The rating was more for the uneven nature of the collection which can come when compiling a decade of criticism and essays. Certainly some of the essays are gems and the entire book is well worth reading.

Mr Rushdie loves ideas and literature, which is his strength. He tends to believe too strongly in his objective leftism, a contradiction if ever there was one, and this is his weakness. His thoughts are interesting and provocative, though not as startling or profound as he believes they are. In spite of these deficiencies, it is difficult to not appreciate and feel some of his enthusiasm for literature and to wish yours were as genuine and long-lived.

Although this is not my type of book, i have enjoyed it. Great book.

In this collection of essays from the 80’s, Salman Rushdie reviews authors, past and present, and political issues, foreign and domestic. Since Rushdie is originally Indian, now British, “foreign” and “domestic” take on shifting meanings. He observes that “Commonwealth Literature” is marginalized in England, but argues that the English language in India and in other post-colonial lands has taken on a life of its own, often appropriating British values and using them to better effect than the British did.

He says that even though the British Empire is no longer, the British have reconstituted the Empire within England. Former subject peoples from India, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere have migrated to England, and Rushdie notes that they are treated as outsiders, even after having been in England for generations. Zadie Smith, another writer with a colonial heritage, writes about the same issues, but always with a relentlessly upbeat and striving take on them. Rushdie takes a more Olympian and pessimistic view of the same struggles.

On a completely different topic, Rushdie offers his opinion of Rudyard Kipling, which compares nicely with the opinions of Edward Said, the author of Orientalism, and of Wendy Doniger, the author of The Hindus. Edward Said argued that Kipling took for granted the colonial assumptions with regard to India, notwithstanding his obvious love for India. Doniger argued that many of the British, including Kipling, appreciated what was good about India, notwithstanding negative interactions as well.

Rushdie’s take is that there were two Kiplings, “Ruddy Baba” and “Kipling Sahib,” the bazaar boy and the colonial Brit. They battle each other, like Jekyll and Hyde, in the novel Kim, and in other stories, and sometimes Ruddy Baba prevails in spite of Kipling Sahib. This is a charming personal interpretation of the struggle of values in Kipling, and allows us to love the Ruddy Baba while questioning the Kipling Sahib.

Rushdie has obviously suffered from his treatment over The Satanic Verses (only three years past in the concluding essay). This leads him to discuss the relations among religion, politics and literature with particular insight, and to defend himself in a way which makes me want to return to the book.

His interactions with authors comparable to himself (as magical realists and as national narrators), such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gunter Grass, are especially revealing. Rushdie always reminds me that intercultural boundaries are where the action is, whether it is in the immigrant experience or in the adjustment to changing times. Reading about making a life in a foreign land is my best guide to making my own life in an unknown future.

☆ 3/5

In the wild haze that was my Rushdie obsession at the beginning of last and the start of this year, I ploughed through this man's entire collected nonfiction. I read his three essay collections in reverse order, which means I started with the most recent and worked my way back to 1981. So Imaginary Homelands, which collects Rushdie's nonfiction from 1981 to 1991, was the last collection that I read. And I loved it a lot. What Rushdie has to say about literature and politics resonates with me on a deep level. Languages of Truth (2003-2020) is still my favorite of the bunch (it will forever hold a special place in my heart) but Imaginary Homelands is super solid as well, highly recommend.

Imaginary Homelands is sorted into 12 sections that each have a distinct focus, e.g. Rushdie looking back at his debut novel Midnight's Children (Section 1), or strong opinion pieces on Indian and Pakistani politics (Section 2) and on the lived realities of migrants living in Britain (Section 5). This book also features some pieces on films and television (Section 4), but the biggest part is taken up by various essays on literature. Essays on writers from Africa (Gordimer, Malan, Farah), Britain (Ishiguro, Barnes, Greene, a.o.), Europe (Calvino, Eco, Grass, a.o.), South America (Márquez, Llosa) and the United States (Roth, Singer, Vonnegut, a.o.) each get their own section. The book closes with some of Rushdie's strongest writings, his initial response to the Satanic Verses fatwa is collected in four scathing essays.

n  Literature is made at the frontier between the self and the world, and in the act of creation that frontier softens, becomes permeable, allows the world to flow into the artist and the artist to flow into the world. Nothing so inexact, so easily and frequently misconceived, deserves the protection of being declared sacrosanct.n

In the title essay, "Imaginary Homelands", Rushdie compares his work Midnight's Children to other works that draw on diaspora as a central theme. He argues that the migrant – whether from one country to another, from one language or culture to another or even from a traditional rural society to a modern metropolis – is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century. He also explains the origin of the title: "It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind." Later, he states: "It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity."

In one of his most famous and controversial essays, "Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist", Rushdie argues that this kind of taxonomy, the urge to separately define writing in English coming out of former colonies (only certain colonies, mind you) serves only to "change the meaning of the far broader term 'English literature' into something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist". Yes, yes, yes. He makes clear that for him all literature written in the English language is English literature. That doesn't mean that it cannot also be Indian literature at the same time. Two things can be true at once. He puts it brilliantly: "There is no incompatibility here. If history creates complexities, let us not try to simplify them." Rushdie admits that he had to repurpose the English language to his own needs. The language went through a metamorphosis through him, and then he made it his own. He reminds us that it is important to never forget that there is a world beyond the community to which you belong, we shouldn't confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers. He ends the essay with the most mic drop moment: "The center does not hold." Uff.

In "Errata", he shares his intention for initially writing Midnight's Children: "When I began the novel (as I've written elsewhere) my purpose was somewhat Proustian. Time and migration had placed a double filter between me and my subject, and I hoped that if I could only imagine vividly enough it might be possible to see beyond those filters, to write as if the years had not passed, as if I had never left India for the West."

"Outside the Whale" is an interesting, and yet again controversial, essay in which Rushdie reckons with the real implications of imperialism for the people of the Indian subcontinent. He writes: "Let me add only that stereotypes are easier to shrug off if yours is not the culture being stereotyped; or, at the very least, if your culture has the power to counterpunch against the stereotype." Later he states: "The modern world lacks not only hiding places, but certainties. There is no consensus about reality between, for example, the nations of the North and of the South. What President Reagan says is happening in Central America differs so radically from, say, the Sandinista version that there is almost no common ground." He ends the essay as follows: "If books and films could be made and consumed in the belly of the whale, it might be possible to consider them merely as entertainment, or even, on occasion, as art. But in our whaleless world, in this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss."

Another brilliant essay is "The New Empire Within Britain". It is scathing and direct and exactly what the British public needed to hear. Rushdie writes: "I want to suggest that racism is not a side-issue in contemporary Britain; that it's not a peripheral minority affair. I believe that Britain is undergoing a critical phase of its post-colonial period, and this crisis is not simply economic or political. It's a crisis of the whole culture, of society's entire sense of itself. And racism is only the most clearly visible part of this crisis, the tip of the kind of iceberg that sinks ships." "British thought, British society, has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It's still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends." "The fact remains that every major institution in this country is permeated by racial prejudice to some degree, and the unwillingness of the white majority to recognize this is the main reason why it can remain the case." It's just banger after banger, really. I literally have nothing to add. "You talk about the Race Problem, the Immigration Problem, all sorts of problems. If you are liberal, you say that black people have problems. If you aren't, you say they are the problem. But the members of the new colony have only one real problem, and that problem is white people. British racism, of course, is not our problem. It's yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your problem. And until you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multicultrualism, or immigration, but simply the business of facing up to and eradication the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new, and last, Empire will be obliged to struggle against you. You could say that we are required to embark on a new freedom movement."

I won't be quoting as extensively from his essays on the works of other writers because I mainly took so many new book recommendations from him but I want to highlight his brilliant essays on Günter Grass ("There are books that open doors for their readers, doors in the head, doors whose existence they had not previously suspected."), Heinrich Böll ("It’s always easier to condemn than to understand.") and Ransmayr ("Metamorphosis, the knowledge that nothing holds its form, is the driving force of art."). Especially the final quote of the Ransmayr essay – "Art can look after itself. Artists, even the highest and finest of all, can be crushed effortlessly at any old tyrant’s whim." – had me almost in tears, it so depressingly prophetic.

And so, then we move along to the 12th and final section and Rushdie just gets to unload all his disgust and disappointment after the Satanic Verses fatwa. This section is hard to read but, my God, it's brilliant. The two standout essays are "In God We Trust", in which he writes: "We now know the ever-expanding cake to be a myth. […] The representative figure of American individualism is no longer that log-cabin-to-White-House President, but rather a lone man with a gun, seeking vengeance against a world that will not conform to his own sense of what has worth.", and "In Good Faith", in which he states that he wrote The Satanic Verses under the assumption that he was a free man. He's exasperated: "He did it on purpose is one of the strangest accusations ever levelled at a writer. Of course I did it on purpose. The question is, and it is what I have tried to answer: what is the ‘it’ that I did?

" "I feel as if I have been plunged, like Alice, into the world beyond the looking-glass, where nonsense is the only available sense. And I wonder if I'll ever be able to climb back through the mirror." It's horrible to think that he was never able to do that fully, the fatwa will accompany him until the day he dies. He ends the essay with a powerful assertion: "I am a writer. I do not accept my condition. I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it."

In "Is Nothing Sacred?", he writes: "And this, finally, is why I elevate the novel above other forms, why it has always been, and remains, my first love: not only is it the art involving the least compromises, but it is also the only one that takes the ‘privileged arena’ of conflicting discourses right inside our heads. The interior space of our imagination is a theatre that can never be closed down; the images created there make up a movie that can never be destroyed."

I have a soft spot for Rushdie, he reminds me of a particular period in my life. I don't find him as impressive as I used to. He has a tendency for the grandiose statements and posturing. He is still good company though. Very enjoyable, very humane.

The essays in this collection (collection published 2010, works within published 1981-1991) are useful and interesting in the way that it is interesting to view the issues and thinking of yesteryear, to remind or educate oneself of elements of the zeitgeist that have been largely forgotten.

However, the literary criticism in Imaginary Homelands is much more voluminous. Book reviews neither attain nor acquire relevance the way social commentary can so I question the publisher's decision to collect so many of them in this volume. (I question my own decision to read through them all--admittedly with varying levels of attention.) Collected commentary is the kind of thing you might want to assemble near or after the author's death but even as a kind of retrospective, it wouldn't be very interesting. I concede that it was interesting to read Rushdie's views on books and authors with which I am already familiar (maybe 30% of them) and perhaps I will get around to reading a few of the other authors.

I am not sure when, or where, I found my copy of this book. I do not know how long it sat, ignored, on my bookshelf. What I do know is, when I needed it, it was there, and literally fell into my hands. Of course, I knew of Mr. Rushdie, but had never read anything by him. My education has begun.

Most of these 75 or so essays are short, some just a couple of pages, but all of them require thought while reading them, and several require thought after reading them; at least for me. As one reviewer noted, this is not a book to take to the gym. His insights on colonialism are fascinating. His insights on the Ghandis, Pakistan, cultures I knew little-to-nothing about were spell-binding. The articles about contemporary authors were not only interesting, but often humorous, and always enlightening.

But the articles in the last section were, for me, the most eye-opening. These were the ones where he discussed the fatwa against him, what he meant when he wrote The Satanic Verses, and the duplicity of the imams even when they agreed with him, shook his hand, said they would help reverse the fatwa, and didn't. What is a human life worth? What is a man's word worth? What is a friend worth?

The writing in these essays is often lyrical. It is always clear, and easily read and understood. I highly recommend this book for anyone with a curiosity about how our world, and those who inhabit it, think and work. Beautiful writing, and I can hardly wait for my copy of Step Across This Line... to arrive.

The literary essays are quintessential Rushdie - insightful, thought-provoking, and even comical. They're definitely worth a read. The rest of the book, especially the notes on other authors, reads a bit like a personal diary. Interesting in some places but mostly not worth more than one -- and, in some cases, not even one -- read.

IMAGINARY HOMELANDS is a collection of Salman Rushdie's writings from 1981 to 1991. They include essays, book reviews, interviews, and random musings dating from the beginning of his popularity after his novel MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN until the third anniversary of the death fatwa pronounced on him by the Ayatollah Khomeini for his book THE SATANIC VERSES.

As with any collection of essays, IMAGINARY HOMELANDS is inconsistent and not every essay will interest every reader. However, there's sure to be a lot of gems here for fans of Rushdie. The literary legacy of the 1980's is quickly being erased from the popular memory, and readers today are forgetting the output of that underappreciated decade. There are reviews here range from one of Graham Greene's last novels to physics superstar Stephen Hawking's A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME. Reading IMAGINARY HOMELANDS today is important to refresh one's knowledge of the 1980's from a literary standpoint. Also, Rushdie proves himself again a man deeply troubled by oppression. He often mentions Pakistan's ruthless US-supported General Zia, and in "A Conversation with Edward Said" deals with the issue of Palestinian identity. His review of V.S. Naipaul's "Among the Believers", a journal of travels through the new Islamic states that sprung up in the 80's, and his two essays on the reaction of Muslims to THE SATANIC VERSES are helpful works to read in this time when dealing with Islamic extremism is such a driving force in international relations. Critics have often found Salman Rushdie hard to classify, wondering if he is an Indian or British writer, or a "Commonwealth" novelist, and Rushdie confronts the madness of classifying everything in "There Is No Such Thing As Commonwealth Literature".

If you enjoyed greatly the wry irony of THE SATANIC VERSES and other Rushdie novels, IMAGINARY HOMELANDS may interest you. While it won't engage the average reader, fans of Rushdie will get a lot out of this collection.

“Many years ago, Kurt Vonnegut asked me if I was serious about writing. I said I was. He then said, if I remember correctly, that there was trouble ahead, that one day I would not have a book to write and I would still have to write a book.

It was a sad, and saddening remark.”