Martyn Bedford
Who Killed the Father of India?
Shalimar the Clown
By Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape 398pp £17.99
Reading this new novel by Salman Rushdie is, for me, like returning to a much-visited country after an absence of ten years – you hope not to be disappointed by alteration, only to discover that the greatest disappointment is the jaded familiarity. This is my fifth trip to Rushdiestan, but the first since The Moor’s Last Sigh, in 1995. Although that novel won the Whitbread Prize, I had begun to tire of sights I had seen too often; to suspect that, as a travel destination, Rushdiestan’s popularity depended on past glories, and that its heyday was, in fact, way back in 1981, with the seismic brilliance of Midnight’s Children.
Shalimar the Clown does a good job of resembling much of his earlier work. The author’s lifelong preoccupations recur: that of identity (geographic, religious, cultural); of deracination; of the inseparability of the individual from the historical; of the good and evil that spring from tribalism. There is the characteristic broad
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘The Second World War was won in Oxford. Discuss.’
@RankinNick gives the question his best shot.
Nicholas Rankin - We Shall Fight in the Buttery
Nicholas Rankin: We Shall Fight in the Buttery - Oxford’s War 1939–1945 by Ashley Jackson
literaryreview.co.uk
For the first time, all of Sylvia Plath’s surviving prose, a massive body of stories, articles, reviews and letters, has been gathered together in a single volume.
@FionaRSampson sifts it for evidence of how the young Sylvia became Sylvia Plath.
Fiona Sampson - Changed in a Minute
Fiona Sampson: Changed in a Minute - The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath by Peter K Steinberg (ed)
literaryreview.co.uk
The ruling class has lost its sprezzatura.
On porky rolodexes and the persistence of elite reproduction, for the @Lit_Review: