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).