Rating: 4.5 stars

A mournful lament of the paradise that was Kashmir ("a ruined paradise, not so much lost as smashed", says the blurb) wrapped in an enticing tale of love, loss, hatred, relegious extremism, power and that ubiquitous, terribly influential entity - luck. The writing is fabulous - at once evocative, captivating, heartbreaking and magical - and the characters are very real.

I read this book on cramped and somewhat-raining train journeys across the beautiful, pond-filled terrain of West Bengal, and neither the landscape nor less-tiring pleasures like listening to music managed to distract me for long.

A masterpiece.

This book has been a hell of a ride. When I started it, I had the feeling I wasn't going to enjoy it that much, but by page 100 I was hooked and so invested in the characters that it I felt like I made all of their decisions with them. The book is a political comentary on the conflict between Kashmir and India, but, through the depth of its characters' humanity, it is also much more than that: a story of love, hatred, feat and death. Just like any good story should be, a reminder of the diversity of human though and human experience.

Не знаю, чому так відбувається, але писати відгук на книгу, яка сподобалася, в рази важче, ніж критикувати ту, що не зайшла. Ну ви зрозуміли, що книга мені сподобалася, бо я щось не можу дібрати слів, крім банальності на зразок "це було круто")

Отже, в романі подано життєві історії героїв на тлі світової історії, включаючи початок 2 світової війни, діяльність франц��зького руху Опору і британських спецслужб, Індію в період 1950х-2000х років (особливу увагу зосереджено на штатах Джамму і Кашмір), історію, побут і культуру кашмірців, релігійні війни ісламістів з невірними, пакистансько-індійське протистояння і збройний конфлікт ібагато інших подій, а також майстерно вплетені любовні (ну це досить умовна назва) лінії і дрібка магічного реалізму.

Довелося багато про що гуглити, бо Індія для мене, за винятком загальновідомих фактів, трохи терра інкогніта.

Переклад досить добрий, книга цікава, а розказана історія не пересічна та дивовижна.

І кілька цитат з книги:

*У метаморфозах полягає справжня сутність життя*

*У царстві тварин немає місця несподіванкам. Із людьми ж усе зовсім не так. Люди непередбачувані та мінливі. Тільки людина, знаючи, як буде добре і правильно, все одно чинить погано. Тільки людина здатна роками носити маску, і то не одну. Тільки людина сама себе засмучує власними вчинками*

*Допоки в тебе не заболіла спина, ти не можеш знати, наскільки важко буде терпіти біль. Жахіття старості залишаться тобі невідомими, поки ти сам не постарієш. Так само і з небезпекою: поки її немає, людина ніколи не знає заздалегідь, як на неї реагуватиме*

*Втрата мрії однією людиною, втрата рідного дому, порушення прав лише однієї людини, вбивство тільки однієї жінки - це втрата всіх наших свобод, всіх рідних домівок і всіх наших прагнень і сподівань. Будь-яка трагедія індивідуальна, але, водночас, це і трагедія всього людства. Приниження одного з нас є приниженням нас усіх*

*Заздалегідь ніколи не знаєш, як поставишся до питань життя і смерті, поки не доведеться давати негайну відповідь*

*Тепер або ми їх, або вони нас*

Sometimes, now, she did not hear his voice for weeks, even months. In the night she reached out for him but found only a void. He had gone beyond her reach and she could only wait for him to return, not knowing if she wanted him to return so that she could preserve her dream of a happy ending, or if she wished him dead because his death would set her free. But he always returned in the end, and when he did it seemed that in his life only a single night had passed, or at the very most two or three. Years of her life were vanishing but in the place from which he called to her, time ran at a different speed, the space around him took a different shape. She did not know how to tell him everything that was happening in Pachigam. There was no time. Increasingly, however, he wanted only to send her the message of himself, of the fire that continued to burn in him, […]

This is a brilliant piece of literature which hit all the right chords for me. The politics and state of world it speaks in the mask of fiction is profound and much apt to this day's state of affairs. Subtle humour while writing depressing paragraphs, and the art of writing prophecies & deftly fulfilling them through the course of story, and making the mind go round & round around the world with rich history and politics to get back to what he always intended in his novels, 'humanity is doomed for the worst when a fraction of it tries to establish ascendency over others' is something only Rushdie could achieve. A work of masters from a master of this storytelling art.

Several years ago, I read The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and felt very overwhelmed and outsmarted. I did enjoy the beautiful language but I think that I had problems with understanding the book because I didn’t know enough about Islam and maybe also, because I didn’t have a lot of experience with reading magical realism. Glimpses of that book has stayed with me, yet it still intimidated me enough to stay away from Rushdie’s novels ever since. So just like when I read Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, this was a test to see if Rushdie’s works are for me.

And it turns out, they are. I really enjoyed reading Shalimar the Clown. First of, it’s beautifully written – Rushdie has a magnificent grasp of the language and really uses it to make his points. There are sections where he breaks it up and changes it completely to underline what’s happening in the story. It’s so skillfully done. He’s truly a master of his arts.

Secondly, it’s a both fascinating and interesting story. On a background of the conflict in Kashmihr between hindus and muslims, between India and Palestine, the lives of Boonyi, Shalimar and Max unfold. But this is not where we start. It begins in Los Angeles where India Ophuls’ father Max, is killed on her door step by his chauffeur, Shalimar the Clown. Rushdie then takes us back in time to explain why Shalimar killed Max. Shalimar was once a young happy muslim boy, completely in love with Boonyi, a young hindu girl. They loved each other very much and was therefore allowed to marry, but for Boonyi, life in the tiny village in Kashmir is not enough so when she gets a chance to get out, she takes it. Even when it means that she becomes the American ambassador’s mistress. She leaves Shalimar and deeply crushed, he vows to kill her and any child she might get and he joins various terrorist groups in order to learn how to kill – and to wait for the right time to kill Boonyi. When Boonyi gets pregnant, a huge scandal erupts, and ultimately, Max’s wife leaves him – and leaves India with his and Boonyi’s child, a girl she names India.

The way Rushdie manages to tell the story of these people, is superb. He makes them all believable, they change and grow and you believe that they could – and would – evolve in the ways, they do. There are quite a few supporting characters, all with their own identity and voice. Even though the book has a political message about the destruction of Kashmir and about how little it takes to destroy relations between various groups, when tragedy and disaster strikes, Rushdie still manages to keep the story well-paced and the sections discussion more political issues, feel integrated in the novel. There are some elements of magical realism in the story and they work to emphasize the rest of the story, as well as how the people of Kashmir think and see the world.

In some ways, this can be seen as a retelling of the story of Paradise. Kashmir as the Garden of Eden, Shalimar and Boonyi as Adam and Eva, and Max, the first TV in the valley and other things as the snake who tricks Boonyi away from Eden and into a modern world filled with possibilities for temptation and sin. Due to a huge sacrifice, she’s allowed to return – but Paradise has changed too, just like she has.

It’s also a book investigating terrorism and how peaceful tolerant countries can suddenly be caught up in violence and conflict, it’s an attempt to understand what makes people become terrorists and how sometimes, it only takes a small incitement or a personal crisis to turn people. It investigates how people react when they are suddenly told how to dress and act and the length people are willing to go to to make other people act as they see fit. Rushdie also looks at how the decisions on nation level influence the ordinary people and the role of the military.

When reading this, I kept feeling it was a 4 stars book. Even though I really loved it, it still felt like 4 stars. And I think the main reason for that is, that I’m sure Salman Rushdie has written better books, even better books. Books, I want to rate 5 stars. I’m really looking forward to reading another Rushdie novel – and he has made it to the list of my potential favorite authors. I just need to read a few more books by him to see if he can make it onto the list of favorites.

When reading Shalimar the Clown in bed late at night, you’re not able to just put the characters away as you do the book when you’re done reading. Instead they stay with you and you think about their life and fates as you drift closer and closer to sleep. And as you slowly starts sleeping, not quite though, and as you loose your hold on reality and starts to enter the realms of dreams, you get closer to Boonyi in her small hut with her goats, struggling with addiction, trying to live while being dead, fighting to grasp reality again. Luckily, she has her dead mother to help her. And luckily, I have Rushdie’s beautiful words to let me know the story of these amazing characters.

"Each tragedy belongs to itself and at some time to everyone else.", pg. 138

The story is a tragic one from beginning to end. It's not necessarily depressing but it is a powerful story. Salman Rushdie does an outstanding job of telling a colorful tragedy utilizing imagery and painting the picture of the human character. Lastly, he shows human emotion and the evil it can drive men to do. The quality of the book I liked the most was the blending of cultural, linguistic, social, and religious inferences to add dimension to the plot. In the reading there are concepts pertaining to Islam, Hinduism and places like Pakistan, Kashmir, and India. Some of the transliterated Hindi-Urdu, Kashmiri, and Arabic words you may have to Google (like I did). It's neat how he injects these words and the impact they have on the story.

Overall the plot is multilayered yet all the aspects tie into the main plot. The characters and their behaviors create a butterfly-effect putting them on a collision course. I interpreted themes of star-crossed lovers, religious radicalism, ethnocentric chauvinism, and sectarian violence all resulting in loss.

I was throughly pleased with the quality of the story and appreciated it more than The Satanic Verses. I would definitely recommend this one to anyone who has enjoyed Salman Rushdie's works. Thanks!

Kashmiri Fates
Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie (2005)

A few years ago a friend of mine gave me what was then Rushdie’s latest with a very lukewarm recommendation. As a result, I set it on my shelf for until such time as I had the time and motivation to plough through the man’s florid prose. I had just read his The Moor’s Last Sigh the previous year and was mildly impressed by the constancy of its themes and the unusual historical context, although the story itself did not have a whole lot going for it. This time around, not a whole lot has changed, since the main narrative thread has great gobs descriptive text hanging off it while the thread itself is rather short and straight. This has the advantage of ensuring that the reader has an easy time following the basic plot and movements of the characters, which is a good thing because the story Rushdie really wants to tell is about a place over time. In short, the novel is about how in a land of fundamental tensions and contradictions, a lasting peace is best achieved by the application of tolerance, moderation and wise counsel from within the native community.

The title is a little misleading because the novel contain four main characters, each of whom is given equal time in the novel, as well as a cast of minor characters, some of whom are just as interesting as the ‘big four’. I suppose calling the novel ‘Kashmir’ might have been too obvious, although Rushdie does not write with any particular subtlety in this case. Rather, he writes with passion and a depth of understand that few other authors can match. Shalimar is an emotionally, if not stylistically, uneven work by Rushdie. It is not only clear where his sympathies lie, but where he put in his strongest literary effort.

At is most basic, the story is about how American diplomat, spy and war hero Max Ophuls allows his lust get the better of him, which sets off a chain of events that has unfortunate consequences. The setting leaps from modern-day America to Kashmir to wartime Europe and back again. Both greater and lesser characters are drawn with much depth, which is necessary to propel the narrative because while their actions have serious consequences, the actions themselves are spaced well apart. There is a lot of interior monologue in this novel.

This is a historical novel. All the contemporary bits serve as windows for the author to peer into the past and follow the steady ruin of a small but vital community until the present day, so that they are in effect perfunctory. Even one of the main characters, the daughter of Max Ophuls, whose names serve as the titles to the first and final of the novel’s five long chapters, is almost a blank state, full of uncertainty and ambiguity, but not grounded in any meaningful sense. In fact, she is hardly a catalyst for the main conflicts, despite her prominence. Depth of character development and setting is reserved for two relatively minor personages and a small place in the heart of Kashmir: the Hindu Pyarelal and Abdullah the Muslim, who are the morale leaders of the town of Pachigam. Together, they make sure that nothing gets out of hand within and without the village. Rushdie excels in describing the idyll of pre-war Pachigam, which represents Kashmir in miniature, and the complex relationship between the two headmen. Both men are shown to be flawed and prejudiced in their own way, but they are always willing to work together to maintain the fragile balance of the community. They do this not only for practical reasons, but also because this is how they see their history.

The novel works on binary tension: Hindu-Muslim, Pachigam and the neighboring village, India-Pakistan, native traditions-external temptation, love-hate, ambition-resignation. The bottom line is that an extreme in any form is the greatest threat to community, and these extremes appear time and time again in the novel. Muslim fanatics work to sow discord in Kashmiri villages; Hindu officers believe that only a large dollop of repression can quell dissent; blind ambition leads to personal ruin and unleavened hate does much the same.
One curious theme that Rushdie is keen to emphasize is how modernization does not have to be an agent of ruin and discord. The introduction of a television into the community and a sudden shift in traditional roles, for example, produce some tension but are ultimately neutral factors in and of themselves. On the whole, so long as no one from beyond the sacred Kashmiri valley tries to add or take away from the native inhabitants, all will be well.

Humor is sprinkled throughout the novel for the sake of comic relief and to reveal the absurdity of the human condition, but again Rushdie takes more care with the Kashmiri jokes than with those stateside. The scenes in modern America are flat, forced or just plain silly, while those revolving around the Kashmiri villages are deep and rich and fully formed. It is as though Rushdie places some of the action in America only because he has to, and as a result deploys his weakest prose there. The climax is rushed and reads as though it was torn out of a pulp spy novel. All the passion and subtlety of Rushdie’s fervent mind can be found in the Kashmiri sections.

Looking at Shalimar from the historical novel point of view, what comes across as strikingly impressive is how Rushdie is able to delve deep into the history of Kashmiri villages while remaining in the near-present. The novel only spans two-three generations, but the weight of history lies heavy on the Kashmiri, yet this is not a burden. The clever literary device is the occupations of the Pachigam people: they are actors, singers and dancers who perform past lives (hence the ‘clown’ that is Shalimar). And all this is taken very seriously. The Indian army and radical Islam – the two great enemies of Kashmir – are treated as emotionally shallow, morally bankrupt, superficial agents. I found myself engrossed in these sections, whereas I breezed through the modern non-Kashmiri bits unaffected.
I highly recommend Shalimar the Clown to those who already enjoy Rushdie, prefer character-driven stories, like exotic settings, or are aficionados of historical fiction.

Pe scurt, musulmanul Shalimar Clovnul devine terorist internațional după ce iubita sa soție, dansatoarea hindusă Boonyi Kaul a fost sedusă de ambasadorul Statelor Unite și i-a născut acestuia o fetiță .
Predestinați încă dinaintea nașterii lor, Shalimar și Boonyi au fost născuți amândoi deodată în aceeași noapte, de două mame prietene, în legendara grădină Shalimar.
Timpul însă îi va transforma însă în protagoniști dramatici ai celebrului conflict pentru Kashmir din anii 60, dintre India și Pakistan.

Un roman de neratat, zic.

http://thalukinglass.blogspot.in/2014...

I find it a slight problem to prepare my comments on any Salman Rushdie Novel as I grapple with the oft occurring issue of where to begin from and how to end what I have started. Presence of this issue acutely describes my ineffectiveness in conjuring apt words and phrases to encompass the entire essence/worlds/themes that Rushdie packages into a single story-line. Rushdie’s stories, (atleast in those ones that I have read so far), hop through continents and bring out a well trussed story of what otherwise could be parallel individual stories, never to intersect each other. One may think so of many such intersections, but then again Rushdie plants the intersections at important historical junctions, thus rallying his entire learnings as a student of history to full effect.

Shalimar the Clown, also does not escape from what has become the Rushdie Signature of allegorical interweaving of storylines placed within factual historical contexts. But while Midnight’s Children was tragically humane in its telling despite the vast swathes of Indian history on which it was pitched across, Shalimar the Clown gets overshadowed by the historical context against which it is placed, and in a manner that might perhaps lead one to assume Rushdie rushed forward to tell the story of Kashmir and sprinkled characters as an after-thought to not make the novel a dry political commentary. However, Rushdie’s prose has never had haters, except the ones who hate deconstructing metaphors and picking up dictionaries, and it emerges strongly in Shalimar as well. However, in Shalimar, his prose shines with a slightly lesser consistent intensity. Nevertheless, the effect of his metaphorical language never diminishes on the reader and like always, his allegories swarm around you invisibly, exerting their unfelt presence, picking their time and impact at a particular and relevant point in the story, to come out at you with full force of instantaneous and revelatory epiphanies and when they do so, one feels as if the story has been given a fresh coat of paint.

When the novel involves a story sensitive to most Indians, one might get lost in fishing for ideological positions to be presented and to be taken in the narrative, with respect to the issue, something which Rushdie tactfully avoids through well-constructed events in the lives of Pachigam, not without mentioning, that Kashmiri terrorism is fed with Pakistani assistance and the whetting up of violent sentiments due to Indian military atrocities. However, in concentrating on Pachigam, as a village of entertainers and cooks, and a village which was out of scope of incursions and intimidations, owing to its relative non-chalance with the issue of Islamic identity splitting Kashmir, Rushdie kept himself safe from being pulled into ideological compartments in the development of story. However, soon enough the bugles of violence do start to resonate in his cozy village of innocence, the telling of which becomes the most humane part of the story, as the reader is slowly led into a despairing sense of gloom created from the dissolution of a sense of “Kashmiriyat” in the residents of Pachigam and its eventual desolation from a once colourful, peaceful and charming locale of inter-mingling people. It is Kashmiriyat that is the winner in this Novel, which also was reflected, on one occassion, in Hindu and Muslims co-operating together to starve Gegroo Brothers inside a Mosque. People never let their religion to interfere with their experience of a shared culture and the residents of Pachigam were obstinate and reluctant to buy into the Islamic ideology being peddled by outsiders.

However, after all that being said, the story exhausts itself of its charm a little after 3 quarters when the factual narrative comes out of the picture and the story is left to its two surviving main characters. From there on, without the backing of the force of real history, the two characters are left to fend for themselves in a dry denouement. It may lead one to think that the primary force of Rushdie’s stories might as well be the historical allegories that he places them in, because without the backing of such allegories, his stories suddenly seem like a wandering animal with no direction or perhaps, I have become too accustomed to expecting every passage of his to have a metaphorical connotation, because he does it so beautifully. It is quite telling of the side-stepping of the issue of self-determination of Kashmiris, i.e., Kashmir for the Kashmiris, Kashmir – "the ungrateful, shrewish mountain state where disloyalty was a badge of honour and insubordination a way of life", when the daughter of Max Ophuls is named, “India”, replacing the name, “Kashmira”. Rushdie never took ideological stances on what should/could have been and deftly places his Pachigami characters at the hands of destiny to tell the story of Kashmir as apolitically as ever. "Your character is not your destiny", says the Kashmiri Bombur Yambarzal, containing with it the tragic tale of a beautiful land which ought to have been in the hands of a beautiful and colourful fate. Bravo, Mr. Rushdie, Bravo!

“For the rest of his life Max Ophuls would remember that instant during which the shape of the conflict in Kashmir had seemed too great and alien for his Western mind to understand, and the sense of urgent need with which he had drawn his own experience around him, like a shawl. Had he been trying to understand, or to blind himself to his failure to do so?”

This book begins with the murder of Max Ophuls, former U.S. Ambassador to India and later chief of counterterrorism, by Shalimar the Clown, while Max is visiting his illegitimate daughter, India, in California. The book then flashes back to provide the family members’ backstories. As we learn about the characters, we also learn about the culture and history of Kashmir. Initially, Kashmir is an area of peaceful coexistence among a diverse population. Over the course of the novel, it devolves into an area of violent conflict. In a similar manner, the characters are initially content, but end up embroiled in gruesome tale of revenge.

“The murderous rage of Shalimar the clown, his possession by the devil, burned fiercely in him and carried him forward, but in the murmurous night it was just one of many stories, one small particular untold tale in a crowd of such tales, one minuscule portion of the unwritten history of Kashmir.”

This is a literary work. Rushdie’s writing is dense and complex. He weaves a compelling storyline, set against a backdrop of Kashmir’s history. He expects the reader to do some heavy lifting. I looked up quite a bit of Kashmiri history to supplement the information provided in the novel. It also includes a number of local myths and legends. Suffice it to say this is not a quick and easy read, but I found it fascinating.

A few of the political, historical, and cultural topics include foreign interference, imperialism, colonialism, corruption, terrorism, and religious differences. I am not going to claim to completely understand all the interconnected elements of this book, but I definitely get the sense that this is a book about the corruption of a paradise. Rushdie is a brilliant writer.

“What happened 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.”

Come sempre leggere Salman Rushdie e come intraprendere un lungo e tormentato viaggio.
In questo caso ci troviamo davanti ad un altro romanzo-mondo composto da 5 capitoli che avrebbero tranquillamente potuto svilupparsi come 5 romanzi autonomi. Ognuno è dedicato ad uno dei protagonisti di questa vicenda che, come spesso avviene in Rushdie, ci mostra le storie dentro La Storia. La Storia, qui, è quella del Kashmir, fazzoletto di paradiso in terra oggetto da decenni di guerra e contrattazione politica, di guerriglia e pulizia etnica e religiosa. Le storie, invece, quelle minute che quella Storia grande si ritrovano a vivere sono quelle di uomini e donne che, per un motivo o per un altro, hanno a che fare con la questione Kashmira. Alcuni ci sono nati, altri ci sono capitati da adulti, per alcuni è stato un punto di partenza, per altri un arrivo, per altri ancora un luogo di rinascita nonostante tutto.

Rushdie ripercorre e approfondisce le tematiche a lui care, dall'imperialismo al colonialismo, dalla storia indiana alla diaspora, dalla questione linguistica a quella religiosa, dai rapporti famigliari a quelli genitore-figlio. Uomini, donne, politici, artisti, religiosi, laici, un mosaico ricco e complesso di umanità che solo in Rushdie riesce sempre a trovare unità a coerenza.
Un'esperienza di lettura intensa, arricchente e, talvolta, sfidante ma che vale sempre la pena di affrontare. Devo ammettere che ho faticato a portare avanti la lettura, a tratti è stata snervante e mi ha messa alla prova ma ho perseverato e tutto ha trovato la sua collocazione.