Mi-a placut foarte mult, eseuri extraordinar de bine scrise. Am sa ii reiau pe cativa dintre autorii mentionati si pe care nu i-am apreciat probabil cum ar fi trebuit la prima citire.
Un citat din nenumaratele care mi-au placut: "O clipa de intuneric nu ne va orbi."

Salman Rushdie is a notorious name-dropper, or I must be simply unaware about the major chunk of literature that he enjoys and sometimes reveres. If this is the popular culture out there, then I must be the ostrich with my head in the ground. Or I can always say that it is the late 80s he’s talking about – a period in which I wasn’t even born, my libraries aren’t build around the books of authors he critiques in the pages of Imaginary Homelands .
But of course, Imaginary Homelands has much more to do with people, politics, religion and popular culture, trying to paint an understanding of the conflict between ideas of orthodox stasis and malleable flexibility of all that is modern and secular, the anguish of being uprooted from the homelands across time and geography, of wanting to hold to the past and wanting to embrace the future. Imaginary Homeland is a personal quest of an immigrant caught in the crossfire of Western cynicism and Eastern intractability, being shaped by the conflicting narratives of both while making a brave attempt to shape them, in turn. A finance guy looks at the world through numbers, Salman Rushdie thinks everyone to be an immigrant caught in a struggle between control and release. In these pages, according to my humble opinion, he tries to fit the world to his hypothesis.
And just like Salman Rushdie actively encourages his readers to do in one of the essays, I will not hold the book and its central theme to be absolute truth (while considering the medium/the channel/the stage to be sacrosanct). While I understand and feel for his predicament (after the issuance of fatwa for Satanic Verses ), I fail in my attempt to empathize – because I couldn’t think of a similar experience in my own sundry life. While his vantage point as an immigrant does have certain distinct advantages – he is bang-on about the rise of a Hindu narrative of India, censorship and maybe about the apathetic, passive racism in the West (being in India all my life, I wouldn’t have experienced it); but I feel that he embraces more of West, and rejects more of East with each passing page. He rejects the tag of being a “commonwealth” author – and it gets my goat not because he is resisting some imperial, old-empire prejudice, but for his keen desire to belong to the West and its literary culture. While he eagerly talks about the politics of his old, imaginary homelands of India and Pakistan and maybe rightly criticizes them, the ideals and inspirations and aspirations that he holds dear as an author and a human being are largely western. It might be argued that the authors whose books he critiques in these pages are from around the world, but they are “West-approved” discoveries which he talks about in a gleeful, dervish-delight.
He calls himself an immigrant, nurtured in the cauldron of mishmash cultures. I do not mind him criticizing India and its culture and its politics, but that he does that in that snobbish accent of his - infuriates me.

Ενδιαφέρουσα επιλογή άρθρων, η οποία δεν περιορίζεται στη λογοτεχνική κριτική, αλλά επεκτείνεται και σε μια ποικιλία άλλων θεμάτων: πολιτική, ιστορία, τέχνες, πρόσωπα...

This is an interesting book of criticism which I got virtually free at a library discard sale. It gives the author's thinking and opinions on all kinds of works, mostly from the late 70's and 1980's. It was definitely worth reading.

Col

Salman Rushdie could write about a slice of bread and make it sound interesting. This is an amazing feat, to be able to demonstrate novelty in the mundane, accomplished only by virtue of an astonishing writing talent and a fiercely thoughtful mind.

Of course when I finally read a compilation of Rushdie's essays from the eighties, this fact is propounded by manifolds. Here we have beliefs and not just make-beliefs as the author himself points out in one of his defenses of The Satanic Verses(included in this volume), as the novel is frequently aimed at achieving.

I will refrain from calling this collection eclectic because the writings have a careful pattern. Most of them are to do with identity, religion, the migrant experience. There is a section in the middle where he reviews a good number of books and their authors and ultimately finishing with the book that brought him notoriety and fame and heartbreak and affirmation.

To be honest, this is my special interest so I greatly appreciated reading the pieces on migration and identity politics. Rushdie is lucid in his identification of the dark underbelly of post colonial Britain dealing with masses of its ex colonial subjects proliferating it's social binds and embracing home the colonial subjugators who have been driven out from different corners of the world. He also ruthlessly unembellished in identifying his own integration into their white world is due to his freakish white complexion, social class and English English accent and not the famous English senses of tolerance.

It is not all anger though. He ruminates ruefully about the homeland that he and by choice all migrants leave behind. The messy ocean that he creates on the pages of his novels is the sea that was underneath his bedroom window in his childhood Bombay and it is the same sea that he carries with him wherever he goes. It is difficult to remember a more sublime description of the immigrant experience of alienation and discovery, of the power memory and perceptions.

It is important to note this volume contains four or five essays of then contemporary India and Pakistan and the volatile socio-political circumstances, the censorship and the autocratic tendencies, that perhaps contributed to people of certain aptitudes leaving their homeland. I believe these are great for contextualizing a certain period in history, especially for someone with subcontinental origins.

I have tried hard to be concise but I cannot finish without mentioning the interview with Edward Said, Rushdie's convictions on Satyajit Ray's films and their acceptability, a scathing review of VS Naipaul's among the believers (which I will read now) and a most ghastly account of a conference of Commonwealth writers, if ever there was a thing as such.

I have thoroughly enjoyed his musings on religion, the one abiding factor that he has not been blessed to escape in his lifetime, even though he is vehemently irreligious and irreverent to it.

Most of all I recommend this book because of the age old maxim, good books bring you more good books.

I pick this book up....I put it down....etc, etc..... Rushdie is always a pleasure to read and this book of non-fiction essays is easy to read over a long period of time.

I just picked it up, again. I'm at page 173 of 479 pages. LL 3 Apr GZ

Salman Rushdie is genius.

This is a good read for someone who likes Salman Rushdie's fiction and wants insights into the personal views of the person, beyond what can be inferred from his fiction. A series on essays and criticisms on diverse issues of importance to a person reveals much more about a person than a biographical work can (of course, most of the essays are from before the Satanic Verses Fiasco, and the person etched out from those essays is most definitely from the person who was born from that unfortunate incident).

The essays strongly reveal Rusdhie's faith in secularism (stemming from a almost childlike belief of the Secular India that was the vision on the founding fathers of the nation) and his life views stemming from his life as a migrant. The essays near the end of the collection are from after the controversy and make for very gripping reading - first, the motivation that led Rushdie to write the Satanic Verses and what the book was really supposed to embody, and second, the chilling experience of a man who has been sentenced to death, a sentence which can never be revoked and who must live in hiding and constant fear from assassins.

The book is also a treasure chest of excellent author and work reviews, some of the books reviewed in this collection, which I went on to read and found very impressive or will go on to read in the near future are:

1. The Master and Margarita
2. Among the Believers : An Islamic Journey
3. CITIES ON A HILL
4. The Golden Ass
5. Slaughterhouse-Five
6. Later the Same Day
7. The Death of Methuselah: and Other Stories
8. Dispatches
9. Legs
10. Billy Bathgate
11. The Safety Net
12. The Tin Drum
13. Gravity's Rainbow
14. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
15. The Complete Cosmicomics
16. Invisible Cities
17. Our Ancestors: The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight
18. Gemini
19. In Patagonia
20. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
21. Another Day of Life
22. Maps
23. My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience

A lot easier to appreciate Rushdie’s fiction and the care that goes into it after learning the philosophy behind the man

He read a lot; that's what I thought when I read this. Rushdie is one of the genius plus diligent. He talks about politics which intersects with his identity. Interesting reading.

A very good collection of articles.