This review is based on The Prophets Hair, a short story within East, West by Salman Rushdie. The Prophets Hair tells the story of a money lender who becomes fanatically religious after finding a hair from the Prophet Muhammad. His children, frustrated by the curse this has brought on their family set out to find a robber who can steal the Prophets Hair for them and save the family from the curse.
Rushdie creates a vividly realised story worth reading simply for the way he employs irony to both mock his characters and setting of the story and to make serious insight on life and the nature of beauty. The story starts of just as any fairy tale would with a man on an outlandish quest. Atta, is determined to find a good robber, however things take a turn for the macabre when instead of being aided he is mugged and beaten to within an inch of his life. The story is riddled with twist such as these which take us from fantasy perspective to a rational one and then back by adding magical elements. This creates a form of ebb and flow in the book as good things such as the money lender finding a new item for his collection, are immediately followed by bad things such as a curse destroying his family. Such movement creates tension and keeps the reader hooked through the story. However the main reason I enjoyed the story was the irony that Rushdie uses. In some places he uses dramatic irony, "Sin" the king of thieves turns out to be an ageing man desperate for money, unbeknownst to the moneylender's kin. In other places the irony is situational such as Sins children bemoaning the fact that they become full bodied by the blessing of the prophets hair as it was easier for them to make money as cripples. In most places Rushdie uses irony to highlight fallacies in our world. Prime among these is that the money lender becomes more religious due to the curse however this is not a good thing as instead of becoming more spiritual the money lender destroys his family and their way of life through his new found orthodoxy. In other places however the twists can be poignant. By the end of the story nearly every character involved is either dead or in horrible condition else than Sin's wife who regained her eyesight through the prophets hair. She alone is happy as she can observe the beauty of Kashmir in her dying days.
To conclude, The Prophets hair is worth reading for the realistic and crooked picture it paints despite its magical elements. Rushdie has managed to create an engaging story that is sometimes funny, sometimes sad and at others poignant and eye opening.

verrrrrry puzzling to say the least, maar interessante ideeën wel

Appended note: (Forgive the pissy tone of this review. I don't know what my problem was.)

The format of this short story collection seems to be a statement itself, and that kind of extra text meta-fictive nonsense pisses me off. If you can't do it with your words alone, then you can't do it, not in a novel or short story anyway.

Rushdie presents three groups of three stories, the first labeled "East" the second "West" and the third "East, West." If we are to take these groupings to represent Rushdie's views or experience of each culture, then he seems to say that the East is too concerned with the external, the wealth, the beauty or power of its inhabitants, the West is too absorbed in an internal dialogue, a sort of masturbatory self examination that makes these three middle tales boring post modern experiments, and that the combination of the two cultures, the two outlooks bring us a great balance of both, the true compromised and fulfilled beauty of literature. He wants to combine the still life painting or poetry of the East with the expressionism of the West. Okay. Sounds fine.

East

In "Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies" a swindler, advice man falls sincerely for a married girl, and her refusal of his advice is the very thing that brings them together. Rushdie's deft quick quaint scenes make this a rough hewn love story, the anti-Dickens ghetto life.

In "The Free Radio" a rickshaw wallah lives an imaginary life with free radio bequeathed by the government, which he always imagines on his shoulder giving him joy, a false promise he never receives. But he lets the dream make him happen and the thief's widow can't break his soul, because he's bound to be a star.

"The Prophet's Hair" posits that the curse of Islam is that it kills everyone, especially those most under its thrall, by telling a perfect Greek tragedy in the slums of Kashmir, filled with fat thieves and fanatics, and meaningless cursed relics.

West

"Yorik" is a shitty John Barth style meta-fiction about Hamlet's court and is quite a letdown in its lack of narrative. This story is basically a disjointed BS session with some erudite references.

In "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers," another meta-fiction, as if Rushdie thinks the West has no reality, only clouded imaginary characters and desires, the ruby slippers represent the grand illusion of the ability of money to be powerful. The narrator, a Westerner, screws his cousin, his "home," as if all Westerners are shrinking tighter into themselves.

"Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabelle" is just another meta-fictive rehash of history, in which the West, specifically America, gets whacked as a seductive, but rude uncultured fly-by-night hobo. Again, there's a lack of immediate action in this story, making room for broad uninteresting generalizations and stupid meaningless punctuation and formatting to cover up weak dialogue.

East, West

In "The Harmony of the Spheres" the devolving madness of an occult expert academic, is framed as a blood chilling relationship piece, Updike in England, where everyone's screwing everyone else's wife. This is a more synthesized internal/external tale. Is Rushdie saying he needs both the East and West to make his fiction complete?

"Chekhov and Zulu" is the tale of two Indian friends, told through connections with Star Trek nicknames they garnered in their youths. The warrior Zulu fights terrorism, and the bureaucrat Chekhov sits behind a desk, and Zulu is always healthier and more successful. There are some fun Tolkien references and it's fun to see such grown Indian nerds.

"The Courter" most fully achieves the crossover of cultures from the previous two stories. A tale about a large Indian family living in England, and specifically about the grandmother falling for the Eastern European door man chess master, this tale is the most "real" of any of these short stories, the most able to be read as a direct literal story, not as some silly experiment. This is closer to Midnight's Children which I loved, than anything else in this book.

Kis rushdieológia, a hármas szám szentségének jegyében, háromszor három novella segítségével:
1.) Az első blokk a keleti tárgyú elbeszélésekből ad ízelítőt: a muzulmán India életképeiből tálalnak nekünk három finomságot. Melegen. Egzotikum, szemernyi misztikum és gazdag mesélőkedv. Kellemes.
2.) Ha egy bevándorló belecsöppen az angolszász kultúrkörbe, falatozik belőle, majd emésztgetni kezdi, mi az első, amit visszaböfög? Alighanem egy Shakespeare-parafrázis. Nem csoda tehát, hogy Rushdie nyugati tárgyú novellái egy Yorick című szösszenettel kezdődnek, amiben írónk saját invenciózus értelmezését adja a Hamletnek. És a többi is valami ilyesmi. Enyhén okoskodó, játékosan modoros szövegek ezek, szerintem a kötet leggyengébb része.
3.) Szerencsére a harmadik blokkban Rushdie visszatér az emberekhez: indiaiakhoz, akik Angliába csöppentek. Kelet és Nyugat konfliktusai jelennek tehát meg ebben a novellatriászban, ami ugye izgalmas dolog, következésképpen nekem ez az egység tetszett legjobban. (Bááár… a triász első elbeszélését a szerző egy bántóan olcsó húzással zárja le.) Ezekből a szövegekből már világos, mitől nagy epikus regényíró Rushdie: apróságokat, marginális eseményeket, mellékszálakat és –szereplőket képes erős színekkel, izgalmasan megragadni, ezzel felettébb oxigéndús szövegteret hozva létre. Szóval a vége jó. Tehát minden jó.

An early collection of geographically separated stories by Salman Rushdie. Comprising of three stories each for the segments East, West and East and West, it's an easy read, but not exactly satisfying. I would have rated it lower had it not been for the final story, The Courter. The story of a hall porter and "courter" of the narrator's ayah Mary, it is borrowed from Rushdie's own complicated life. It has shades of Midnight's Children and some of its poignancy. As such, it is the only one that rings true.

There are a couple of other amusing stories. From the segment East, The Free Radio, of a hapless rickshaw driver who falls into the hands of an unscrupulous widow who makes him dream impossible dreams. Also from East, The Prophet's Hair, the story of a liberal man turning into a conservative monster as soon as he comes upon a hair of the Prophet Mohammed. And from East and West, Chekov and Zulu, of an ideological difference between two Trekkie friends who go by the names Chekov and Zulu.

What makes this story collection almost unpalatable is the whole of West. The three stories that comprise it highlight not so much as the West's (supposed) moral bankruptcy as it does Rushdie's reluctance to go beyond that trope. I expected more of him.

3.5

Why do we lose our minds?

This was my first Rushdie book ever read, and all I can say is that i am very happy for choosing this lecture on a calm Friday afternoon.

The stories are well-written (I have mosly enjoyed the first part - The East, but overall the book is great anyway) and Rushdie knows how to combine words in an excellent mix of a true born story-teller and an exotic thinker.

5/5 stars!

Not sure what to make of this. I really liked ‘The Harmony of the Spheres’, but was just confused and thrown off by the majority of the book. Maybe today’s class will make me understand and appreciate it some more.

Short-story collections can be hit-or-miss, and I feel like it's unfair to assign five stars to any of them in principle because the weaker stories might drag down the quality of the book as a whole, even if the good stories are *really* good. Here's the thing, though; in spite of one or two stories here that didn't quite stick the landing, the good stories are great.

"East, West: Stories" is my first experience of Salman Rushdie in short story form; I've tackled his epic "Midnight's Children" and just recently read "Shame," while I also read "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" about two decades ago, more or less (well, more like fifteen years ago). I'd been thinking about reading some more Rushdie before the year ends, and so I found this collection on the shelf at my local library and checked it out. It's pretty damn good, overall.

The stories are playful, melding styles like magical realism and post-modern wordplay with old-fashioned efforts to explore the world around us. Rushdie is comfortable inhabiting the voices of many different characters, and each story is rendered as a reflection on either the East (India), the West (Europe), or a meeting of the two in the lives of the protagonists. The only story I didn't care for so much was "Chekov and Zulu," but the collection as a whole is great fun and whimsical in ways that I've seen before in his longer fiction. I'd worried that Rushdie might be one of those artists who doesn't work as well on a smaller canvas than what could be afforded through the novel (I feel like Michael Chabon is the poster-child for an author who works best when they're writing something epic-length, and whose shorter fiction doesn't come across as well), but the stories here are fun and just as compelling as the novels that I've read.

A little highbrow for my tastes. Slightly rambling writing style that I struggled to stick with. But it’s Salman Rushdie, so it’s definitely my lack of deeper understanding, rather than than content.

There's always comfort when reading Rushdie. The collection of short stories isn't remarkable- the blurbs expect you to think otherwise. But there are a few standout ones. Home isn't a place, it is a person. And if it was a book, it would be a Rushdie.