Grimus

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I’m afraid we bastardize the name to Calf” (211). This name is homonymous with Attar’s Mountain of Qâf. Rushdie’s unique note in the novel revolves around the author’s inaccurate rendering of the Arabic letter referred to as “K”: “I have chosen to refer to it as K (Kâf) and risk confusion with the quite distinct letter Kaf…” (209). This erroneous spelling is compounded by the fact that Rushdie has anglicized the letter and transformed it into “Calf”, a scarcely recognizable travesty of the original letter! Rushdie thus asserts the prevalence of the signifier over the signified, exploring language’s potential for confusion. Rushdie also toys with the nature of mother-son relationships in Indian and Pakistani society, emphasizing the perversion of their closeness. In Shame, for example, the three Shakil mothers dote over their only son Omar, keeping him”excluded from human society by [their] strange resolve”(Rushdie 29). Furthermore, the stereotypical mother resents her son’s new wife for monopolizing his affection and tries to disrupt any opportunities for intimacy in the new marriage (Adler 135). Both Bariamma’s nocturnal segregation of the married couples in Shame (Rushdie 71) and Flory Zogoiby’s demand for Abraham’s firstborn son in The Moor (Rushdie 111) exemplify this unusual attachment. As Wives Shalimar the Clown (2005), Rushdie’s ninth novel, has been hailed by a number of critics as a return to form. Set in Kashmir and Los Angeles, it develops many of the themes present in Fury but, according to The Observer, in a ‘calmer’ and ‘more compassionate’ manner. Ostensibly a story about love and betrayal (familiar themes in Rushdie’s earlier work), there is a fresh urgency about this book with its meditations on post-9/11 terrorism. The Enchantress of Florence (2008), Rushdie’s next novel, was also one of his most structurally challenging works to date. It is beyond simple summary and represents, on the surface at least, a turn from present to past, from politics to poetics (of course, the two are mutually constitutive). Focusing on a European’s visit to Akbar’s court, and his revelation that he is a lost relative of the Mughal emperor, the novel was reviewed in glowing terms in the Guardian as a ‘sumptuous mixture of history with fable’. Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, a novelist and essayist, set much of his early fiction at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world.

Grimus offers striking similarities with Simone de Beauvoir’s Tous les hommes sont mortels, a novel (...) Anthony, Andrew. “How Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses Has Shaped Our Society.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 11 Jan. 2009, www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/11/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses. The Satanic Verses (1988), novel of Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie led Ruholla Khomeini, the ayatollah of Iran, to demand his execution and then forced him into hiding; his other works include Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker prize, and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995).

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Self. My self. Myself and he alone. […] Myself and himself pouring out of ourselves into the glowing bowl. Easy does it. You swallow me, I swallow you. Mingle, commingle. Come mingle. Grow together, come. You into me into you. His thoughts. (242) How would you describe the world of Rushdie’s novel? What does it remind you of? What elements make it otherworldly? The whole sequence of interacting with the other immortal people is just interspersed with these terribly written, terribly times, deeply unsexy sex scenes that make most of the middle of the novel a blur for me. In general, though, characters are introduced and dropped and rementioned at such a pace that it’s impossible to get a sense of any of them.

The story loosely follows Flapping Eagle, a young Native American man who receives the gift of immortality by drinking a magic fluid. Thereafter, Flapping Eagle wanders the earth for 777 years 7 months and 7 days, searching for his immortal sister and exploring identities before falling through a hole in the Mediterranean Sea. He arrives in a parallel dimension at the mystical Calf Island, where those immortals who have tired of the world but are reluctant to give up their immortality exist in a static community under a subtle and sinister authority. Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Selected Works: Grimus (1975), Midnight’s Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), Quichotte (2019)Christopher Norris, Deconstruction; Theory and Practice ed. T. Hawkes (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 23.