Light On Dark Water

52 Authors, Week 3: Salman Rushdie

It is not necessary to know very much about India and Pakistan, Hindus and Muslims, or have any working knowledge of their languages and dialects to find Salman Rushdie’s books enjoyable–simply a love of literature, and the beautiful writing that can be accomplished with the English language. Take this opening section from Midnight’s Children:

One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history. Unaware of this at first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled the prayer-mat into a thick cheroot, and holding it under his right arm surveyed the valley through clear, diamond-free eyes.

I have been sitting at my computer reading and re-reading this passage wondering what to say about it. It is so rich in everything that is Rushdie to me: magical realism (the rubies and diamonds); religion (the prayer-mat, god or man, a “vacancy”); Indian history (the story begins in Kashmir, a region of India which Pakistan lays claim to); and humor. The funny part is that despite his recently completed medical training, Dr. Aziz does not recognize the “heart-hole” made by his decision to forego his former religion.

I love reading Salman Rushdie! He is one of those few authors that I hold back reading their books because once I have that initial experience it cannot be repeated. But I have read Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses several times each. These are his two most famous books, but for very different reasons. The former was the 1981 winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction; and then in 1993 was awarded the Booker of Bookers, or, the best novel ever awarded the Booker prize. The Satanic Verses though, is how I and many others initially came to know who this Salman Rushdie troublemaker was.

I still remember in 1988 going to my local bookstore in North Miami, Florida (back when small stores like this were more prevalent) to buy a copy of this book which was causing such discontent amongst Muslims around the world. The owner of this store had hardback copies of The Satanic Verses in brown paper bags behind the counter, one of which I purchased. I read through it, though not really understanding what I was reading, or what any of it meant. When asked about it by my contemporaries I probably remarked something along the lines that the writing was very vivid and wonderful, but I wasn’t really sure what it is about. Now that I am more than twice as old as I was then, a more mature reader, and more familiar with Rushdie and his worldview, I do have some idea; but the book remains strange, mysterious, beautiful, and more elusive than Midnight’s Children, or most of his other novels.

The last time I re-read The Satanic Verses I remember feeling very deeply affected by a scene at the very end where Saladin Chamcha returns to India to care for his estranged father who is dying of cancer. I wrote in my reading journal that these passages were in their way more powerful to me than Leo Tolstoy’s great novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. After glancing over this passage, I think I will spare all of you a quote from it. Think pain, destruction of the body by disease, and love.

This morning while thinking about Rushdie I could not help but realize how topical he remains as long as freedom of speech is in short supply in so many places around the world. The attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo just a few days ago is a direct correlation to the entire Rushdie/Ayatollah Khomeini affair from the late 1980s; and it seems that no progress has been made. Rushdie wrote about his experience of nine years in hiding and protection by the British Secret Intelligence Service in his book Joseph Anton: A Memoir. The book is written in the third person, perhaps in a conscious effort by Rushdie to distance himself from these memories and that period of his life. It has its detractors because of this, but having always been interested in this little piece of pre-911 history, I found it quite fascinating.

In closing I would just like to try and assert my love for Salman Rushdie’s writing enough to maybe get a few others to try him. These books are not all he has written, but just the most important to me. He has also written two novels aimed at younger people, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life; along with other novels, essays, and short stories. He is a heartfelt and important contemporary figure in English literature.

–El Gaucho is a pseudonym of Stu Moore. Stu spends his time considering Registrar-related activities at a small liberal arts Jesuit college in the South, and how they might relate to his background in English and Theology.

[Editor's Note: Let the record show that the 52 Authors project was originally proposed by Stu.]

Maclin Horton
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40 responses to “52 Authors, Week 3: Salman Rushdie”

  1. Janet

    I obviously am going to have to retire and spend the rest of my life in the library.
    I don’t think I would ever have thought about reading anything by Rushdie, but now I think I will have to eventually do so.
    AMDG

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  2. godescalc

    I read The Satanic Verses a while back and also couldn’t make head nor tail of it. I plan to reread it at some point now I’ve read The Master and Margerita, which was apparently an influence – I think Rushdie was attempting to do something similar but with a fictionalised start to Islam instead of Christianity, and a commentary on life as an immigrant instead of on life under communism or as a censored artist.

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  3. Mac

    Yes, that was pretty much my reaction, too, Janet.
    (Just discovered this comment waiting for me to click “post”–I actually made it last night.)

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  4. Mac

    I’m thinking that Midnight’s Children might be a better place to start than Verses.

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  5. Mac

    I read something interesting about The Master and Margarita within the past year or so. Now I can’t remember what it was.

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  6. Janet

    Yeah, I was thinking that too, although the connection to The Master and Margerita is interesting. I’ve read that, but I’m having trouble remembering much of it. It’s funny, I look at the title now and what jumps out at me is Faust but I can’t remember if I made that connection at the time. I’m feeling quite stupid.
    The M&M reminded me of The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark, and I liked the latter better.
    AMDG

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  7. Janet

    Must have cross posted.
    AMDG

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  8. Mac

    Yep.
    I was thinking it might have been in The New Criterion that I’d fairly recently read something about M&M. Can’t find anything, but I did turn up this review of a history of Russian lit, which I think is pretty old. It contains this observation:
    “Nor is due recognition given to Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, arguably the best twentieth-century Russian novel. Bulgakov’s novel has become a part of the idiom in the Soviet Union and is considered a modern classic in Europe. (The book is much less appreciated in the United States, where it exists in Mirra Ginsburg’s excellent translation; to my mind, this betrays a lack of imaginative empathy on the part of the American audience.)”

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  9. Marianne

    Ah, the power of popular culture. I see “Margarita” and immediately think of Jimmy Buffett and the drink.
    Also shows my deep ignorance because I’ve never heard of that Russian book. And have read no Rushdie other than some of his journalism.

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  10. Janet

    I don’t think you are unusual on any of those counts. I only heard of M&M from someone in our CSL group. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it mentioned any place else, but I do have a copy I got for a dollar at a book sale.
    AMDG

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  11. Mac

    No, not unusual at all. I think almost any American would think of the drink, if not of Buffett, on hearing the word “margarita.” Don’t know how popular it is outside the U.S.

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  12. Anne-Marie

    I had heard the title of M&M, but for some reason thought it was by Nabokov. Maybe the aural association with Lolita?
    I tried a bit of SV once and gave up, but this inspires me to try again with Midnight’s Children.

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  13. Louise

    That excerpt was great. Thanks for sharing it.

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  14. El Gaucho

    I have not read the Bulgakov book, though am pretty sure I have a copy. But a few years back I finally read The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass and thought that Rushdie’s style of writing was a lot like that.

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  15. godescalc

    I never read it back then, but when I was a child we had a copy of M&M on the bookshelf. Every Russian I ever talked to knew of it (my boss assures me you really need to have lived under soviet communism to fully understand it), so I kind of assumed it was as famous as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy etc. It’s a lot of fun, especially the bits with the Devil running round an officially-atheist Moscow and causing unspeakable havoc. (Well, Woland is labelled as “The Devil”, but he’s more of a vengeful trickster figure.)
    On the topic of the post, I remember during the mildly famous Hitchens, Hitchens & Johnson debate on Rushdie, an audience member stood up to declare Midnight’s Children a first rate novel, in response to Boris Johnson declaring Rushdie totally unreadable. I’ll put it on my “pick up a copy if I see it going cheap” list. (I’m not terribly rich at the moment, so the list of books I’ll buy full price is very small.)

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  16. Mac

    I’m still that way about buying books, even though money is not nearly as tight for me as it once was. Decades-long habits don’t die quickly. Can’t watch the video now, maybe this evening.
    I obviously had a totally off-base notion of Master and Margarita. I had a very vague notion that it was some kind of cozy pastoral.
    Re The Tin Drum–that doesn’t necessarily increase my expectation of liking Rushdie. Talk about books of which I did not know what to make…

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  17. El Gaucho

    I thought you might come back with that, Mac. So let me assure you that for the most part Rushdie and Grass have very little in common. It is mostly the magical realism component where I feel that Rushdie was strongly influenced by Grass. The Tin Drum is a much tougher book than Midnight’s Children, but I do really love the first chapter, and find it quite enchanting to read and re-read.

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  18. Janet

    M&M as cozy pastoral. Waaaay off base.
    AMDG

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  19. Mac

    So I gather.
    First chapter of Tin Drum, EG? I don’t remember it. It’s been 30+ years since I read it, maybe closer to 40. I only remember a few scenes, e.g. eels. But I do remember not having any idea what the whole thing really amounted to.

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  20. Janet

    It seems to me like the characters in M&M end up in a seraglio some place along the line, or am I confusing it with something else.
    AMDG

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  21. Craig

    The Satanic Verses has been on and off my reading list several times over the years. Now it goes back on!
    I’ve read a few of Rushdie’s other novels and I think he is a tremendous talent, but somehow his books have never quite cohered for me. Brilliant in miniature, but too diffuse on the large scale. But every so often I get a hankering for more of him, and this post has brought it back — at least until next week’s post in this series!
    The most recent Rushdie book I read was The Enchantress of Florence; notes here.

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  22. El Gaucho

    I feel the same way about Enchantress and Moor’s Last Sigh, Craig. You hit the nail on the head!

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  23. Paul

    When I was in school there was an English master who was keen on Midnight’s Children and almost convinced me to read it, but then all the furore about Satanic Verses started, and I reckoned I could manage without a writer who gratuitously offended people’s religious sensibilities.

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  24. Janet

    Was it gratuitous? I really don’t know, but I have a hard time believing someone would risk his life gratuitously.
    Switching topics–in all the brouhaha that I heard on the radio about the SV, I never heard anyone say that it was funny. That surprises me.
    AMDG

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  25. Mac

    I had a somewhat similar reaction, Paul. Not that I gave it a lot of thought either way, and I didn’t have anyone recommending Rushdie to me. But I wondered the same thing as Janet. Was it a deliberate effort to offend? And was it something only a fanatic would object to, or was it egregiously offensive to any Muslim? I don’t have any idea. Though I always had the impression that Rushdie did not expect the reaction he got–i.e. did not knowingly choose to risk his life.

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  26. El Gaucho

    The offense to Islam sections of SV are akin to the offense to Christianity sections of The Last Temptation of Christ where Willem Dafoe (as Christ) has sexual dreams. There is a section of SV which is a dream-like parable taking place in a town like Mecca with a prophet like Mohammed who acts very human. And like the author of Last Temptation, who I assume is/was a Christian, Rushdie has a Muslim background. No, I do not think that Rushdie was trying to offend, and he did seem surprised to even be noticed. He was not exactly a Stephen King type literary figure at the time.

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  27. Mac

    I had never heard of him until that controversy, which I expect was true of 99% of the world’s population. I suppose it helped his book sales, but he probably didn’t regard it as a good trade.
    Since Islam views Mohammed as entirely human, I suppose the portrayal must be not just human but not-entirely-admirable human.

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  28. Marianne

    Rushdie was undoubtedly surprised by the fatwa, but he must have known the Muslim world, and especially Iran, would be mightily offended by the book. The rise of the ayatollah in 1979 had given a huge boost to a revival of fundamentalist Islamic culture in lots of places, along with jihad and terrorism, and all that wasn’t a secret.

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  29. Mac

    Here’s a whole bunch of info, of which I’ve read only part, which says that Rushdie didn’t expect anything as drastic as what happened: “”I expected a few mullahs would be offended, call me names, and then I could defend myself in public… I honestly never expected anything like this”

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  30. Paul

    There was a mild-mannered, thoroughly integrated Chemistry master who said he found it offensive (he also found the Bradford book burnings offensive). From a couple of interviews I’ve seen I rather get the impression that Rushdie was thoroughly surprised at the reaction, and not by any means consciously risking his life. I don’t think it even registered with him that people educated and literate enough to be reading his books would not be thoroughly secular in outlook, or that the violent religious politics of places like Pakistan and Iran could in any way impinge on the life of an intellectual in Britain.

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  31. Janet

    Well, then.
    AMDG

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  32. Janet

    Still, I read The Fairie Queene, and that definitely offends my religious sensibilities.
    AMDG

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  33. Marianne

    His close friend, Christopher Hitchens, said this about whether Rushdie “knew what he was doing”:
    By the way, he certainly did know what he was doing. He had studied Islamic scripture at Cambridge University, and I well remember one evening, at the apartment of Professor Edward Said near Columbia, when the advance manuscript of The Satanic Verses was delivered to Edward by the Andrew Wylie agency. In a covering note, Salman asked America’s best-known Palestinian for his learned advice, given the probability that the book might upset “the faithful.” So, yes, he “knew” all right, but in a highly responsible way. In any case, it is not the job of writers and thinkers to appease the faithful. And the faithful, if in fact upset or offended, are quite able and entitled to explore all forms of protest. Short of violence.

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  34. Mac

    “He knew what he was doing” and he “never expected anything like this” aren’t necessarily contradictory. It seems very plausible that he was well aware that it would offend, but that living in England from his teens on (I gather) had led him to expect the sort of thing that happens when someone offends Christians–denunciations from people whose denunciations are far preferable to their praise in sophisticated circles. Maybe he thought he would just get that little thrill of needling the orthodox at no real risk to himself, in fact gaining some useful publicity. That’s all just speculation on my part, but although El G has persuaded me that Midnight’s Children at least is worth reading, Rushdie comes across as sort of that kind of guy.

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  35. Mac

    I just watched the video that godescalc linked to earlier. The Boris Johnson bit is funny, especially his preference for Dick Francis over Rushdie.
    The debate is about whether Rushdie should have been given a knighthood.

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  36. Paul

    When he went on television and apologised and said he meant no disrespect and had been misunderstood and was himself a believer, and then months later said in an interview that he hadn’t meant any of that and had only done it to make the fatwa go away and it hadn’t worked so he regretted even trying, I decided not to be bothered with him either way.

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  37. Mac

    That’s pretty low. Still, I’m going to read Midnight’s Children eventually.

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  38. Paul

    It’s understandable, given the circumstances, but not exactly inspiring.

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  39. El Gaucho

    In the Joseph Anton book he addresses that Paul mentions. He was asked by the British Secret Service to make the statement and did so although he was against it. They had been protecting him for a long time and he felt he had to try what they suggested.

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  40. Paul

    That does put a rather different complexion on it.

    Reply

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