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 systematic murder in them all the more gruesome.

My other main objection is the Max Ophuls section. If I never read another book about a brilliant, multitalented Renaissance man who gets all the girls, treats all of them like commodities, behaves in general like a raging narcissist that nevertheless knows his lines and is still supposed to be a sympathetic figure it will be too soon. It made me even angrier that he was supposed to be worthy of pity because he got his throat slit in the first section. (This isn't a spoiler since it's mentioned with increasingly tedious foreshadowing every fifth sentence from the second page on.)

So yeah, women are treated like dirt, minorities are treated like dirt, people in regions the possession of which is disputed by major powers are treated like dirt, and being treated like dirt makes people crazy. That's the takeaway. The presence of a bow- and gun-shooting, boxing, martial-artist hot female instrument of revenge in the last 75 pages doesn't balance the rest of it, really.

Shalimar the Clown is a book filled with richly detailed pictures. They're just not pictures I want in my head.