East, West

Salma Rushdi'nin büyülü dünyasına farklı bir yolculuk. Her öykü bambaşka bir dünya gösteriyor. Kitapta toplam dokuz öykü var. Üçer üçer bölümlenmiş. Doğu- Batı- Doğu,Batı. Zateb Rushdi de kendisinin Doğu, Batı arasında kalan o virgülde yaşadığını söylüyor. İşte tam oradan, o virgülden bakıp Doğu'yu, Batı'yı ve sonrada ikisinin kavuşmalarından ya da kavuşamamalarından ortaya çıkan karmaşık bir dünyayı anlatıyor. Çok sevdim :)

A este libro voy a ponerle 1 estrella y es que creo que en resumen no me ha dado nada de lo que esperaba. Se suponía que era una historia de fantasía, con sentido y no me ha dado ni una ni otra.
Este libro llego a mi vida porque como siempre participo en muchos retos y uno de ellos me parecía interesante, leer libros de diferentes continentes. Me costo encontrarlo pero me recomendaron al autor y encima como tenía muchas lecturas de libros tochos pensé en meter algo más light, ya que es el último de este reto.
Este libro esta dividido en 9 relatos cortos y ya con eso yo debí huir. Ya que como siempre me pasa no me entero de casi nada y cuando ya empiezo a entender el relato, es decir, de donde viene y a donde va se termina el relato.
Voy a ir contando un poco de cada capitulo y que me ha parecido:
1)El relato se llama " un buen consejo es más raro que un rubí" la verdad es que el cuento me ha dejado algo fría una pareja que él intenta ligar con ella y al final ella se iba a casar pero al final no porque no consigue pasaporte....
2)Se llama"La radio gratis"y es la historia de un muchacho que se caso con una viuda y le hizo hacerse la vasectomía. Ah y un viejo que se entrometía en todo...
3)El relato se llama "El pelo del profeta" pues esta historia me ha gustado mucho . Me ha recordado a una cuento infantil por como estaba relatado pero me gusto. También el pelo me recordó al anillo del señor de los anillos no sé porque!
4)El cuento se llama "yorick" pero como bien dice el autor en la ultima frase esto es un cuento sin pies ni cabeza. es como una obra de teatro pero con mucha descripción en plan diré que en la mesa hay pan, agua, leche, queso. etc y dice mil palabras y así varias veces . este cuento es el peor de todos por ahora. Y encima crea algo que lo va a seguir usando en todos los siguientes cuento y es el tema de describir las cosas con mil palabras, ya nos describa lo que ve, lo que come, lo que lee,etc.
5)El relato se llama "en la subasta de las zapatillas rubíes" este hombre ya mezcla todo. Trata sobre el mago de oz pero juntandolo con mil historias más. Y dice que cuando la penetra grita que él esta en el hogar como el mago de oz @-@.
6)El relato se llama " Cristobal Colón y la Reina Isabel de España consuman su relación" y como bien dice el título trata de Colón ligándose a Isabel pero siempre sin sentido....
7)El Relato se llama " la armonía de las esferas" creo que es el mejor relato del libro por ahora aunque como siempre el autor desvaría un poco pero va de dos parejas que uno de los chicos anda medio chiflado y tiene fantasías con ambos miembros de la otra pareja, se suicida y al final las fantasías no son tan fantasiosas.
8)Creo que lo único lógico de este relato llamado " Chekov y Zulú " es que han nombrado a star trek y el señor de los anillos. Supuestamente usaban star trek como código para hablar. El final no tiene ninguna lógica.
9)Pues con el relato "El cortero" terminamos este libro y solo puedo decir que el capítulo a sido igual de extraño que todos los demás.
Este autor es un poco raro y no sé si volveré a probar algo de él y una cosa que me ha dejado un poco flasheada es que usaba bastante el sexo sin venir al caso.
¿Lo recomiendo? No, al menos no este libro. Esperare algun tiempo para leer algo más de él y pensar si al final me gusta o debo terminar con el autor.

"East, West, home's best." -- 19th-century proverb *

If one has a foot in two regions where then is home? In these nine short stories -- three published for the first time in this collection -- Salman Rushdie explores the disorientation that some experience when cultures collide.

These aren't polemical essays, however, but character studies, thumbnail sketches which allow us insights into individual lives with all their comforts and dilemmas, and as such are a joy to read. They include vignettes, parodies, fables and mini-tragedies, each item with an independent life but all linked by themes, imagination and wit.

The nine stories are presented in three sections -- East, then West, finally East, West -- and are written in a variety of contrasting styles and voices.

The first section includes three tales set in India: two are tragi-comedies from unnamed cities, one near Lahore in the Punjab and the other somewhere in the northern Deccan, while the third piece is a true tragedy from Srinagar in the state of Kashmir and Jammu in the first half of the 20th century. "Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies" describes a woman applying for a visa for an arranged marriage in England, but what are her true motives when she consults with a freelance adviser in the compound before the British consulate? "The Free Radio" tells of a handsome but gullible rickshaw wallah who, while setting up with a thief's widow, harbours ambitions to be a Bollywood star. "The Prophet's Hair" tells of the terrible fate that befalls a well-off family in Srinagar when a precious relic comes into their possession.

The second section also contains three tales, this time with connections to Western Europe. "Yorick" is written in the style of the author of the cock-and-bull story The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne, and has all the playfulness one might expect from that writer. It is simultaneously a conversational skit on Hamlet and on Shakespeare's inspiration, the Danish legend of Amleth: Yorick is the comic gravedigger in the play, his name a version of the Scandinavian name Iorek but which also was the name of the character assumed by Sterne himself for his chef-d'oeuvre and for n  A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.n Rushdie has clearly had great fun writing this pastiche and playing around with characters' roles, as too will the reader armed with this knowledge. This is followed by the author's enthusiasm for The Wizard of Oz manifested in "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers", another tour de force using the historic present for much of the narrative and indulging in joyous flights of fancy.

The third of this trio of tales is encumbered with the title "Christopher Columbus & Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship (Santa Fé, AD 1492)". In the Iberian region of Grenada, with rulers deciding the fates of Moors and Jews, an Italian mariner petitions the monarch to finance a voyage into the unknown, a petitioning that comes close to a wooing when first one protagonist, then the other, plays hard to get. Courtiers give a running commentary. How will it end?

The final section highlights the uneasy relationship between the East, represented by India, and the essence of the West as vested in a Britain which the author knows all too well. The matters discussed in "The Harmony of the Spheres" may be familiar to anyone around in the sixties and later, especially in the curious hybrid cults that arose from submersion in occult and mystical traditions from both the Occident and the Orient. Welshman Eliot Crane retires to the Welsh Marches after a lifetime crossing the borders between sanity and madness. His friend, who's not too far distant in nature from the author, observes matters both from afar and from much closer than he imagines.

"Chekhov and Zulu" begins as a humorous take on Star Trek fans hailing from the subcontinent; now that they're ensconced in powerful diplomatic and security echelons in 1980s Britain at the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination, it soon becomes apparent that beneath the surface levity more serious matters are afoot. Finally "The Courter" brings us close to autobiografiction with a story of a Pakistani family in London during the sixties, with a narrator applying for British citizenship during the time of Enoch Powell's incendiary Rivers of Blood speech while observing the blossoming relationship between his aya and the porter at the entrance to the block of flats.

Taken together, this nonet of brief narratives offers us a wonderful gallery of canvases with clearly defined portraits and atmospheric settings. The language and speech patterns both characters and narrators to me seems spot on, and each tale comes across as distinct, precise and well crafted. There is darkness as well as light, grave issues tempered by laugh-out-loud moments, all couched in a range of tenses and voices and tones.

In East, West Rushdie transports us across the world on the wings of a simurgh, dropping us down in the midst of vibrant relationships; at the same time this collection feels like the literary equivalent of Mumbai's monumental Gateway to India, the point at which East and West meet, the border crossing between cultures. Where then is home to be located when one is in transit?

[n  * nWalter Keating Kelly, Proverbs of all Nations (1859) translated a German proverb, Ost und West, daheim das Best, as 'East and west, at home the best', while Charles Spurgeon's John Ploughman’s Talk (1869) rendered it as 'East and west, Home is best.']

This is an average book: some of the stories are boring, but to the subject, others are written in an interesting way, but they lack something...I couldn't put my finger on this "something" and identify it. I expected this volume to be something else, but it wasn't. In fact, I think that the intention of the author was to create 3 kinds of stories: the ones specific to the East, the ones specific to the West and the ones specific to the Indians that are living abroad, but miss their customs and country. He managed to write some boring stories about the East, some far-fetched ones about the West...and only the ones from the third cathegory are a bit better.

I liked "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers" and "The Harmony of the Spheres", but I found the others to lack the literary genius that Rushdie has proved to have in his books I have read before.

The excerpt 'The Prophet's Hair' from East, West by Salman Rushdie, looks at the theme of religion and how its over-influence can prove to be harmful to one self. Salman Rushdie, though he was Muslim, was against religion and uses this story to get his point across. He makes the story interesting with a gripping plot line and the conflict of getting rid of the 'prophet's hair'.

Through this short story, Rushdie explores the theme of religion through the metaphor of the 'prophet's hair'. In this story, the prophet's hair is stolen and ends up with a moneylender, Hashim and then for a little while with the thief and it brings nothing but bad luck to both the families. The moneylender grows aggressive and violent after the hair is under his roof and his whole family suffers the consequence. The thief's family heals in some way but it doesn't work for their benefit. It brings them more misfortune than good. These events show how Rushdie feel's that religion can be harmful. If too much trust is placed on religion, if you depend on it too much, it can be your downfall. It can come into your life and end up hurting you instead of being a blessing.

Rushdie also uses magic realism to talk about religion. In the story it is not realistic for the sons of the thief to be healed of their cripple instantly. The mother also gains her sight back. These are incidents that are not rational but the writer uses it to show how religion doesn't help anyone. People might believe that religion is helpful, it heals you. But it might not heal you the way you want it too. It might unexpectedly end up causing you more misery just like the thief's sons. Though many would see the curing of their cripples as a miracle, it actually didn't help their fortune. Religion might 'cure' you but not the way you might want it too. It might not be godsend like many like to believe.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book. It looks at such a complex theme of religion, through a simplistic idea of the curse of the prophet's hair. It is ironical in its use of religion to bring bad luck. Religion is associated to being a blessing, not a curse, but this story shows a unique side to religion. It's cynical ending and overall plot makes you think how religion is actually affecting you positively or negatively and makes for a good read.

Curti as primeiras histórias (capítulo Oriente), não curti o capítulo Ocidente (achei os contos muito confusos), e das três histórias de Oriente, Ocidente, curti a última. Nota final 3,5/5.

Nesses textos de que não gostei muito eu me perdia demais na narrativa, confundia situações e personagens, não achava as histórias claras o suficiente pra eu me ver envolvida com elas a ponto de não me perder. Quando retomava a leitura eu sempre precisava voltar algumas páginas pra tentar relembrar o contexto, me situar novamente com os personagens e poder continuar a leitura.

Um grande feito pessoal do livro foi que ele me levou a ler Hamlet, pois um dos contos é todo baseado em referências à peça, então parei a leitura, li a peça e retomei o conto. Gostei demais de ler a peça e agora quero ler mais de Shakespeare.

A set of 9 Rushdie short stories. Very varied in scope, ranging from a small town rickshaw puller's tale set during the Emergency to a historical fantasy of Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella; a dystopian futuristic world where everything is on sale, to a very personal tale of an aya and her East European 'Courter' in sixties London. Rushdie can make me laugh out loud, he can make me cry and sometimes, he can just awe me with clever word play. This slim volume isn't him at his very best - but it still has the magic and the madness you can expect from the man.

est, ovest e tutto quel che c'è in mezzo

racconti divisi in sezioni: est, ovest e est-ovest, in realtà sono tutti figli di Rushdie, il quale non è nè est nè ovest e nemmeno tutti e due, è un caso unico, un indiano inglese che nei suoi libri usa le spezie della sua terra stemperandole col gelo inglese e mescolando un po' a caso riempie il piatto di qualcosa di più della somma delle due culture...


ps. Il pelo della barba del Profeta è stupendo!