Imaginary Homelands

A critical, at times poignant analyses about religion, Indian-Pakistani politics, multiculturality, the role of literature and the works of several great writers. definitively worth a read, even if you're only interested in some of those topics.

I'll keep repeating, "for God's sake, open the universe a little more!"
Rushdie is one of his kind, as I have been knowing him long time ago :) and no more is there to be said.

This is a fine collection of essays that encapsulates a writer’s musings over an eventful decade in his life: from his Booker win to the fatwa declared upon him.

Made up of a collection of reviews, political observations of mainly India and the UK, interviews, travels in Australia, critical appraisals of fellow writers of renown (of course, all of them have their limitations according to Salman), musings on religion, and to a final defence of his most controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, Rushdie is insightful and incite-full, humorous and critical, and it’s hard to pin him down, as he seems to be a writer in full intellectual flight during this period, dabbling everywhere, exploring every issue worth exploring, which makes this book compelling reading.

I found his appraisals of other writers to be a bit one-sided; of course, no one can write as good as Rushdie, they seemed to say. But I found some interesting titbits to add to my authors’ trivia collection: Garcia Maquez had 15000 copies of his book Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor burned in Valparaiso; Raymond Carver beat alcohol only to succumb to cigarettes; Proust and Kafka did not travel widely, yet had the breadth and depth of imagination to roam the gamut of human experience like world-weary travellers; Gunther Grass was the artist of uncertainty, having to migrate from Nazism to post-war Germany; Naipaul was superficial in his analysis of the resurgence of Islam in his book Among the Believers.

Among the political observations, I saw a strident call for the recognition and abolishing of racism in Britain that seemed to be at a high during that decade: “the Empire has been brought back to England where the pukka sahibs can continue to lord it over the locals (immigrants, this time around); the cult of individualism in the USA has generated more Oswalds than Lincolns; politics works on linear time while religion works on messianic time (i.e. past, present and future are integrated and circular) and therefore the two need to be separate; Pakistan is a failed state built on an insufficiently imagined idea.”

As for the novel and literature: the novel must be an idiosyncratic view of the world, not a representational one (I think readers need to be educated on this one too!); the novel has no rules, it must be transgressive and subversive; the market economy reduces books to products; literature is the least likely to be externally controlled (unlike cinema) because it is created in private by a single person; the colonial writer has infused the English language with a multitude of thoughts, rhythms, words and phrases, enriching what was previously tightly circumscribed. And writers’ conferences are the same no matter the calibre of writers assembled, where everyone drinks a lot, talks a lot, roams about the new locale with a critical eye, and “fertilizes” other writers - whatever that means!

The final section is Rushdie’s defence of The Satanic Verses. He goes onto explain the book and the meaning behind his imagery and symbols, asserting that it is a book of dissent not of abuse and insult. And yet, magic realism being what it is, imagery can be confusing and open to misinterpretation, and a writer having to explain his creation is self-defeating. When dealing with subjects such as religion, fanatics do not have the depth to plumb the “why” of the writer, they only see the “what” that is on the page, and Rushdie paid dearly with the fatwa declared upon him for this serious miscalculation.

Reading this book I was reminded of blogging that came into being long afterwards. If Rushdie was unknowingly experimenting with a form of blogging in the 80’s, then this book is testament to that effort.

Fantastic collection of essays.

"... apa yang dihasilkan oleh seorang penulis dalam sebuah kamar yang hening adalah hal yang sukar untuk dihancurkan oleh kekuasaan."

Like Bruce Chatwin's book of essays Anatomy of Restlessness, this book changed my world view. i love his perspective, he is very articulate, and a great story teller.

Oh boy, Rushdie can definitely write.

I must say that I am biased: Salman Rushdie has been one of my favorite authors ever since I encountered n  The Satanic Versesn. I've always admired a person who would be willing to question everything, and hold nothing sacred. I have followed the whole controversy relatively late, as I was still too young to appreciate the things at stake when the Salman Rushdie affair exploded in the early 1990s. Anyway, I have read about it later, and since I could Rushdie as one of my favorite authors, I tend to get excited when I find my hands on a book of his.

Like this one, which is a collection of essays and criticism that were written between 1981 and 1991. He gathers together plenty of essays, grouped into 12 different topics, ranging from politics in South Asia, to authors from various parts of the world, to the Satanic Verses controversy. And perhaps the thing I appreciate the most with this book is that I can see how a brilliant mind like Rushdie's can critique a book.

The nice thing about this is that I am rather familiar with several of the authors that he critiques. It also provides me an alternative perspective on things, which is always valuable. For example, he apparently hated Umberto Eco's writings: even though I liked it, I can see why he arrived at a different conclusion than mine. The same can be said on our diverging opinions about George Orwell and Henry Miller.

Another thing I liked is that this book provided me with leads on other interesting authors to read. There are authors that I haven't encountered before, such as Italo Calvino, Nuruddin Farah, among others. And reading what Rushdie had to say about these authors made me want to bookmark it for future reading.

Anyway, there might be areas where Rushdie and I do not converge, but the important thing is that divergent ideas is okay. This is his main point especially with the Satanic Verses controversy. Censorship is a negative thing: literature is one area where we can entertain diverging ideas in the privacy of our own head. And to explicitly hinder a particular voice when that voice happens to be different from your own is not going to produce positive results. I always see this in the context of cults, after all, I escaped one. If there are things that are too sacred to question, then how do you know that your belief is indeed strong, when you are afraid to put it to the test by looking at opposing theses?

Of course I liked this book. I give it 5 out of 5 stars. It's not fiction, but it is recommended reading to get a glimpse into the mind of one of the best writers of our time.

See my other book reviews here.

dapat buku Salman Rusdhie berisikan essays dan criticism....:)