Shalimar the Clown [Perfect Paperback]

Salman Rushdie (Author)

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 649 pages
• Publisher: Random House Uk Ltd (2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 009949809X
• ISBN-13: 978-0099498094
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (76 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Sir Salman Rushdie is the author of many novels including Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence. He has also published works of non-fiction including, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Short Stories.

He has received many awards for his writing including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 1993 Midnight's Children was judged to be the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In June 2007 he received a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars yes it comments on terrorism but is so much more, September 26, 2005

By 

L. Berlin "disraeli67" (Evanston, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Shalimar the Clown: A Novel (Hardcover)

Yes I am a fan of Rushdie, but I found this to be his best since Satanic Verses, although much different. As the other reviewers note part of this book is about terrorism. The other reviews also do a nice job of covering plot so I will skip it.

I would suggest the book is about so much more than terrorism. In fact I think his views of terrorism are not integral to the story and would not recommend reading it as a text in support of or against current US policy. Rushdie condemns politicians and their inane behavior in many ways, but I do not view that as central.

First and foremost, I believe this book is about the meaning of freedom. This brings it close to the heart of Rushdie who of course had to give up his freedom, at least for awhile to take advantage of his freedom to think and write. The book recounts the flights to freedom and differing views of it through many of the characters in the book. It explores the struggles of many characters to attain freedom or to benefit from it. This includes Max Ophuls who fled the nazis, Boon-yi, the heroine of sorts, who is trapped in her life, India Ophuls, the daughter of Maxand other characters. It is also about Kashmir and its loss of freedom at the hands of India and Pakistan who use it for their political ends.

I also believe this book is about the western concept of fate as passed down from the Greeks and its meanings. It is also about women and their role in societies and how they cope with men, life, love, tragedy and more. Much of it reminded me of the classics by men and written about women. Yes this is a short list, but Rushdie does such an amazing job of dealing with these issues, I can hardly do it justice.

All this is done through a tight plot with typical Rushdie humor, twists and turns and a good share of mysticism. It was a pleasure to read and I heartily recommend it.

50 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing, October 9, 2005

By 

huckledude - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shalimar the Clown: A Novel (Hardcover)

A mesmerizing tale centered in Kashmir but roaming around the world and throughout history. The large cast of characters are each enchanting or entrancing in turn (although, oddly, the protagonist, India Ophuls, is not). The central tragedy of the story is the transformation of Kashmir from a Garden of Eden populated with warm, humble, enchanting, and enchanted rural villagers, into a ravaged moonscape populated by cold-blooded, fanatic, malevolent marauders from Pakistan and India; the story of Shalimar the Clown and Boonyi recapitulates the tragedy on a personal level, each proceeding toward their respective dooms after Boonyi eats from the forbidden fruit of modernity and Shalimar the Clown becomes an Islamist terrorist by way of passage to the execution of his personal terrorist agenda.

Rushdie's writing is mesmerizing throughout. The narrative is a dense tapestry that seems to lead in many directions but is all, in the end, tightly woven together. The only weakness, in my humble opinion, was that his protagonaist, India Ophuls, is an unappetizing character in her own right. The story of her childhood as the "root cause" for her unappealing traits is an oddly sociological, Oprah-istic formulation in a novel that is dominated by innocence and evil frankly declared.

Notwithstanding the overarching tragedy of the narrative, there is considerable humor of both the life-affirming and the splenetic varieties. On the other hand, Rushdie's proper English gentlemanliness creeps in occasionally in his disdain for those sullied by commerce or uniforms.

As someone who does not read a great deal of fiction, I was familiar with Rushdie only because of his unpopularity with the famous literary critic, Ayatollah Khomeini. I can see from Shalimar the Clown that I have been missing out on one of the most substantial literary talents of our time.

43 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "An age of fury was dawning, and only the enraged could shape it.", September 12, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Shalimar the Clown: A Novel (Hardcover)

When India Ophuls finds the body of her father, his throat slashed by his Kashmiri chauffeur, Shalimar the Clown, she and the police believe the death to be connected to terrorism. Max Ophuls, "the Resistance hero, the philosopher prince, the billionaire power-broker, the maker of the world" was also "America's best loved, then most scandalous Ambassador to India." Though Max has been US counter-terrorism chief recently, his assassination by Shalimar the Clown, we learn, has been an act of pure, personal revenge, unrelated to terrorist organizations.

Through an extended flashback, Rushdie recreates the love story of Shalimar, a tightrope walker, and Boonyi Kaul, a dancer and acrobat, in a troupe from Pachigam, a small Kashmiri village where both Muslims and Hindus live and work together peacefully and govern the town together. Shalimar and Boonyi fall deeply in love at fourteen and marry soon after, but several years later, Boonyi has an affair with Ambassador Max Ophuls, and her abandonment of her husband turns the enraged Shalimar into a potential assassin, who swears revenge upon everyone involved in the affair.

The continuing story of Boonyi and Shalimar becomes an allegory for the history of Kashmir, its Hindu/Muslim conflicts and its political India/Pakistan conflicts, as young Muslim men including Shalimar, respond to the teachings of the "iron mullahs" with their fundamentalist messages. Incorporating local mythology, legend, and traditional story-telling, Rushdie sheds light on the actions of the main characters, emphasizing the traditional beliefs which underlie much of their behavior. Dreams, visions, and prophecies give warnings of disasters to come. Boonyi's relationship with Max becomes the story of betrayal by a powerful American, and Max's Jewish background, which is emphasized, injects fundamentalist hatred of Jews into the controlling allegory.

Though Rushdie stresses that Shalimar assassinated Max Ophuls as an act of personal revenge, not terrorism, he nevertheless extends the allegory and symbolism from the personal to the universal. When the focus of the novel moves from Kashmir into the broader realm of all recent world events, it begins to break down thematically. "Everywhere's story is now a part of everywhere else," Rushdie says. Shalimar, for example, has trained in the Philippines with Abu Sayyaf, a group aided by Libya and Malaysia. India Ophuls sees her father as Nelson Mandela in a dream. The Los Angeles riots, 9/11, Rodney King, and Reginald Denny are viewed as part of interconnected violence throughout the world. Even the 1974 murder of a nanny in England by Lord Lucan is somehow connected to Max's murder and Shalimar's personal revenge.

Dense with imagery, legend, and local color, the novel lacks Rushdie's trademark humor, word play, puns, and clever repartee. His characters, though layered and often complex, illustrate aspects of the historical allegory and behave in ways that advance the plot and symbolism, rather than as characters with lives of their own. Journalistic passages, inserted within the story, give further information about the Indian army, its fight against the insurgency, and reports of fidayeen attacks and atrocities.

A fascinating study of the Kashmiri conflict, the cultures of the area, and the growth of radical Islam, the novel conveys both the spectacular beauty and the spectacular violence of the area, offering much to think about in terms of the origins of such violence. In his attempt to broaden the scope from Kashmir to the world stage and to show all violence as connected, however, Rushdie has stretched his themes and created a novel which often feels dogmatic. n Mary Whipple