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Shalimar the Clown

Overview

Shalimar the Clown is a masterpiece from one of our greatest writers, a dazzling novel that brings together the fiercest passions of the heart and the gravest conflicts of our time into an astonishingly powerful, all-encompassing story.

Max Ophuls' memorable life ends violently in Los Angeles in 1993 when he is murdered by his Muslim driver Noman Sher Noman, also known as Shalimar the Clown. At first the crime seems to be politically motivated - Ophuls was previously ambassador to India, and later US counterterrorism chief - but it is much more.

Awards

  • Commonwealth Writers Prize
  • Costa Book Awards
  • International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
  • Listen Up Awards
  • Man Booker Prize for Fiction
  • New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Author Information

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie was born in India, raised in Pakistan, and educated in England, where he now lives. His Rabelaisian skill for telling stories teeming with fantasy and history, and the virtuosity of his style, with its sly transliterations of Indo-English idioms, won him a delighted audience with the publication of Midnight's Children in 1980. However, it was the urgency with which he returned to the lands of his birth and childhood to write of a world where politics and the individual are inseparably connected that won him wide acclaim as a brilliant new novelist and intellectual. He manages to stand both inside and outside the world of developing nations and tell their stories. His fantastical retelling of the story of Islam set in a London peopled by immigrants from around the world, The Satanic Verses (1988), is his last full-length novel: its publication raised the anger of Muslims in Britain, South Asia, and the Middle East who asked that the novel be banned. In February 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini decreed a fatwa pronouncing the death sentence on him, and Rushdie has since lived in hiding. Subsequently, he offered several published explanations and apologies to Muslims (collected in Imaginary Homelands, 1991), and he also wrote a children's story, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). 020

Editorial Reviews

For Westerners, Rushdie's latest may be better heard than read. While readers might stumble over the Kashmiri, Indian and Pakistani names and accents, Mandvi glides right through them, allowing us to engage with Rushdie's well-wrought characters and sagas. Mandvi has a calm, quiet storyteller voice, often employing tempo to express emotional states and to make long, complex sentences entirely clear. In fact, one realizes he is nearly invisible (until he reads a few lines in a Romance language), leaving us to relish the sounds and images and rhythms of Rushdie's language. The book begins at the end, with the murder of the former American ambassador to India, Maximilian Ophuls, now a counterterrorist expert, then introduces his murderer, Shalimar the Clown, Kashmiri actor and acrobat-cum-terrorist, and Ophuls's illegitimate daughter, India, who brings the book to a conclusion as terror-filled and ambiguous as our own future. Suspense and tension are superbly built and layered through mythology and plots of lust and jealousy intertwined with cultural, religious, national and international affairs. Rushdie does get polemical for a while, even didactic; his writing in these sections sometimes sounds speechifying. Yet we come away with a mostly lyrical parable that offers us a way of grappling with the realities of our time and place, a way of refracting history through multiple lenses. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Reviews, July 25). (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Customer Reviews

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Product Details

  • Published by

    Random House

  • Publish Date

    October 09, 2006 

  • Print ISBN

    0679783482

  • eBook ISBN

    9781588364845

  • Imprint

    Random House

  • Filesize

    566.21 KB

  • Number of Print Pages*

    416

* Number of eBook pages may differ. Click here for more information.

Excerpt from Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie

At twenty-four the ambassador's daughter slept badly through the warm, unsurprising nights. She woke up frequently and even when sleep did come her body was rarely at rest, thrashing and flailing as if trying to break free of dreadful invisible manacles. At times she cried out in a language she did not speak. Men had told her this, nervously. Not many men had ever been permitted to be present while she slept. The evidence was therefore limited, lacking consensus; however, a pattern emerged. According to one report she sounded guttural, glottal-stoppy, as if she were speaking Arabic. Night-Arabian, she thought, the dreamtongue of Scheherazade. Another version described her words as science-fictional, like Klingon, like a throat being cleared in a galaxy far, far away. Like Sigourney Weaver channeling a demon in Ghostbusters. One night in a spirit of research the ambassador's daughter left a tape recorder running by her bedside but when she heard the voice on the tape its death's-head ugliness, which was somehow both familiar and alien, scared her badly and she pushed the erase button, which erased nothing important. The truth was still the truth.