3.5*

After drinking a magic potion, an outcast Amerind becomes immortal. Eventually tired of his wandering, purposeless life, he searches for the man who gave him the potion and ran off with his adopted sister. He ends in another dimension ruled by Grimus, peopled entirely by immortals. An odd book indeed: Rushdie’s first novel is a bizarre, semi-mystical science fantasy. From this evidence, I wouldn’t predict that its author would go on to win the Booker Prize. It’s not bad — there are a few unaccountable bits of whimsy, not much attempt to ground the fantastic elements with realistic reactions by the players, more than a few loose ends — but on the whole an enjoyable enough dark drama.

La storia di un uomo condannato all'immortalità per sua stessa scelta, che diventa nella sua odissea per sbarazzarsi della stessa lo stesso lettore condannato a seguire il percorso stabilito dall'autore, che potrebbe virtualmente tenerlo schiavo in eterno nel suo romanzo. Un guazzabuglio di romanzo d'avventura, fantasy, storico e meta-letterario che non smette mai di stupire per la sua semplicità, efficacia e il suo incredibile sviluppo.

Li boas e más críticas a este livro antes de começar a leitura e confesso que fiquei um pouco "preocupado" com algumas das más críticas...Mas no fim do livro posso dizer que embora não seja dos melhores livros que já li, é bastante bom de se ler!A história tem qualquer coisa que nos prende,embora consiga ser um pouco "surrealista" por vezes...Acho que a menção na capa do livro de "combinação entre fantasia científica, fábula e folclore"é realmente uma excelente definição para este livro!3 estrelas quase a chegarem a 4,por isso optei por dar 4 estrelas!

TL;DR Rushdie is very clever, with plenty of good ideas, but is held back by some miserable writing, character choices, and inability to focus in on some of the more interesting things about his own story.

Tw: sexual assault

Plenty of spoilers below. More of a criticism than a “review” per se.

Grimus is the story of Flapping Eagle—a young “Amerindian” who gains the gift of immortality after fucking his sister. Technically she gives him a potion that the man we eventually find out is called Grimus gives her—but he does fuck his sister, and he does it very early on in the novel as a rite of passage. Before the immortality. But still.

If you were interested in what would happen to the character and meaning in a person’s life after they become immortal, and then got turned off of reading because of the sister fucking, you just had an experience that echoes most of mine with the book. Rushdie introduces something interesting, and then drops it for a strange sex scene or a non-sequitur. Genuinely, I feel like I might be missing something with some of these sequences so if I’m the moron here, tell me. There are just so many places—including the first stint with immortality at Livia Cramm’s that just happen for so long, mean nothing, and are over.

The book constantly assures us that Flapping Eagle, our main character, is the bringer of destruction, a being with pure chaos inside of him that will bring death to Calf Island—a different dimension that’s home of the town of K, a strange place full of other immortal people who must remain obsessed with their day to day life to avoid the deadly “Grimus Effect” (more on that later). He just… never really does any of that? He doesn’t have many personality traits, interests, or personal motivations beyond finding his sister who fucked off and presumably went to Calf Island with Grimus many years ago. Even then, he drops that whenever it’s more convenient for him to hang out with the weirdos in K. He does end up destroying the whole dimension, but it’s basically an accident. In general, he’s mostly callous and stoic, but without anything behind that veneer.

One of the most interesting things, conceptually, about immortality, is how does a human life change when the stakes are no longer there? The residents of K sort of get around this problem by being forced to live life as it were to avoid the Grimus Effect. Flapping Eagle, however, gets to spend his time on earth for the most part. 700 years of his life go by in a page. He says he fought wars, did all sorts of debauchery, and saw many people die. The detachedness with which this is written could be incredibly interesting—an emotionless man who, after multiple lifetimes, is simply not impressed by what the world has to offer. Or a man so beaten by watching the world go by and effectively not being part of it that he can only be deadpan to the hurt. But, no, he kinda has regular emotions that are just dulled because..? I don’t really know? He’s just like that. Flapping Eagle doesn’t work on the level of an interesting protagonist, nor does he work on the level of a Harry Potter type that’s supposed to mostly serve as a reader-insert. He occupies this weird middle spot that just left me not really caring about what happens to him.

Rushdie’s blending of mythologies is fine in the sense that it’s accurate as far as I can tell, there’s too much source material and I just don’t know it all, but I can’t help but feel like he’s missing the point. Mythologies, stories, parables, are easily accessible but endlessly deep to their audiences. Regardless of your beliefs, I think we can admit that religious stories move people’s souls because they can be understood at any point in one’s life and endlessly reinterpreted. Children can understand the stories in the Old Testament, but Christian and Jewish scholars have debated and reinterpreted these stories for literally thousands of years with millions of different interpretations. “Mythology”, defined loosely as just religious lore, is as personal as it is universal.

Grimus, as a novel, turns that on its head. The mythologies are abstract and obscure, but once you track down the references to real life ones, or get your head into the actual mythology of Calf Island, there’s just not much more to say than, well, it exists.

In Grimus, the alien race of The Gorfs provides a microcosm of these last two problems. Supposedly, they are the ancient immortal alien race that created the Stone Rose, which links together multiple universes and potentialities. I think this is, inherently, interesting. They also have this obsession with ordering, that all should be in the right order, which makes them a perfect foil to Grimus’s chaotic human experimenting on Calf Island. But the two don’t interact except for one time at the end, and there are no real conflicts between their ideologies in the book.

The real pisser is the Gorf’s obsession with anagram—an extension of their fixation on ordering and reordering. They can even “anagrammatically alter their own environment”. Despite desperately wishing I could tell you what this means, Rushdie never goes into it other than to say it could happen. Their game of Anagrammer could be so damn interesting and fun from a reader’s perspective—the chance to work out some literal puzzles while reading, OR, it could be a chance for Rushdie to really flex his literary abilities and give us some complex anagrams just to show that he can do it. Sadly, mostly what we get is Gorf’s (frogs) lead by the Gorf Dota (Toad) on the planet Thera (earth) in the Gorf Nirveesu (frog universe). There’s one extended anagram in the book that’s rather cool, so I’ll throw it here.

The chiefest question, the most important one to the Gorfs for a long time is:

“And are we actually to be the least intelligent race in our Endimions?” (Last word an anagram for dimension, not just a cop out for the letters).

And it’s answered:

“Determine how catalytic an elite is; use our talent and learning-lobe.”

But that’s really it despite the fact that they show up a couple of times. It’s a cool, complex concept that’s dropped too fast to get to the next thing, and provides no real contemplative depth like a fucking alien race that acts completely differently than humans should.

The sex in the novel is distracting, barely readable, and goes into territory that is just offensive. Barring a deep investigation of when Flapping Eagle revenge rapes the image of his religion’s goddess in a different dimension (no joke, the book literally reads "And then he raped her.", a ton of page count is spent on a brothel in K. It’s so often dry, so often overly written, and yet somehow still indulgent. It’s really a stain on the middle of the book.

My favorite least favorite plot line is where Flapping Eagle makes two women cheat on their wives with him, and then claims the peak of his life is when he is fucking one of them, imagines the other one, and says that he was finally with a “complete woman”. It’s objectively more nuanced than that in the novel but it’s too fucked up and embarrassing to deep dive into.

The whole sequence of interacting with the other immortal people is just interspersed with these terribly written, terribly times, deeply unsexy sex scenes that make most of the middle of the novel a blur for me. In general, though, characters are introduced and dropped and rementioned at such a pace that it’s impossible to get a sense of any of them.

In general actually, the novel suffers from some pretty piss poor pacing, never seeming to want to take the time to get into deeper character moments, interesting multidimensional lore (there’s barely anything about any other dimensions exist but Calf Mountain, regular Earth, and Thera), landscape, philosophy, instead it opts over and over to spend its page count on poorly written sex scenes and cruelty toward some of the kinder characters (If I could take Ignatius Gribb and Virgil Jones out of this book and place them in their own novel I’d be so happy).

Ultimately, when Grimus himself arrives on the scene after being a shadow over the whole novel, he brings nothing but disappointment.

Grimus’s characterization, to me, is paradoxical. He’s characterized as this megalomaniac playing a human experiment on the people of K, but he mostly just acts like a whiny child. Let me be clear: it takes Grimus a lot of effort in the lore of the book to keep up this experiment.

But if Grimus has the personality to carefully construct this reality from the Stone Rose and maintain it every day, it doesn’t really track that he’d continue this with such minimal interference when he’s so childish. You’d imagine him more as a Loki figure.

If he wasn’t this way from the beginning, and, as is sort of implied, he grew into this childishness from a lack of existential consequences, you’d think he wouldn’t have the ability to keep it up for so long. And I guess he doesn’t, as he does get himself killed. He just frankly seems much too dumb about it for a 700 year old who claims to be researching the universe, and who has the access and time to visit every possible dimension and every possible potentiality.

Flapping Eagle thinks, “Grimus: a baby with a bomb. Or a whole veiled arsenal of bombs.” He’s just too childlike to be anything but a baby, and yet he is.

The thing that kills me is that Flapping Eagle brings up the problem that anyone would immediately think of—doesn’t the Grimus Effect, the radiating power and time-weirdness from Grimus’s subdimension at the top of Calf Mountain, affect the result of this “experiment?” Grimus’s answer is basically, no, because fuck you I don’t care. It’s so frustrating because he seems to randomly care or not care about the validity of his experiment, and if the answer is “it’s because he’s unpredictable and crazy after being alive so long or because that’s how he is he’s a mad scientist weehaw!”, I’m bored to tears. He's 700 some, he should be more interesting.

The reason I end up with 2 stars is because there really is so much potential in so many of these ideas. The cross cultural mythology and it’s connection to multidimensional travel and ideas, the reflection of capitalism within a society of people who are forced to keep their heads down and obsess over the little things so they can’t meaningfully challenge an all powerful being, the game of Anagrammer, so much potential. It’s just note executed well enough as a novel.

The ultimate problem with Grimus is this: As clever as Rushdie may be, as deftly as he may have employed interesting hybridizations of culture (Most interesting is Calf Mountain = Kaf Mountain, Grimus named it the Arabic ك‎ but the white people butchered it, the town of K which is pronounced the same in both langauge,), as many cool little sparks of genius and philosophy he includes in Grimus, he does not provide a compelling narrative or characters. There is room for that sort of play in literature, but it does not read as though it’s intentional here. The lack of coherency reads more as though the characters and narrative in Grimus are Rushdie’s way of selling his ideas as a fiction book instead of a work of philosophy.

I know I have more to say, but this is so long and I’m getting super tired, so I’ll leave it at that—for now.

Peace.

3.5 stars
Grimus is Salman Rushdie���s first novel. Part fantasy, part folk-tale, and part science fiction, this book is a blend of mythology, mysticism, and religious symbolism. The book tells the tale of Flapping Eagle, a Native American man who becomes immortal and wanders the world for 777 years, 7 months, and 7 days until he attempts suicide and ends up in another world (a parallel dimension). The book is based on a 12th century Sufi poem and covers themes of human identity and meaning.

This was my first Rushdie book and in retrospect was probably a strange book to chose as my first Rushdie book. What a wacky book! The book was like nothing I���ve every read before but I really enjoyed it for reasons I can���t quite describe. I���m sure many people who read this book will hate it because at times it seems nonsensical. There are flaws in the book (I think he tries to pack too much in the book to the point that the story line becomes convoluted at times), but interspersed with the moments of nonsense there were some real gems. Rushdie raises some interesting questions in this book about human nature, spirituality, and cultural isolation. I enjoyed thinking about the issues he raised and loved seeing the parallels with other works of literature. In many ways, the book structure parallels Dante���s Divine Comedy. There are three parts, a guide called Virgil, and parallels between the travels through various circles to reach ���Heaven.��� I decided to re-read the Divine Comedy while reading this book and it made the reading experience much more meaningful. I am less knowledgeable about the other religious/spiritual material he draws from so I think I missed out on a lot of the other references that were made in this book.

Funny how even at the time Rushdie published this, his first book, (1975] the multiverse concept had creeped beyond hardcore physics and sci-fi. Although panned by critics I found it a good read, with flawed characters with whom you find yourself empathizing. A ridiculous plot line that nontheless provides food for thought.

This was Rushdie's first novel and it's very much a journeyman work. He does use the magical realism vehicle that he uses much better effect in later novels (such as the excellent  Midnight's Children and  The Satanic Verses). It's difficult to identify themes that that he would come back to so it's best to just look at this as it comes.

Flapping Eagle takes the elixir of immortal life, after his sister is first given it and spends the next several hundred years wandering the world, after her disappearance. Eventually he finds his way to Calf Island, which exists somewhere between dimensions and eventually to a confrontation with the eponymous Grimus.

The characters that Flapping Eagle encounters on his journey are mostly just caricatures, without much in the way of depth, although Flapping Eagle's companion and guide Virgil Jones does get more development.

I think that Rushdie may have been going for somewhere between gothic and grand guignol in this novel, and to some degree he's managed it, but at the expense of any warmth or engaging characters. Flapping Eagle is a difficult character to warm to, as his motivations and thoughts mostly go unreported, and his actions are often less than endearing. Rushdie's writing here is workmanlike but he's still developing a craft. It's not yet the polished and poetic style that it would develop into.

So mostly worth reading if you're a fan of Rushdie to see how his writing developed, but it doesn't really stand up to his later work either in plot or in the writing.

The book was a huge disappointment. Rushdie shows glimpses of his lyrical prose but that is just about it. Asinine story, drab characters and Rushdie's imagination run amok. Though it was his first book , not a good book at all to get introduced to his work.

Interesting concepts of magic realism intertwined with Native American mythos made for a confusing but entertaining ride. Initially thought Rushdie was a political essayist but this book threw those expectations away immediately lol

i like in theory the mashup between all religions and mythologies and a thousand literary allusions
but it's pretty hard to actually read it. this is his first novel, maybe it gets better with the satanic verses or midnight's children. or maybe it doesn't because this is just his style and that's fine. but - good in theory, killer to read

I was surprised how disjointed this first novel of Salman Rushdie was. If I didn't know any better and didn't know who Rushdie was, I'd probably stop right here. This was the first book of his I've read. It doesn't want me to read anything else by him. But I do know better, so I'll probably explore a little more, althought I'm not sure if I should move on to his second novel or jump to The Satanic Verses.