Salman Rushdi is at his best when he is writing about Kashmir. It is as if you are suddenly taken to hills of Kashmir.
Where so much is said about Kashmir issue, most of it is biased inf favor of one party or other. Slaman Rushdi has been able to provide most neutral of all descriptions of the issue, I've come up with. He has managed to cover the whole history of place in a single story with out appearing to lecture.
For as much, I could have given him five stars.
It is true that this is no Midnight Children of stories. At its rots, it is a revenge story but there are very few stories that are great in themselves - most are made great by the way told. This one belongs to the later group.
The story is full of beautiful passages, metaphors and allegories but i'm sorry to say not all of us get most of them. I believe a great story teller has privilege of choosing his audience.
The passages are long but that doesn't trouble reading.
The only limitation that i find is that the book seemed stretched at places. Not too much, mostly details were easy to go through and were just building atmosphere, but there were a few places specially in the last section where it could had been cut short.

I enjoyed this a lot. Compared to Rushdie's style in The Satanic Verses his magical realism here is more subtle and toned down to the point where it enhances rather than disrupting my suspension-of-disbelief. At one point magic even forms the case for the defence in a trial in an entirely believable way: the argument is, as my friend Alicia pointed out to me recently "If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences".

The magical strand helps to creates a wonderful, unsettling sense of the fragility of truth. Rushdie also revises interpretations by giving two characters' thoughts on the same thing: he does an unnecessary author-voice thing like 'but Firdous saw more clearly; she knew...' that strategically offers comparative, but never definitive judgement. Nonetheless, this isn't one of those works that casts the reader into despair by dispensing with a stable timeline of events. Rather, it shows how conflict and slaughter rewrite history by erasing memory.

I enjoy how he moves between different styles of dramatising events too, for example when he describes the Indian army crackdown on the Muslim population he does so in a style of utterly transparent propaganda that enables him to describe horror wittily, creating a distance that stops it from being unbearable to read. This is similar to the technique used by Voltaire in n  Candiden. Kashmir descends into violence, and Rushdie can only show how it happens. In n  Orientalismn Said points out that any distinction tends to polarise (orientalism makes the Orient more oriental AND the West more western). Here religion turns into a polarising division because it is politicised in the precious materiality of the land. Thus it becomes the defining feature of the bodies of believers...

The vortex of violence in Kashmir is centred on two intense characters, Boonyi and Shalimar. They can be read as ordinary, elevated only by the author's attention (ie everyone is endowed with certain transformative capacities) or as magical beings, foci of passionate energy and power. Kashmira and Max are on the same plane. All of these characters exhibit ruthlessness and the ability to channel all of their resources obsessively to a single end.

I find Rushdie an interesting writer of gender. I don't see this as a sexist book, but as a masculinist one. It's interesting that the person who seems most despicable to the novel's internal poetic(?) morality(?) is an asexual, unmotherly woman. Shalimar also seems minimally sexual, but this feature defines him much less than his brutality. Boonyi's sexuality is her power and it directs her fate; while Max is even more insatiable than her, and the contrast between their downfalls - he never loses agency, is always subject rather than object - is an indictment of patriarchal gender roles. Kashmira is so 'unfeminine' that she takes no interest in clothes and at age seven tells her father she likes 'bows and arrows and slingshots and excaliburs and guns' (I wonder why she calls our attention to King Arthur). He is unfazed, telling her to use the doll he has brought her for target practice. Poetic(?) justice(?) rewards Kashmira's warrior qualities in a literally penetrative climax.

(B) 75% | More than Satisfactory
Notes: It's description-over-dialogue, nonlinear storytelling. A tedious read, owing to many lengthy and meandering asides.

After toiling through The Satanic Verses a few years ago, my overriding memory is of how little of the novel I understood. I was therefore reluctant to get stuck into Shalimar The Clown when my sister passed it on recently.

Sure enough, I'm finding Rushdie's authorial voice to be much like I remember it - extensive vocabulary, usage of magical realism/dreams/fantasies, strong character descriptions, and multi-cultural savvy that combine together seamlessly. For these reasons I'm finding the story a bit overwhelming, and the author's power of expression is so strong and eloquent that at times I find it overpowering.

The novel tells the tale of Shalimar the Clown, a Kashmiri performer who is blinded by hatred following his wife's affair with the American ambassador. The complexities of character and impulses are beautifully told in this story and are superimposed over historical events and ideological conflict.

The tones of the novel vary greatly, although the story becomes increasingly desperate as Kashmir is torn apart by conflict and Shalimar is possessed by hatred. The author seems ambivilant towards the main characters, challenging the reader to judge/sympathise for themselves.

I would recommend Shalimar The Clown for its sheer scope, humanity and power of description.

Очень смешанные чувства вызвала книга: всё, что происходит в Кашмире, - великая книга, максимально актуальная, до боли. В США же есть отдельные ок места, но какая-то совершенно неубедительная и неинтересная главная героиня. И концовка… не знаю. Обратная ситуация от shit sandwich.

Ovaj roman je par ekselans primer kako treba da izgleda remek-delo visoke književnosti. Pisano bistro jasnim stilom koji međutim nije previše uprošćen, sa temama koje su izuzetno relevantne i aktuelne, ono pokazuje kako sukobi današnjice vuku svoje korene iz prošlosti i podsećaju na začarani krug bez prestanka koji opstaje gde god ima ljudi i njihovih razmirica i trzavica. Rušdi se i pored toga što je sekularni erudita miri sa nekim mračnim, podzemnim istinama o ljudskom biću ali ne zapada u misticizam, on jednostavno prikazuje sve mane svojih slikovitih likova koji su u isto vreme i realni, životni ali i simboli i čak arhetipi, ne nadajući se da će se njegovim pisanjem nešto stvarno promeniti, on jednostavno domete književnosti pomera do samih granica, savija kao gumu i na tome ostaje. I to je za svaku pohvalu.

Fiecare carte scrisă de Rushdie îmi reamintește : în '47 s-a născut cel mai mare povestitor.

One of the best of Rushdie's later novels.

I'm kind of guessing this is brilliant, but I can't say I really got it all. The story was okay, but I found it overlong and it was hard to stay interested for a lot of it. This was my first experience of Rushdie and I'm not sure there will be another.

We get it, you can use 10 pages to describe a single thing. Unfortunately, Rushdie seems to have run out of the depth in his earlier work, I'm afraid to say, Rushdie seems like a shadow of his younger self.

I have read several books by Salman Rushdie (including one that I read a second time because I forgot I had read it. I continue to be impressed by his intelligence, his use of words and ideas, and the depth of his own reading, from which he draws much about which he writes. His books are chock full of information and history that have given me a new understanding of this world and those of power in it. Shalimar The Clown is a well written, but gut-wrenching book centered around 4 individuals connected by love, hate, and genetics. While in the end it is a sad story I am glad that I read it, but think it will be a while before I read another Rushdie novel. I am still searching for a library copy of Midnight’s Children, which I hope to be my next of his novels to read.

Shalimar the Clown is a novel from Salman Rushdie released in late 2000s, featuring four principal characters and a plot based in three different continents. As in most Rushdie novels, there is a story, featuring a particular family, with politics of the places involved in the background.

Coming to the plot – a former American diplomat is killed in the US by his driver. The story then moves back in time to Kashmir, featuring a rural Hindu girl Boonyi who is in love with Abdullah Noman, a Kashmiri Muslim who performs tightrope acts in the village. Despite their religious differences, the village elders are in favour of their marriage, which would also make the statement that they were Kashmiris before their religious identities.

On the other side, there is an ambitious man from Strasbourg, France – Max Ophuls. His tact and seductive skills make him a valuable asset for the French resistance against the Nazi regime during the Second World War. Following the war, he moves to the US and is posted to India as their ambassador, which is where Max’s love affair with Kashmir begins.

The story has four main characters and each of them have a segment named after them. The four are Max, India (Max’s daughter), Boonyi and the title character, Shalimar the Clown. This story moves across timelines and similar to the other Rushdie novels – with multiple complex characters – with some based in the West with ties to South Asia. The author often plays along people having multiple identities and acting accordingly – for instance, Max – a Frenchman from a region which has often shifted between France and Germany, with a British wife, and later becoming a US diplomat.

The political shift and radicalisation that took place in Kashmir was brought out well by the author – where a culture that encouraged an interfaith marriage and participated in social events together regardless of religion; were taken to violence and eventual doom. The effect the conflict had on civilians was brought out well – be it atrocities from the Muslim extremists or Indian army.

An equally interesting character was the title character – Shalimar the Clown, who was content staying in the village who had fallen in love with Boonyi, who had bigger ambitions and did not want to be ‘stuck’ in the same place and was looking for an opportunity to leave. However, the segment with both Shalimar and Boonyi was a tad long – with too many characters being introduced and beyond a point, it became difficult to keep track of them, especially considering that they were important in the subsequent phases.

The author being an atheist himself, did not have second thoughts in bringing out absurdities in religion, where a bit of dark humour was involved when a group of Muslim women pacify an extremist mob by using the religious limitations that the men have.

Without spoilers, I would say that I was not satisfied with the ending of the book. It was not particularly bad, but considering the way that the story was going, it was not quite what I expected.

On a personal level – this story was highly relatable for me, considering I have lived most of my life in India and a substantial portion in France (my current residence), and all the principal characters are from these places, and I really enjoyed the description of the city of Strasbourg, loved it as much as my visit to the city. So, if you could relate with the underlying themes, you could enjoy it better, but regardless, it is a great read.

To conclude – this could be classified as a cliched story involving love, ambition, jealousy and revenge but what makes it special is the narration, and the subtle themes going on in the background. If you have enjoyed other works of Rushdie, this would be an enjoyable read too – I would not place it quite at the level of Midnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses, but a notch below and on that note, I would award this book a rating of seven on ten.