clown.” And suddenly, I found myself in the middle of a novel that I not only enjoyed, but whose symphonic breadth enchanted me and I knew that I would be recommending to other people for years to come.

“Shalimar the Clown” is set off when India Ophuls witnesses the murder of her father, Max Ophuls, the famed United States Ambassador to India, by his chauffeur Shalimar. A fine premise to start with, other than the ambassador sharing the same name – to the letter – as the German film director who made “The Earrings of Madame de …” (1953), “La Ronde” (1950), and “Le Plaisir” (1952), a fact which both piqued my frustration with such tactics and immediately set my ears on edge, ready to pounce on any hidden significance this might have. (From a singular reading, I can’t tell that there was any at all.) His next novel, due out in Fall 2019, is called “Quichotte,” so this is apparently a habit he can’t quite break.

Max’s assassination allows for an expository flashback to Kashmir, where the beautiful Boonyi Kaul falls in love with a young Muslim circus performer named Shalimar. When Max shows up, he falls in love with Boonyi and absconds with her back to Delhi; in due time, Max gets Boonyi pregnant and their daughter, India, is taken back to the West. This leaves Shalimar in a unique but desperate position: cuckolded by a westerner, ripe for political radicalization, and seeking revenge. These events allow for the parallel exploration of India: the young woman’s discovery of the multiple sources of her own identity told aside the political and mythological complexities of the country itself.

Rushdie’s prose can be a bit purple, his turn of phrase more than a bit hyperbolic. We’re told of the ambassador Max Ophuls that, “He was the high priest of the golden bough. He inhabited his enchanted drove and was adored.” As a scholar of international relations and with a lot of political clout, this is forgivable: he’s very much part of the establishment, someone whose reliability and predicable opinions have garnered him an increasingly solid reputation over the years; we all know politicians like this. Sometimes the purple can explode into a miasma of earth-shattering violet, as with the description of Shalimar, Max’s new chauffeur. “He came, he said in halting reply to her enquiry, from Kashmir. Her heart leapt. A driver from paradise. His hair was a mountain stream. There were narcissi from the banks of rushing rivers and peonies from the high meadows growing on his chest…” Another issue can be the intentionally weighty symbolism: the daughter named India, Shalimar (one of my favorite Guerlain perfumes – another tidbit that perked my ears but seemed ultimately devoid of meaning), etc. This can get stifling at times, but if you’re willing to indulge the author and his story, I think it’s something that can be easily enough overlooked.

Despite the problems, I found the ideas and even the language to be too big, polyphonic, and metropolitan to avoid. So many English-language novels take place within a single country, with characters whose viewpoints are largely interchangeable, living unquestioned lives with unquestioned assumptions. The vitality of “Shalimar the Clown” is that it gets us in the mind of not only Max and India, but also Shalimar – and somehow, comes damn near to having us sympathize with his motivations. That it’s about big, chewy, woolly questions about topics like identity, politics, and love only serve to make it more irresistible.

You blocked me on Twitter, Salman, but I’m still giving your book a five-star review. It certainly deserves it.

A fierce critique of ideology; a post-modern assault on liberal internationalism; a lament to lost paradise. Shalimar the Clown moves with the same acrobatic grace as its eponymous protagonist, bravely walking the tightrope past the end of history.

Salman Rushdie’s loquacious narrative voice benefits from the focus of a more disciplined creative brief, allowing him to write with a tragic melancholy that practically weeps off the page. The passages in which he describes paradisal Kashmir are achingly beautiful. Written at the height of the West’s War on Terror, this novel represents a courageous and profound piece of post-colonialism - conveying the unique vulnerability of young men to radicalisation in the developing world.

One of my favourite novels so far. Salman Rushdie is an effortlessly brilliant writer.

An amazing insight into the history and mythology of Kashmir. Sometime fairytale and sometimes thriller Salman Rushdie uses his beautiful intellectual prose to slowly build a picture of the main characters so that by the climax we are heavily invested in the outcome. Always in the “grey” and never black and white we are left to draw our own conclusions.

2* A Feiticeira De Florença
3* Joseph Anton: A Memoir
5* Midnight's Children
TR The Golden House
TR Shalimar the Clown

This book begins with the consequences, and only then does it take us to the past so we can understand who these people are and why this has happened.

This is a complex story about love and lust, about war and atrocities, about responsibilities and consequences, told with Rushdie's incomparable, poetic prose.

By moments irreverently funny, by moments darkly tragic this is an epic, magnificent tale that held me enthralled for its whole length, always wondering what would happen next.

I may have come to love magical realism with Gabriel García Márquez, but Salman Rushdie has kept this love alive and growing.

Revisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament.

The book opens with the murder of Max Ophuls – a WWII Resistance hero from Strasbourg (itself a disputed territory fought over between Germans and French and so analogous to Kashmir), turned maker of many of the institutions of the modern world, turned initially popular ambassador to India turned America’s counter-terrorism chief. He is assassinated by his Kashmiri Muslim driver – a mysterious character called Shalimar the Clown.

The book tells the story of Max, Max’s wife (a WWII secret agent), Shalimar, India (Max’s daughter) and Boonyi – a Hindu from a Kashmiri village. Boonyi is a great dancer and Shalimar a trapeze artist. The village gains fame for its combination of folk theatre/circus (run by Shalimar’s Muslim Dad) and feasts (run by Boonyi’s Pashun – Hindu- Dad) – the village combining the two takes away the feast trade from a nearby mainly Muslim village which is much later the cause of much trouble and tension. Shalimar and Boonyi fall in love and are betrayed – but their village’s famed tolerance means that the union is blessed.

However fault lines begin to emerge – the tolerance of the village becomes harder to maintain as increasingly militant Muslim’s enter the area. Max – a serial philanderer – falls for Boonyi and it is his downfall. Firstly he develops an obsession with Kashmir – then when their affair ends in Boonyi’s pregnancy – just at the time when America’s position in the world is being undone by Vietnam, he is forced to resign by the scandal. The baby is adopted by Max’s wife and renamed from Kashmira to India - and Boonyi returns to her village where she finds that the villagers having officially registered her dead refuse to acknowledge her.

Shalimar vowing a long-term revenge becomes involved in terrorism – initially Kashmir militants but then the Taliban and Al-Qaeda all the time pursuing his own long-term plan of revenge.

After murdering both Boonyi (only after both their parents die) and then Max he pursues India who instead kills him.

The book (as often with Rushdie) is over-packed with allusion – each character seems simply a cipher.

Ultimately the book although at heart a love story is dominated by despair and the descent of both the beautiful valley of Kashmir but also the world into violence and terror (with the book particularly influenced by the post 9/11 world).
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Despite this I found the book by far the easiest of Rushdie’s books to read (language is less tortured and magic realism is more measured) and easily (at the time of publication) his best book since Midnight’s children.

I just can't do it. I cannot concentrate enough on the style of writing to comprehend it. It hurts my head. I am not enjoying this, and I'm stopping on page 31. There is just TOO much allegory and similie and flowery-vision descriptive prose for me to truly take in this story. I know  Salman Rushdie is supposed to be this big important prominent world author and everything, but I think the last time I felt like this about a book was when I ***HAD*** to read Faulkner in high school. Well, there's no grade or teacher or paper due this time, so I QUIT!

Here's a sample: "The second portent came on the morning of the murder, when Shalimar the driver approached Max Ophusl at breakfast, handed him his schedule card for the day, and gave in his notice. The ambassador's drivers tended to be short-term appointees, inclined to move on to new adventures in pornography or hairdressing, and Max was accustomed to the cycle of acquisition and loss. This time, however, he was shaken though he did not care to show it. He concentrated on his day's appointments, trying not to let the card tremble. He knew Shalimar's real name. He knew the village he came from and the story of his life. He knew the intimate connection between his own scandalous past and this grave unscandalous man who never laughed in spite of the creased eyes that hinted at a happier past, this man with a gymnast's body and a tragedian's face who had slowly become more of a valet than a mere driver, a silent yet utterly solicitous body servand who understood what Max needed before he knew it himself, the lighted cigar that materialized just as he was reaching for the humidor, the right cuff-links that were laid out on his bed each morning iwth the perfect shirt, the ideal temperature for his bathwater, the righ ttimes to be absent as well as the correct moments to appear. The ambassador was carried back to his Strasbourgeois childhood years in a Belle Epoque mantion near the old synagogue, since destroyed, and found himself marveling at the rebirth in this man from a distant mountain valley of the lost traditions of service of the pampered prewar culture of Alsace."

I was so impressed by this book that it's taken me awhile to work out what to say.... primarily, what fascinated me was the grace and effortlessness with which it moves from one setting to another: a large chunk is set in Kashmir, covering much of the last half of the 20th century; another large chunk in Europe (primarily France) during the Second World War; the last chunk in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Each of these settings and historical periods is richly detailed; a lesser author would have taken an entire book (at least!) to evoke just one of them. Rushdie, however, discusses the history of Alsace and the history of the India-Pakistan conflict with equal facility, making for a truly rewarding read. And the prose is beautiful.

Of course, this isn't just a book about setting: we follow the lives of four main characters, as well as a host of minor characters who add quite a bit of flavor to the stories. Unlike some other reviewers, I think Rushdie's female characters are depicted quite well; neither of the female main characters is Everywoman, but as a woman I found them realistic and compelling even when I couldn't relate to their decisions.

This is one of those books that begins near the end, then works its way backward in time before coming back around; I often find this irritating since I already know what's going to happen, but in Shalimar the Clown it works extremely well: even knowing (part of) the end, I was dying to know what happened in the middle.

Finally, as far as the politics of the whole thing... I was surprised when I came to this site after finishing the book and saw how many people view it as a book about terrorism. Hardly. Yes, the history of Kashmir in the last half-century includes terrorists, and so they appear; yes, the book comments on the causes of terrorism. But there is a lot more to it than that; with slight alterations, the book could have been written with only passing references to terrorism and kept the story largely the same, which should tell you it's not the big focus. If it might bother you, you should know that the Indian government is portrayed in an unfavorable light, while Rushdie's views on the US government come across as somewhat ambivalent. And that the atrocity count in some places is high, although this doesn't make the book depressing all the way through--some of my favorite scenes were the comic ones depicting pre-war village life in Kashmir.

Some have read this entire book as political commentary (with particular characters representing "east" and "west", "Hindu" and "Muslim", etc.), and since Rushdie is a literary author, I don't doubt he intended that. But for me it was mostly just a great story, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as such. Happy reading!

Incredibly moving and involving. Surprisingly humorous for a book that gets so sad, and the historical sections are very interesting as well.

Shalimar the Clown has been on my shelf collecting dust. While I do admit to having quite the crush on Rushdie, I get flashbacks from the utter disappointment I felt when I read The Satanic Verses. My friend, also a Rushdie aficionado, finally convinced me to pick it up and blow the dust off the covers. My love affair with Rushdie has been rekindled.

Rushdie is at full power in Shalimar. He combines his lush prose and diverse characters with political allegory and cultural savvy. Although it's easily one of Rushdie's most comprehensive novels, it certainly isn't a light read-- he dedicates much of the novel to theorizing about different conflicts. He brings us from WWII Germany to ongoing conflicts in Kashmir and the Philippines. But don't let that scare you from reading it. At it's core, it's a beautiful story about love and vengeance.

The story is told through the eyes of four main characters; Shalimar, a tightrope walker from Kashmir; Max Ophuls; his illegitimate daughter, India; and Boonyi, the woman whose story unites them all. Even more astounding than the characters is the setting itself. Rushdie takes us to a beautiful, Macondo-esque village in rural Kashmir. The religious tolerance in this village allows for the Hindu/Muslim marriage of Shalimar and Boonyi. We read about Pachigam in all its glory, and its slow destruction into an Asian dystopia. Rushdie is all about the allegory, and once again (quite brilliantly) mirrors the destruction of Kashmir with Shalimar's own descent into violence.

Of course, Rushdie can't write a book without stirring some controversy.. Many critics have accused Rushdie of being sympathetic towards terrorists. I disagree. He merely gives us a different perspective of the world. He portrays each character with such intimate detail, but remains ambivalent throughout the book. He leaves it to us to judge each character.

5 stars. Great. Amazing. Brilliant. But it isn't for everybody.