Fiction
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Grimus (1975):
An epic fantasy full of mystery and adventure. This
book was a 'flop' in terms of sales when first published.
A review in the Financial Times described it as
"A mixture of S.F. and folktale,
past and future, primitive and the present day [...]
Grimus is a parallel form of life, the conjuring of
an alternative society."
This book first brought Rushdie a wide audience and and won him
Britain's prestigious Booker Prize and also the Booker of
Bookers in 1993. It is, among many other things an allegory about
the birth of independent India. The book has some
autobiographical features.
A fiction that ironically examines Pakistan's recent rulers.
The blurb says of the story: "Hypnotism,
insomnia, somnambulism, clairvoyance and addiction to
pine-kernels would have their part in the history
of two families whose destinies could not be untangled
even by death. It is a saga complete with political
coup, wedding scandal and apocalyspse - taking place
in the fourteenth century, the twentieth century
or any other century. Babies are born to bring joy
or mortification to their parents, conspiracies
hatched, alliances formed, God invoked and murders
committed; inevitably sexual matters complicate
everything; as Prime Minister Harappa puts it,
'Life is long.' And all the while the beast is stirring,
roaming the streets at night, stalking the countryside -
a beast which tears the heads off its prey and approaches
ineluctably."
This is a complex work whose two main protagonists, like Rushdie,
are expatriate Indians. The publication of this work aroused the
wrath of many Muslims and persuaded Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to
issue a fatwa offering a reward of millions of dollars for the
author's assassination. Rushdie was forced to go into hiding.
A collection of children's tales which Rushdie
wrote for his son.
A collection of nine short stories in which
Rushdie looks at his two 'worlds' East and West
"their intimacy and distance,
their shared history, and the misunderstandings -
comic and tragic that separate and bind them"
"'Mine is the story of the fall
from grace of a high-born crossbreed - me, Moraes
Zogoiby, called 'Moor', for most of my life and
only heir to the spice - trade - 'n' - big - business
millions of the da Gama - Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin -
and of my banishment by my mother Aurora, nee da Gama,
most illustrious of modern artists.'"
James Wood writes in The Guardian (3/4/99), "It is difficult
to summarise this novel, which moves between Bombay, London and
New York, which connects Plato and earthquakes, rock music and
mysticism, and also manages to present an alternative history
of the past forty years (in which Oswald's gun only jammed, and
Pierre Menard actually wrote Don Quixote."
Alternatively, in the Indian news weekly Outlook, Pankaj Mishra writes
"[It] does little more than echo the great
noise of the modern world; and in doing so it not only ceases
to be literature but invites scrutiny as an alarming new kind of
anti-literature."
Non-Fiction
Essays and Criticism written between 1981 and 1991. The blurb
describes it as "an important record of one writer's intellectual
and personal odyssey. The seventy essays collected here
[...]
cover an astonishing range of subjects - the literature of
recieved masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries; the politics
of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians,
the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial
prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free
expression."
There are also a number of essays on Rushdie's experience of
writing Midnight's Chlidren.
A book of film criticism.
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