The old and the new Rushdie

At first I wanted to write about Salman Rushdie´s new novel "Shalimar the Clown". After the first chapters I missed something and I wanted to compare this book to his prior classic "Midnight´s Children" from 1980 (I have not read "The Satanic Verses" until now). But reading further, I liked "Shalimar" more and more and thought it would not be fair to compare both with each other. They are just too different. The one is an epic about the narrator´s perception of and personal relationship with the first 30 years since India´s independence in 1947. The other one is a global thriller that originates from a love-story and the tragedy of Kashmir.

The author might have changed, too. When he published "Midnight´s Children", Rushdie was 33, when "Shalimar" came out last year, the author was 58. A lot of years and experiences were inbetween, including the Fatwa against him and the wars and terror attacks of the last years. No wonder that Rushdie felt the need to write not only about Kashmir again (where his family originally comes from), but also to write about global conflicts, about war, terrorism and fundamentalism.

Including this all, "Shalimar" is a very complex book that combines many times and places. There are not only Kashmir and Los Angeles, but also Strassbourg (in France) during the Second World War and the narrator follows Shalimar´s trace also to North Africa. There is Kashmir the paradiese and Kashmir the hell.
The number of introduced persons is high and so is the complexity of their family relationships. Once you can think that this is all a bit too much, but there could be more inner spirit in the story itself. Complexity certainly comes from the topic. How do you judge Shalimar in the end? Is he more a victim or is he more the perpetrator? There is no simple answer.
After all, I like this book very much, but I do not love it like the "Midnight´s Children". It is nice (inspite of all the brutality), sympathic and certainly well researched and written, but it is not brilliant.

Finally I found a page in Rushdie´s new book that showed me a link to his old masterpiece. In the Shalimar-chapter, the hero and his comrades from the Kashmir-separatist group come to a an old house at a lake near Srinigar in the 1970s. They are looking for money and a shelter, but they are so kind to wait until the host is back from town. He then tells the group about the history of the house: the collection of European paintings, especially the portrait of the goddess Diana, the blind owner Mr. Ghani who had died 3 years before, his daughter Naseem who died during a bombing of her house in Riwalpindi in 1965.
Here I was satisfied to find my early suspicion confirmed: that house at a lake near Srinagar, with an old painting of the goddess Diana inside, is exactly the same place where Aadam Aziz, grandfather of Saleem Sinai, the hero of the "Midnight´s Children", met his wife Naseem, daughter of the blind Mr. Ghani, for the first time.
That was just a window from one book to another, surprisingly awaiting you on page 345 (in my edition, a German translation, as I have to admit).

Syriana

"Syriana" ia a movie by Stephen Gaghan who has also been the author for Stephen Soderberg´s "Traffic" in 2001. The style and the atmosphere of these two movies are very similar and prove that no one better in Hollywood thanGaghan has the talent to express the complexity of global political and economic relations in a movie.

Therefor these films stand in a line with other movies which dealt with global political themes in the last year, such as "The Interpreter" or "The constant Gardener". But as in "Traffic", "Syriana" gains its complexity through a cut-up of different plots, a mosaique of actions that take place in different parts of the world. In "Traffic" there were 3 levels: we saw the cop in Mexico fighting against drug-dealers (on the "producer-level"), cops in the USA fighting against the gangsters on the "consumer-level", and we saw the Senator fighting hopelessly against the organised drug-criminality while his own daughter is a Crack-junkie.

In "Syriana" there are even more levels and places (only to mention some of these places: Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Switzerland, Spain, different places in the USA ..). The single actions and persons finally make up a puzzle:
The old-fashioned CIA-agent (George Clooney) who becomes a victim of his own people, the corrupt Arabian Emir who prefers his business-relationships to political rationality, the leaders of the American oil-industry who do not have any scruples to implement their business-interests, a financial expert who becomes the manager of the Emir´s son, the unemployed young Pakistani oil-worker who gets in the hand of fundamentalist ideologists, the young Prince Nasir who wants to get his people to political sovereignity and who fails because of the will of the western oil-mafia.

All in all, this is not a movie that will make you feel happier. There is the hard torture scene in which Clooney loses two finger-nails. And it is the whole composition of the movie that gives you the depressive feeling (as in "Traffic") that a lot of things are going wrong in our world. Good that such movies are made today. And good that those movies still can win Oscars.

Ali Farka Touré (1939-2006)

On the 6th March died Ali Farka Touré, the great guitarist and king of the Mali-Blues. With his music he proved that the true roots of John Lee Hooker grew at the Niger:
"Blues are the leaves and branches while the roots and trunk are African."
His country Mali has lost an important cultural ambassador, and the world lost a great musician. May he rest in peace!