Word: shalimar
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...very first page of Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie's new novel, the reader has a horrible presentiment that a literary disaster is in the making. Rushdie is trying to describe a woman speaking in her sleep: she is "like Sigourney Weaver channeling a demon in Ghostbusters." This is the kind of bathos?the desperation to prove his hipness by making asinine references to pop culture?that helped sink Rushdie's last novel, Fury, generally acknowledged to be the worst he has written. After a first-page blunder like this, it requires a leap of faith simply to turn...
...Shalimar the Clown could also have been called "Fury", but the anger in this book is of an entirely different kind. The novel is an allegory of the rape of Kashmir, told as a story of love's betrayal and vengeance. When we first land in it, Rushdie's Kashmir is paradise. In this bucolic valley, Muslims live in peace with their Hindu neighbors and share a common culture, woven of Indian and Islamic traditions. Embodying this syncretic culture is Pachigam, a village of theatrical performers and cooks, where a tightrope walker nicknamed Shalimar has fallen in love with...
...Salman Rushdie hadn't been sentenced to death by Ayatullah Khomeini and if he weren't chummy with the likes of Kylie Minogue, he would be famous merely for being one of the world's greatest living writers. He chats with TIME's Lev Grossman about his new novel, Shalimar the Clown (coming in September), the crisis in Kashmir, the nature of tragedy and the future of the Klingon race...
...SHALIMAR IS A VERY FUNNY BOOK, BUT IT'S NOT A HAPPY ONE, IS IT? INDIVIDUALS STRUGGLE AGAINST HUGE POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL FORCES, AND THE FORCES PRETTY MUCH...
THERE'S A LINE ABOUT KLINGONS ON THE VERY FIRST PAGE OF SHALIMAR. AREN'T YOU WORRIED THAT A POP REFERENCE LIKE THAT WILL DATE THE BOOK...