Customer Reviews

Grimus

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The most obvious thing to say about Salman Rushdie's first novel is this: if you have read no other Rushdie, put it down now and return to it after you have read one of his other novels.

Grimus only resembles Rushdie's other work in a nebulous and tenuous way. It is not as complex, rich, or engrossing to read as his later work. That said, this book is probably best left to Rushdie completists; if you want to read absolutely everything he's written, then go ahead. Otherwise, approach this book with caution: it alone does not fairly represent the Rushdie that is considered one of the best writers of the current generation.

Not to say that this is a bad book. By no means is it bad. It just isn't exceptional. The writing is somewhat fumbling, and even a little clumsy and overbearing in places. Rushdie has said that he found his voice while writing his second novel, "Midnight's Children" and Grimus reads like someone who is searching for a path or a voice, not someone who is on firm footing; this novel provides direct evidence of Rushdie's statement.

The bizarre story deals with immortality, created worlds, other dimensions both inner and outer, and outcasts. Flapping Eagle, or Joe-Sue, or Born-from-Dead is an Axona indian who has a lighter complexion than the rest of his people; add to this that his mother died seconds after he was born and you get an outcast. He is not easily accepted, but his sister, Bird-Dog, protects him. She also presents him with the elixir of eternal life (in the form of a yellow liquid) and she disappears mysteriously from the land of the Axona. Flapping Eagle is then exiled from his people, and wanders the world for centuries before falling through a gate in the Mediterranean that leads to "Calf Island" while attempting suicide (he is also in the throes of searching for his sister, Bird-Dog, who has also drank the yellow liquid, and apparently wandered off with a man named "Sispy"). He floats under the rocking chair of Virgil Jones, who recognizes something in Flapping Eagle, and takes him in. Flapping Eagle gets Virgil to admit that he has seen Bird Dog on Calf Island, and decides to go up Calf-Mountain, but Virgil must accompany him because of the "Grimus Effect". This effect consists of a "whine" that pervades the mountain and, for lack of a better explanation, drives people mad who succumb to it for too long a time. At the top of Calf Mountain sits the town of "K", in which live people who deal with the effect by obsessing over various things. Here Flapping Eagle and Virgil part ways: Flapping Eagle goes to an upper-class type existence and gets intimately involved with two married women, and Virgil retreats to the "House of the Rising Son" (a brothel). When people begin dying in the town of "K" (which is doubly shocking because everyone in K has tasted the yellow liquid of immortality), they turn against Flapping Eagle, and he and Virgil decide they must join forces and face Grimus, who supposedly resides at the cloud-obscured summit of Calf Mountain. This leads to the novel's climax.

The specter of Grimus looms cryptically in the back of the plot; is Grimus a man, a force, a monster? The answer doesn't come until the very end of the novel, where the "goal" of Flapping Eagle's life comes to fruition: but did he choose his own destiny or did Grimus? Philosophical issues such as immortality, free will and determinism, suicide, and death are dealt with throughout the twisty tale. It is a bizarre read, and half way through the novel readers may wonder what they've got themselves into. Sometimes the text slips from third to first person (always the first person is the voice of Flapping Eagle), but so irregularily and infrequently it's jarring each time; at best the technique is only arguably somewhat effective.

Some feminist critics have lashed out at Rushdie for the depiction of women in this novel. It's not hard to understand why. Most of the women characters are either prostitutes or dizzy and demented with love for a man. One example is the character of Liv, who is a black-velied beauty who uses intimacy as a tool for revenge. Many of the women in this novel all come off as somewhat hollow, weak, and one-sided characters. This adds to the second rate and unexceptional tone that pervades the entire novel. This is something Rushdie has risen above in his later work, and judging him on this issue by this book alone would be a great injustice.

In the end Grimus is not a bad book, but as a book by Salman Rushdie it is disappointing. It is extremely hard to believe that about five years later Rushdie would publish "Midnight's Children" - which is as rich and dazzling as Grimus is mediocre.

Very mystical and very confusing, this is Rushdie's first work and if you enjoy his later stuff this is worth the read. If you have never read Rushdie it is a great book to begin with.

There are few living writers that gain immediate recognition as true artists in their time, along side Pynchon, DeLillo, and perhaps Vonnegut, is Salman Rushdie. Before The Satanic Verses and before the fatwa there was Grimus.

The first impression of this book, gleaned from the initial 50 or so pages is that we are face to face with an unrefined Rushdie. His penchant for dabbling in mythology, spirituality, canonical literal echoes, and Joycean word play are on full display. Being his first book, I was surprised that someone would pick up such chaotic prose as an author's debut. But trusting the author, I stuck it out. I'm glad I did.

Our protagonist, Flapping Eaglewho also goes by the names Born-From-Dead and Joe-Sue in the first handful of pagesessentially has been given the "gift" of eternal life. Staying the same age for hundreds of years, Flapping Eagle decides he no longer wants to live, but to finally die a mortal's death. He has to go to Calf Island and ascend Calf Mountain to meet Grimus, much like a mythological Wizard of Oz. That's the premise.

Along the way, Flapping Eagle befriends Virgil Jones and his lady, Dolores O'Toole. The disfigured couple are the first clue that something is dreadfully wrong on Calf Island. Jones the obese is with O'Toole the humpback. The two really are remarkable and Rushdie gets lots of mileage from the two, creating a sympathy for them that never ventures into pity.

A host of characters and themes are introduced, mythology has served Rushdie well and one gets the impression that Joseph Campbell would have enjoyed the playfulness and overlapping of Native American and Asian-Indian concepts. As we grip this overlap, Rushdie sends Flapping Eagle to find Grimus with Virgil Jones as his guide, echoing Danté.

Details quickly pile up and the writing veers in unforeseen directions. Any balance that we grasped in the first chapter is taken away in the second. The only thing that kept me reading was trust in the author. Lost as I was, I knew I was being taken on a voyage by a master, who, in his first novel, was clearly establishing himself as a master.

As obtuse as the second chapter was, then, the third chapter was very, very clear. Seemingly meaningless details from hundreds of pages prior came to make sense. Interruptions in the story, now had their place. Masks were removed. Tales were told. Resolution came into focus.

Reading Grimus is, in some respects, like putting together a puzzle. The first chapter involves turning all of the pieces face up so we see what we have to work with. The second chapter relies on our powers of observation to not only look at the pieces but, at least try to fit them together. The third chapter leaves us with about 50 pieces left of a well-defined picture and we can race to the finish line, putting everything in place. In the end, you should have seen it all along.

The greatest praise I can heap on this book is this: Rushdie teaches us how to read it. Like every great master, Rushdie has the ability to take us out of our own world, disorient us, and reorient us in a way that is not unsettling, but engaging. In the end, we feel smarter and more open minded.

Grimus should really, in hindsight especially, get a lot more attention than it does. Rarely does a writer enter the scene so accomplished and well rounded as Rushdie does with this work. Although it is his first, it certainly is better than some of his other fares, and that alone should sell you on this book.

I recently read Salman Rushdie's "Grimus" for my Commonwealth Literature class in university. This is the only book I have read by Rushdie and I did not know what to expect. The novel was, at times, confusing; the story will start with one character, then abandons that character for a time and moves on to another; sometimes the narrative voice changes suddenly from first person to third, and most confusing for me, the novel seems to be a mystery, and the reader is not sure of who or what Grimus is until the end of the story. But having said that, I can also say that the story is beautifully told and utterly fascinating. I took my Commonwealth class with Dr. Uma Parameswaran, one of the first serious scholars of Rushdie. She explained to our class that Rushdie wrote this novel for a science fiction contest - an interesting bit of trivia, but also, this should give you some idea of the story as well. It is science fiction, but it also social commentary, I felt...and a fascinating read. The only reason why I gave the novel four stars is because at times it seems to includes references to sex that I felt were only there for the sake of sensationalism, and I also have a problem with Rushdie's depiction of women (they were either whores, or stupid, or stupid whores). At any rate, I still believe that this novel is worth purchasing...and if you have read other Rushdie novels, people I know that have read this novel and his other works say this one is quite different. Just so you know!

After reading "The Tiger's Wife" and being recovering from that disappointment, I found great comfort reading "Grimus: A Novel" by Salman Rushdie.

I generally love Rushdie and this book enforced that conviction. It involves travel between dimensions, immortality, gorfs, and anagrams. It was fun to rearrange letters to determine that gorfs were like frogs and that there is a cool anagram for dimensions, milky way universe and earth. What anagram does GRIMUS represent?

This book revolves around immortal Axon amerindian "Flapping Eagle" and his desire to age and find a home. Via a con man, he travels through dimensions and universes to arrive at Calf Island washing up behind the rocking chairs of Delores O'Toole and Virgil Jones. She is a grossly ugly petite hunchback and he is an obese lunatic genius. See why I LOVE Rushdie???

The adventure begins when Flapping Eagle and Virgil decide to go up the mountain into the Town of K. It is delicious, complex, thought provoking and keeps you on your toes as you read.

Okay as you can tell this is great book...wonderful descriptions, incredible insights, and complex characters. Oh did I mention that there is whore house in the town of K?

Themes include the price of mortality and definitions of morality. What makes a good person a good soul? What should Flapping Eagle do when he arrives at the top of the mountain and faces Grimus? (Trust me that is a crucial theme that is deeper than what I stated)

As someone who is not a regular reader of Rushdie's works, I'm going into this review fairly unaffected by any sort of opinion of him formed by other works (I just picked up "East, West" though to give his short stories a look).

Grimus can be confusing at times. Especially in the first half, you may lose patience with it. I would have liked to give the book a three and a half star review, but obviously I can't, and the work it seems to take to get through the first half of the book is what made me round down instead of up.

I really enjoyed the concept of the book; it's certainly weird, twisted fantasy writing. Rushdie creates a world that you constantly question--not because Rushdie has consistency problems, but beceause the world really is meant to be debated--is it real, or isn't it?

Some characters are better crafted than others, but most of them I found engaging and added interesting stories to the town (but also further complicated the plot).

To be honest, my first reaction to this book was "WTF?!" ...but you learn to love those "WTF" moments. At least I did. I will say though that those moments may gross out some readers, or just skeeze them out enough to make it "not their kind of book." But for those of you who welcome the weird, and who are willing to wade through some of the confusion at the beginning, the book delivers a fairly entertaining ride.

I hate to admit it (but I have to), but it took me too long to finish this novel. I started it out of respect for the great and mighty Rushdie, who I certainly know of, but had not read anything by, in the interest of going chronologically through his canon.
I look forward to venturing into his others worlds, and will hold Grimus up as a marker to where his art can be said to have begun. And an astonishing art it is.
Grimus, reviewed here fairly thoroughly, was a dense and frequently dry exploration of immortality, passion, interdimensional adventure and sexual ardore for me, with sparks of inspiring passages and images of heightened observation and creation, internal tumult and ecstatic realizations. I found the trip Flapping Eagle takes from Axona to Calf Mountain, to K to Grimushome interesting, but too long. Perhaps too thorough. I hesitate to criticize a giant of literary creativity, but I can't deny my own struggles.
I appreciated the whimsical entries Rushdie takes into the minds and hearts of his chracters, though I cared only for a few of them, and by the time I finished the read I mixed up Ignatius Gribb, Nicholas Denggle (sp?) and even the important Virgil Jones. Sorry to say, but so be it.
I would recommend this to people interested in Rushdie, and I am happy I finished it. I hold up it's frequent visions of interstellar consciousness, centuries old wanderings and a beautiful conclusion, as the molecules of an immortal world finally alter, as the pieces of Grimus that touched me.

This is my first Rushdie, and putting aside whether it's representative of his other works, I will say that I enjoyed this book enough that I definitely intend to revisit this author in the future. In that respect alone, I'd say it's a successful first novel, since it makes me want to read more of Rushdie's ostensibly better works.

That being said, this book is certainly fantastical, though the language is crafted in such a way that it didn't exactly strike me as sci-fi until I read reviews on the back of the book describing it as such. I didn't have much trouble accepting the absurd qualities of the worlds (or dimensions) that Rushdie had created, but others might. Then again, you might be all for that, but have a harder time with the more philosophical aspects of the novel, as some of Rushdie's characters have the propensity to soliloquize about fairly weighty concepts. This was probably my least favorite element to the novel, as these explorations tended to cause the story to come to a grinding halt. They happened frequently enough that the novel winds up with an uneven pacing, which can make it a struggle to get through at times, but ultimately I'm glad I stuck with it and enjoyed reading it. It's a great book to discuss and has a lot of big ideas, so despite its slim size, it's definitely not a light read. Comparisons to "Alice and Wonderland" are quite apt. If you'd like something that's a bit unconventional and are fine with a slightly challenging read, then I'd recommend giving this a shot.

An enchanting work by the greatest writer alive!

Much to my amazement, Salman Rushdie's first novel, "Grimus", is a metaphysical science fiction novel which thematically most closely resembles Ursula K. Le Guin's classic fiction from the 1960s and 1970s. However, having said this, I won't charitably describe "Grimus" as a fine example of science fiction - in stark contrast to the view expressed by another recent Amazon.com customer reviewer - since I have read more memorable, thought provoking fiction from the likes of Samuel Delany, James Tiptree, Jr., Joanna Russ, and of course, Le Guin, herself; all of whom wrote some of the most memorable science fiction published in the English language during the 1960s and 1970s. Rushdie redeems himself here only by virtue of the fact that he's demonstrating that he's a fine prose stylist, writing some rather memorable passages throughout the book. However, his main protagonist, Flapping Eagle, an American Indian of the Axona tribe, is fundamentally a cypher, for whom I had little interest in or appreciation of the various episodes involving him within this book. "Grimus" deserves a marginal recommendation only because it is Rushdie's first novel, providing a brief glimpse into some of the elegant prose he would use to such superlative effect in "Midnight's Children".