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Dec 16, 2009

Jan rated it:

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' More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jul 22, 2007

Brian rated it:

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? More...

2 comments like (9 people liked it)

Nov 24, 2010

Regine rated it:

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. Alth More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Feb 04, 2009

Toni rated it:

Maxmillian Ophuls a U.S. diplomat, who was formally stationed in the Kashmir Valley, is murdered by his former chauffeur, Shalimar, in broad day light on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter India. The murder looks at first to be a political assassination but turns out to be personal.

Several flashbacks take the readers to the past. Shalimar, the clown, was once full of affection and deeply in love with Boonyi, a beautiful Hindu girl who he married. Things come to a turn when Max More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 01, 2008

Zoe rated it:

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 askin More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Aug 26, 2008

NYLSpublishing rated it:

The publishing community has long believed that once authors achieve best seller status and their names become recognizable, subsequent works from these so fortunately knighted are bankable safe bets. Oh, how easily sprinting giants stumble when they lose sight of the path to reader bliss and focus, instead, on the desires of their marketing departments.

Rushdie’s latest work, Shalimar the Clown, is a clear example of what ails the novel today. Notwithstanding my disdain for page lo More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 03, 2008

Gunjan rated it:

spit it out already rushdie!

some of this is just so long winded.

also, his descriptions of the character, "India," remind me of his first inkling of desire for his ex-wife,pseudo-human and nit-wit, padma lakshmi. sick.

and finally, if you're going to name one of your main characters after a sort of popular german film director, make sure your audience understands why. if anyone else has read this, what do max ophuls the director, max ophuls the main ch More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 19, 2009

MacK rated it:

Rushdie, like Marquez, is a master of setting, capturing the essence of a place and a time. But while Marquez specializes in placing a town, an island, a village under a microscope, Rushdie prefers to center his satellite over a sprawling metropolis, compelling geographical region or nation at large.

In Shalimar the Clown Rushdie considers India's largest problem spot: Kashmir. While his classic Midnight's Children delves into the history of independent India as a whole, Shalimar focus More...

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Feb 17, 2009

Linda rated it:

I found this wonderful synopsis of the book posted by Don in Sep 2007. He took over a year to read the book so compared to him I sped through it. Here's Don:
"Fierce! Make no mistake: this is a war novel, in both the literal and figurative sense; though mostly the literal. Transformation is a major theme here, as it is in most of the Rushdie's novels, and the reader is led through the hellish makeovers of people and places affected both directly and tangentially by the conflict/crisis More...

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Feb 05, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine added it

Like some of the post-9/11 literature, Shalimar delves deep into the roots of terrorism and explores the turmoil generated by different faiths and cultures attempting to coexist. How can nations, Rushdie asks, go from near-peaceful ethnic and religious acceptance to violent conflict within a mere generation? Critics agree that Rushdie has brilliantly unraveled the construction of terrorists: some of them fight for ideas; others fight to fulfill vows or, if they are men, to reclaim their wives.

Sh

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Feb 02, 2009

Sarah Beth rated it:

I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about this book. Historically, Rushdie has been one of my favorite authors and this book displays many of the reasons why: he's a captivating story teller, he can tear through a dictionary, he has a lot of interesting multi-cultural stuff going on and he plays with the boundaries of what is plausible.

What I can't remember about his other books in comparison to this one is whether they have the emotional distance this one has (i.e. I could u More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 09, 2011

Graham rated it:

I tend to be suspicious when a book is trumpeted as "___'s best since ____." I know the machinations of money in any artistic industry and I know what motivates quotability.

But in this case, the assertion that this is Rushdie's best work since "The Satanic Verses" is spot fucking on. I don't even really know how to succinctly sum up my feelings on the book either. To describe Rushdie's scope as "cinematic" or "epic" sells it short. His is a More...

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Sep 07, 2011

Aarthi added it

A book that meanders, with a bunch of hugely unbelievable characters with unbelievable lives. I can't say for sure about the European characters, Max Ophuls, Grey Rat etc., but definitely, some of the Indian characters, like Boonyi Kaul. A Kashmiri teenager, from a small village, who elopes with an American Diplomat? Very 'unrelatable' - such a thing just wouldn't happen. I guess that's why Rushdie went to great lengths - at least 100 pages - to get them together; introducing 50-something Max's More...

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Jul 03, 2011

Patrícia rated it:

Temos assistido, infelizmente, a mais uma guerra, mais ou menos declarada, por um pedaço de terra. Caxemira. Não é nova esta luta, aliás arrasta-se desde o fim do dominio colonial Britânico na India.
Não sei muito sobre este assunto e acho que (tal como em todas as outras guerras por um bocado de terra e que envolvem religião) ninguém tem razão. Ou melhor, razão podem ter, mas nada justifica actos de guerra, mortes e mais mortes. India ou Paquistão é, neste momento, (quase) indiferente.
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Apr 28, 2011

Jeremy rated it:

Joy keeps lending me books that I dislike in interesting ways.

There is no doubt that this is a collection of beautiful sentences. The writing is vivid, lyrical, and evocative. Unfortunately it's mostly evocative of horror. The sections all pretty much start out "Here are some people. Horrible things happened to them. Let's examine their lives leading up to the horrible things." The Kashmir sections are the loveliest, I think, but that just makes the torture, rape, and More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 06, 2011

Emma rated it:

I was so impressed by this book that it's taken me awhile to work out what to say.... primarily, what fascinated me was the grace and effortlessness with which it moves from one setting to another: a large chunk is set in Kashmir, covering much of the last half of the 20th century; another large chunk in Europe (primarily France) during the Second World War; the last chunk in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Each of these settings and historical periods is richly detailed; a lesser author would have ta More...

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Nov 29, 2010

Bob rated it:

I wanted to make myself a better person and so I read one of Salman Rushdies novels. He writes beautifully, like poetry. He takes three pages to describe something that I would be hard pressed to describe in 2 sentences. He describes the lush beauty of Kashmir (I looked up on Goggle images to see pictures of Kashmir and indeed it is a gloriously beautiful place.) For me the entire book is filled with this feeling of impending disaster. At the end of the book I felt as if I had read an ancie More...

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Jul 27, 2010

Rowland rated it:

With the brilliant style that has made him famous and earned him respect (and condemnation) around the world Rushdie has written a tale woven through the new and old worlds of Kashmir and America and all points between. This book, this prose, this personal vision into the rarified worlds of political, spiritual and personal power, revolves around a young Kashmir who, from the humblest beginnings, brings himself into the limelight of political world attention through a life of crafting his route More...

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Jun 13, 2010

Matthew rated it:

I have enjoyed every Rushdie novel I have read until this one. There is simply not enough action in this ramble, and it seems to me a good example of what happens when an author decides to tell instead of show in character development. This style of rambling fiction always runs this risk.

Throughout the first part of the book, whose only real concrete event is India's birthday car ride with her aging father, Rushdie would drift away into the minds of the characters and it quickly be More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 18, 2009

Amy rated it:

Rushdie's writing is pretty great. He does some beautiful and powerful things in this book. It's a personal story that sandwiches an account of the Kashmiri conflict... and frankly, the characters in the personal story weren't super-compelling for me. The story of the Kashmir situation was really good to learn, and really heart-wrending, and really pretty horribly violent. It's a dark book, and while I know there are dark things out there (that's part of what it's here to describe), there was no More...

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Dec 20, 2008

Mark rated it:

If there is one author that makes me want to write as much as GGM or Borges, it has got to be Rushdie. In this book, his newest, Rushdie reminded again about the risks that one can and should take with language. Rushdie has a unique literary voice that makes up words, fuses words together, uses words in new contexts and just makes the language unique to his characters and their personal histories and origins. This story is a story about love, hate, revenge, and justice all told along with the tr More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 06, 2011

Dylan rated it:

It's a twist of fate, but not one that seems ridiculous, or one to be dramatic simply for the shock of it, in fact, in reading this (whilst the butterfly effect, and the butterflies in your stomach, come to life) you'll suddenly find yourself aware of every living soul on the planet. Just as movies like Babel show the domino effect of a single action, "Shalimar the Clown" shows the great unison and culpability of all that breath.

And yet the message does not stem from this feeling. Whe More...

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Sep 22, 2010

Secnud rated it:

From World War2 to the Vietnam war, from various separatists movements all over the globe, including the Taliban and the JKLF, this book does not leave any war untouched, unexamined and un-theorized.
Woven around an American Ambassador's tale of illicit romance during his professional layover in India, this story spans several generations of war, political movements and major global upheavals and one wronged man's determination to strike revenge. This man moniker-ed 'Shalimar the Clown'
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Feb 05, 2009

Jerry rated it:

Salman Rushdie is an imaginative writer who also imparts a basic truth and reality in writings that seem rather fanciful in many respects. Here there are more than one unhappy love stories intermixed with well researched historical data. The book is really about the historical development of Kashmir, the coexistence of different cultures evolving through religious and ethnic fundamentalism, the very real problems caused in Asia by colonialism, and the unhappy consequences unleashed by it. A More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 15, 2010

Natacha rated it:

Não sei bem o que pensar deste novo romance do Salman Rushdie. Li-o com algum prazer, a história é interessante e prende. Temos sempre vontade de passar ao capítulo seguinte para sabermos mais um pouco das vidas de Max Ophuls, India Ophuls e do Shalimar. De que forma as vidas deles se entrelaçaram para que o desfecho, indicado no próprio prólogo, seja a trágica morte de Max, um homem nos seus oitentas e aparentemente inofensivo.
Deu-me gozo ler este livro e cheguei ao fim com a sensação de More...

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Oct 23, 2010

George rated it:

In the first section of Shalimar the Clown, the former U.S. ambassador to India is assassinated on his daughter's front step. The assassin, his chauffeur, is a Kashmiri man named Shalimar. Most of the rest of the book is spent on how we got to this point. Fate is a common topic of Rushdie's and it's only appropriate that, in many of his books, the question isn't where are we going, but how will we get there. In this one, the main point of discussion is whether our character determines our destin More...

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Jun 24, 2007

Sze rated it:

there's enthralling rushdie (midnight's children), and maddening rushdie (the ground beneath her feet) - this one was somewhere in between. i got a bit tired of the mythology to be honest, but that sort of single-mindedness was a kind of magic.

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Georgia rated it:

Sometimes I will read a book in a day and it won't be a terrible book but I just want to get on to the next book. This book worked the complete opposite. I took my time and loved it so much that I never wanted it to end. Thanks Salman!

"But maybe the truth is that there are things about your experience you will never understand. My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight o More...

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May 04, 2009

Aastha rated it:

My respect/admiration/love for Salman Rushdie's writing continues to grow as I read his books. His unique style is really appealing to me, though I recognize it's not for everyone. Again, this particular book blends fiction and reality, history and current events, past and present, mythology and fact.

Most of Shalimar the Clown is set in Kashmir, and throughout the book, Rushdie makes references to the conflict and comments on the decay of "heaven on earth" (which is what Kash More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 28, 2011

Ramkumar rated it:

Though this book lacks the usual wordplay i much love in his books,the novel's plotline and its development is great. Notably,the evolution of Shalimar from a mere clown to an assassin.The story of India,the ambassador's daughter,is nice but its a letdown comparatively with the stories of Boonyi,Max,Shalimar the Clown,Kashmiri. Her musings about her name and her synonymous thinking of Kahmir and paradise were interesting to read.The description of Shalimar's days of hiding is with a magic touch More...

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