My Review (in very "reviewy" language)Wonderful. All of Rushdie's powers are at play here, but perhaps the most striking is his exploration of the social and psychological borderland between visceral, emotional impulse and ideological motivation. What motivates someone to become an assassin, a terrorist, a murderer? And in the enlongated moment of that decision, how do personal, emotional wounds gain political currency enough to justify killing someone? Or killing many people? (For a second ther...

At times, this rambling, rambunctious rollercoaster of a read is feathered by the genius seen in Rushdie's Midnight's Children, at other times it becomes mired in an overload of Indian/Pakistani/Kashmiri political history, which is great for providing context but stems the otherwise rampant flow of this terrific story.As you would expect from the great man, the humour is irreverent and the human imagery transcendent. To offset this, there is pathos-a-plenty and at times the story is unbearably h...

The story is a tragic one from beginning to end. It's not necessarily depressing but it is a powerful story. Salman Rushdie does an outstanding job of telling a colorful tragedy utilizing imagery and painting the picture of the human character. Lastly, he shows human emotion and the evil it can drive men to do. The quality of the book I liked the most was the blending of cultural, linguistic, social, and religious inferences to add dimension to the plot. In the reading there are concepts pertain...

I've been a reader for some time now & I've read a few good books but none of them have made me realise the power of fiction. Until now. Until I picked up 'Shalimar the Clown'.Had anyone ever given us a non-fiction book about the issues related to Kashmir as raised in this book, we'd have probably abandoned it after 100 pages or so & I'm not lying or judging anyone when I say that, since that is pretty normal. That is perhaps since most of us have been watching the same thing over & over again i...

This book has been a hell of a ride. When I started it, I had the feeling I wasn't going to enjoy it that much, but by page 100 I was hooked and so invested in the characters that it I felt like I made all of their decisions with them. The book is a political comentary on the conflict between Kashmir and India, but, through the depth of its characters' humanity, it is also much more than that: a story of love, hatred, feat and death. Just like any good story should be, a reminder of the diversit...

a smart young lady trying to find herself in California. the assassination of her father - America's counterterrorism chief. a portrait of Kashmir before all the ugliness and horror. the life of a man: lawyer, Jew, printer, resistance fighter, diplomat, husband, lover, father. a portrait of Kashmir - the ugliness, the horror. the life of a man: acrobat, actor, husband, freedom fighter, terrorist, chauffeur, assassin. a courtroom drama. a tale of a guy who really knows how to handle himself in pr...

With Salman Rushdie's fascinating novel, Shalimar the Clown I found it rather easy & often necessary to suspend disbelief, in part because this is no conventional story but rather an amazing fable that uses the fractious land of Kashmir as a metaphor for the India/Pakistan partition, Hindu/Moslem relations and perhaps the world at large. On the surface, Shalimar the Clown appears as an updated, Kashmir-based Romeo & Juliet tale, seeming to portray an unsanctioned love affair between Shalimar (a

Excellent book. For me, it started out painfully slow. I was not terribly interested in the first characters he introduced to me. Nor was I terribly interested in the story. CONTINUE READING! The histories of these characters are deep, deep, deep. Rich and beautiful language. By the quarter mark of the book I was completely riveted. For the first part of the book I found myself, irritatingly, asking, "when is he going to get to the point!" and the rest of the book eagerly asking, "what happens N...

(B) 75% | More than SatisfactoryNotes: It's description-over-dialogue, nonlinear storytelling. A tedious read, owing to many lengthy and meandering asides.

“For the rest of his life Max Ophuls would remember that instant during which the shape of the conflict in Kashmir had seemed too great and alien for his Western mind to understand, and the sense of urgent need with which he had drawn his own experience around him, like a shawl. Had he been trying to understand, or to blind himself to his failure to do so?”This book begins with the murder of Max Ophuls, former U.S. Ambassador to India and later chief of counterterrorism, by Shalimar the Clown, w...

Sometimes, now, she did not hear his voice for weeks, even months. In the night she reached out for him but found only a void. He had gone beyond her reach and she could only wait for him to return, not knowing if she wanted him to return so that she could preserve her dream of a happy ending, or if she wished him dead because his death would set her free. But he always returned in the end, and when he did it seemed that in his life only a single night had passed, or at the very most two or thre...

After toiling through The Satanic Verses a few years ago, my overriding memory is of how little of the novel I understood. I was therefore reluctant to get stuck into Shalimar The Clown when my sister passed it on recently. Sure enough, I'm finding Rushdie's authorial voice to be much like I remember it - extensive vocabulary, usage of magical realism/dreams/fantasies, strong character descriptions, and multi-cultural savvy that combine together seamlessly. For these reasons I'm finding the stor...

Shalimar the Clown has been on my shelf collecting dust. While I do admit to having quite the crush on Rushdie, I get flashbacks from the utter disappointment I felt when I read The Satanic Verses. My friend, also a Rushdie aficionado, finally convinced me to pick it up and blow the dust off the covers. My love affair with Rushdie has been rekindled.Rushdie is at full power in Shalimar. He combines his lush prose and diverse characters with political allegory and cultural savvy. Although it's

I enjoyed this a lot. Compared to Rushdie's style in The Satanic Verses his magical realism here is more subtle and toned down to the point where it enhances rather than disrupting my suspension-of-disbelief. At one point magic even forms the case for the defence in a trial in an entirely believable way: the argument is, as my friend Alicia pointed out to me recently "If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences". The magical strand helps to creates a wonderful, unset...

Shalimar the Clown is consummate Rushdie although with less magic realism than most of his books, particularly the most recent ‘Two year, eight months and twenty-eight nights’ which was just full on magic! There is so much in this book, starting with an assassination in California, to 1950’s Kashmir to the Second World War and the French resistance in Strasbourg and then back and forth between Kashmir and California. In Shalimar, Rushdie focuses on the contested land of Kashmir before most of th...

4.25|5This book was two months in the reading and it’s probably one of the reasons I had a big reading slump this Summer... but I still loved it so damn much. It’s not an easy book to read by any means, but for me it was totally worth it. I probably didn’t get all the references since it requires some history knowledge but I was there for the ride and I enjoy every minute of it.

But maybe the truth is that, as he used to say, our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets. My father says that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains nobility, the silence of the silence. We...

Revisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament. The book opens with the murder of Max Ophuls – a WWII Resistance hero from Strasbourg (itself a disputed territory fought over between Germans and French and so analogous to Kashmir), turned maker of many of the institutions of the modern world, turned initially popular ambassador to India turned America’s counter-terrorism chief. He is assassinated by his Kashmiri Muslim driver – a mysterious character called Shalimar the Clown.The book tells th...

How do you review a book that's made sure to push you into a deep set of feelings? The characters that make you take sides even though the writer doesn't? The characters that don't shy away from their worst behaviour to just buy into the goodness of the world. Because in their world goodness is a non-existent entity now. An entity that is long gone leaving behind it's inhabitants with raw and unabashed feelings about the world.This is a story of love, loss, revenge or is it all the same? Is it t...

Rather dazzling in a depressive manner. We are no longer protagonists, only agonists. Rushdie does wonderful lush prose. Rather sharp, too, in his critiques of peoples and events. But his characterization is superb. In each of the main characters you find things to admire and recoil in disgust. He brings a male sensibility and gaze to his writing, that's not to say that it's performative masculinity, but rather that you would never mistake his gender.You have an idyllic place with Muslims living...