Articoli correlati a Shalimar the Clown.
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.
Ophuls is a giant, an architect of the modern world: a Resistance hero and best-selling author, brilliant economist and clandestine US intelligence official. But it is as Ambassador to India that the seeds of his demise are planted, thanks to another of his great roles – irresistible lover. Visiting the Kashmiri village of Pachigam, Ophuls lures an impossibly beautiful dancer, the ambitious (and willing) Boonyi Kaul, away from her husband, and installs her as his mistress in Delhi. But their affair cannot be kept secret, and when Boonyi returns home, disgraced and obese, it seems that all she has waiting for her is the inevitable revenge of her husband: Noman Sher Noman, Shalimar the Clown. He was an acrobat and tightrope walker in their village’s traditional theatrical troupe; but soon Shalimar is trained as a militant in Kashmir’s increasingly brutal insurrection, and eventually becomes a terrorist with a global remit and a deeply personal mission of vengeance.
With sweeping brilliance, Salman Rushdie portrays fanatical mullahs as fully as documentary filmmakers, rural headmen as completely as British spies; he describes villages that compete to make the most splendid feasts, the mentality behind martial law, and the celebrity of Los Angeles policemen, all with the same genius.
But the main story is only part of the story. In this stunningly rich book everything is connected, and everyone is a part of everyone else. Shalimar the Clown is a true work of the era of globalization, intricately mingling lives and countries, and finding unexpected and sometimes tragic connections between the seemingly disparate. The violent fate of Kashmir recalls Strasbourg’s experience in World War Two; Resistance heroism against the Nazis counterpoints Al-Qaeda’s terror in Pakistan, North Africa and the Philippines. 1960s Pachigam is not so far from post-war London, or the Hollywood-driven present-day Los Angeles where Max’s daughter by Boonyi, India Ophuls, beautiful, strong-willed, modern, waits, as vengeance plays itself out.
A powerful love story, intensely political and historically informed, Shalimar the Clown is also profoundly human, an involving story of people’s lives, desires and crises – India Ophuls’ desperate search for her real mother, for example; Max’s wife’s attempts to deal with his philandering – as well as, in typical Rushdie fashion, a magical tale where the dead speak and the future can be foreseen.
Shalimar the Clown is steeped in both the Hindu epic Ramayana and the great European novelists, melding the storytelling traditions of east and west into a magnificently fruitful blend – and serves, itself, as a corrective to the destructive clashes of values it scorchingly depicts. Enthralling, comic and amazingly abundant, it will no doubt come to be seen as one of the key books of our time.
The second portent came on the morning of the murder, when Shalimar the driver approached Max Ophuls at breakfast, handed him his schedule card for the day, and gave in his notice. The ambassador’s drivers tended to be short-term appointees, inclined to move on to new adventures in pornography or hairdressing, and Max was inured to the cycle of acquisition and loss. This time, however, he was shaken, though he did not care to show it. He concentrated on his day’s appointments, trying not to let the card shake. He knew Shalimar’s real name. He knew the village he came from and the story of his life. He knew the intimate connection between his own scandalous past and this grave unscandalous man who never laughed in spite of the creased eyes that hinted at a happier past, this man with a gymnast’s body and a tragedian’s face who had slowly become more of a valet than a mere driver, a silent yet utterly solicitous body servant who understood what Max needed before he knew it himself, the lighted cigar that materialized just as he was reaching for the humidor, the right cuff-links that were laid out on his bed each morning with the perfect shirt, the ideal temperature for his bathwater, the right times to be absent as well as the correct moments to appear. The ambassador was carried back to his Strasbourgeois childhood years in a Belle Époque mansion near the now-destroyed old synagogue, and found himself marvelling at the rebirth in this man from a distant mountain valley. . . .
—from Shalimar the Clown
From the Hardcover edition.
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.
Ophuls is a giant, an architect of the modern world: a Resistance hero and best-selling author, brilliant economist and clandestine US intelligence official. But it is as Ambassador to India that the seeds of his demise are planted, thanks to another of his great roles – irresistible lover. Visiting the Kashmiri village of Pachigam, Ophuls lures an impossibly beautiful dancer, the ambitious (and willing) Boonyi Kaul, away from her husband, and installs her as his mistress in Delhi. But their affair cannot be kept secret, and when Boonyi returns home, disgraced and obese, it seems that all she has waiting for her is the inevitable revenge of her husband: Noman Sher Noman, Shalimar the Clown. He was an acrobat and tightrope walker in their village’s traditional theatrical troupe; but soon Shalimar is trained as a militant in Kashmir’s increasingly brutal insurrection, and eventually becomes a terrorist with a global remit and a deeply personal mission of vengeance.
With sweeping brilliance, Salman Rushdie portrays fanatical mullahs as fully as documentary filmmakers, rural headmen as completely as British spies; he describes villages that compete to make the most splendid feasts, the mentality behind martial law, and the celebrity of Los Angeles policemen, all with the same genius.
But the main story is only part of the story. In this stunningly rich book everything is connected, and everyone is a part of everyone else. Shalimar the Clown is a true work of the era of globalization, intricately mingling lives and countries, and finding unexpected and sometimes tragic connections between the seemingly disparate. The violent fate of Kashmir recalls Strasbourg’s experience in World War Two; Resistance heroism against the Nazis counterpoints Al-Qaeda’s terror in Pakistan, North Africa and the Philippines. 1960s Pachigam is not so far from post-war London, or the Hollywood-driven present-day Los Angeles where Max’s daughter by Boonyi, India Ophuls, beautiful, strong-willed, modern, waits, as vengeance plays itself out.
A powerful love story, intensely political and historically informed, Shalimar the Clown is also profoundly human, an involving story of people’s lives, desires and crises – India Ophuls’ desperate search for her real mother, for example; Max’s wife’s attempts to deal with his philandering – as well as, in typical Rushdie fashion, a magical tale where the dead speak and the future can be foreseen.
Shalimar the Clown is steeped in both the Hindu epic Ramayana and the great European novelists, melding the storytelling traditions of east and west into a magnificently fruitful blend – and serves, itself, as a corrective to the destructive clashes of values it scorchingly depicts. Enthralling, comic and amazingly abundant, it will no doubt come to be seen as one of the key books of our time.
The second portent came on the morning of the murder, when Shalimar the driver approached Max Ophuls at breakfast, handed him his schedule card for the day, and gave in his notice. The ambassador’s drivers tended to be short-term appointees, inclined to move on to new adventures in pornography or hairdressing, and Max was inured to the cycle of acquisition and loss. This time, however, he was shaken, though he did not care to show it. He concentrated on his day’s appointments, trying not to let the card shake. He knew Shalimar’s real name. He knew the village he came from and the story of his life. He knew the intimate connection between his own scandalous past and this grave unscandalous man who never laughed in spite of the creased eyes that hinted at a happier past, this man with a gymnast’s body and a tragedian’s face who had slowly become more of a valet than a mere driver, a silent yet utterly solicitous body servant who understood what Max needed before he knew it himself, the lighted cigar that materialized just as he was reaching for the humidor, the right cuff-links that were laid out on his bed each morning with the perfect shirt, the ideal temperature for his bathwater, the right times to be absent as well as the correct moments to appear. The ambassador was carried back to his Strasbourgeois childhood years in a Belle Époque mansion near the now-destroyed old synagogue, and found himself marvelling at the rebirth in this man from a distant mountain valley. . . .
—from Shalimar the Clown
From the Hardcover edition.
Le informazioni nella sezione "Riassunto" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.
Recensione:
Praise for Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
“Rushdie has written an intensely political novel, infused with recent events, but its emotional scope reaches so far beyond our current crisis and its vision into the vagaries of the heart is so perceptive that one can imagine Shalimar the Clown being read long after this age of sacred terror has faded into history.”
–The Washington Post
“Richly textured, exotic prose . . . Rushdie simply delivers more of a wallop in one novel than most writers achieve ever. . . . [He] proves himself to be a master of the global novel.”
–USA Today
“Evoking a novella by Gabriel Garcia Márquez or a movie by Quentin Tarantino or a tragedy, say, by Shakespeare, Shalimar the Clown is a chronicle of an assassination foretold. . . . Rushdie defies gravity and dispatches his characters on journeys leading up to the assassination, leading away from the assassination, entertaining and dazzling, but all the while guiding us on an examination of this precarious high wire we find ourselves walking in the 21st century. . . . Rushdie’s greatest novel since The Satanic Verses.”
–Los Angeles Times
“Though there are already a number of fine novels that have examined the mind-set of the budding Islamic terrorist . . . this is probably the most important of all. . . . a brilliant work of political imagination [and] a welcome return to form for one of our modern masters of the novel.”
–Houston Chronicle
“Rushdie has done what he has set out to do. In Shalimar the Clown, he has written a vast, richly peopled, beautiful and deeply rageful book that serves as a profound and disturbing artifact of our times.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Fiercely focused . . . and understated . . . Shalimar the Clown should rank as Rushdie’s most affecting and most effective novel in years.”
–The Miami Herald
“Marvelous . . . brilliant . . . Prepare for magic when reading Shalimar the Clown, the kind of magic that comes from a novelist weaving a story worthy of his genius–and the kind of magic that comes from a novel that opens you to seeing the world as you never supposed.” –Detroit Free Press
“A masterpiece–a beautiful, painful, terrifying book, both fantastical and harshly realistic, filled with complex and memorable characters, and completely unpredictable in its blend of political thriller, folktale, melodrama, reportage and even science fiction.” –Seattle Times
“Mischievous, masterful . . . a whirling dervish of a story that unfolds from Los Angeles and Strasbourg to Kashmir and New Delhi. The vastly entertaining high jinks involve high diplomacy, low politics, illegitimacy, assassination, innumerable assignations, frequent hallucinations, media saturation, and post-9/11-style terrorism.”
–Elle
“Rushdie is a master of ambiguity, but his belief in beauty’s influence, perhaps most tellingly in denial, makes Shalimar the Clown his most uncompromising novel yet. This glittering jewel of the storyteller’s art justifies Rushdie’s faith in beauty and is the best antidote I know for post-9/11 despair.”
–Providence Journal
“Eye-popping . . . daring . . . poignant.”
–Boston Globe
“When all is said and done, Shalimar the Clown . . . is a timely novel that tells us something about Kashmir, a distant valley that has been thrown into the limelight for the wrong reasons. It is also an important book about the world we all live and die in.”
–The Wall Street Journal
“Complex and intriguing . . . Rather than seek for anything as trite as a ‘message,’ I should guess that Rushdie is telling us, No more Macondos. No more Shrangri-las, if it comes to that. Gone is the time when anywhere was exotic or magical or mythical, or even remote.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“Shalimar the Clown . . . finds [Rushdie] working once again at the top of his powers. The book deftly mixes dark comedy with high politics, sex and war and terror, romance and mythology. . . . Rushdie’s prose rises to moving, chantlike crescendos. . . . a geopolitical love story with gusto and excitement.”
–Chicago Tribune
“It circumnavigates the globe and the last half of the 20th century like a hyperactive satellite, but Salman Rushdie’s rich and restless new novel, Shalimar the Clown, has an ominous stillness at its center. . . . [The novel] is a grand tour of recent world history led by a honey-tongued polymath. It’s also a passionate love letter to beleaguered Kashmir . . . and, like Kashmir, it is a multifarious, patchwork world where realist characters and events live harmoniously among fantastical ones, ancient eastern fables alongside modern western logics.”
–Baltimore Sun
“Richly detailed, intricate, exhilarating . . . an important work that entertains and illuminates.”
–Pittsburgh Tribune Review
“An occasion to celebrate the astonishing voice [Rushdie] has brought into the world of English-language fiction, a voice whose language and concerns have stretched the boundaries of the possible in English literature . . . Shalimar the Clown is an impressive addition to an oeuvre that has already narrated a vision of the subcontinent into being and is doing the same for the world.”
–Financial Times
“Ingenious and beautiful . . . Shalimar the Clown is a wonderful example of Rushdie’s trademark ability to mix high and low culture, to quote bits of Baudelaire as well as scenes from ‘The Magnificent Seven’. . . . As a prose stylist, Rushdie is in fine form here, his delicate sentences seamlessly taking the reader from English to Urdu and back. Add to this the characteristic humor and unflinching observation of a master storyteller, and you have Rushdie’s best work in many years.”
–The Oregonian
“Shalimar the Clown, like all Rushdie’s best work, has the energy and color and speed that only cartoons can offer.”
–The New York Sun
“A masterly deployment of interconnected narratives spanning six decades. . . . Dazzling. . . . A magical-realist masterpiece that equals, and arguably surpasses, the achievements of Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Moor’s Last Sigh. The Swedes won’t dare to offend Islam by giving Rushdie the Nobel Prize he deserves more than any other living writer. Injustice rules.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The. . .transformation of Shalimar into a terrorist is easily the most impressive achievement of the book, and here one must congratulate Rushdie for having made artistic capital out of his own suffering, for the years spent under police protection, hunted by zealots, have been poured into the novel in ways which ring hideously true. . . . Shalimar the Clown is a powerful parable about the willing and unwilling subversion of multiculturalism.”
—Publishers Weekly
From the Hardcover edition.
L'autore:
“Rushdie has written an intensely political novel, infused with recent events, but its emotional scope reaches so far beyond our current crisis and its vision into the vagaries of the heart is so perceptive that one can imagine Shalimar the Clown being read long after this age of sacred terror has faded into history.”
–The Washington Post
“Richly textured, exotic prose . . . Rushdie simply delivers more of a wallop in one novel than most writers achieve ever. . . . [He] proves himself to be a master of the global novel.”
–USA Today
“Evoking a novella by Gabriel Garcia Márquez or a movie by Quentin Tarantino or a tragedy, say, by Shakespeare, Shalimar the Clown is a chronicle of an assassination foretold. . . . Rushdie defies gravity and dispatches his characters on journeys leading up to the assassination, leading away from the assassination, entertaining and dazzling, but all the while guiding us on an examination of this precarious high wire we find ourselves walking in the 21st century. . . . Rushdie’s greatest novel since The Satanic Verses.”
–Los Angeles Times
“Though there are already a number of fine novels that have examined the mind-set of the budding Islamic terrorist . . . this is probably the most important of all. . . . a brilliant work of political imagination [and] a welcome return to form for one of our modern masters of the novel.”
–Houston Chronicle
“Rushdie has done what he has set out to do. In Shalimar the Clown, he has written a vast, richly peopled, beautiful and deeply rageful book that serves as a profound and disturbing artifact of our times.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Fiercely focused . . . and understated . . . Shalimar the Clown should rank as Rushdie’s most affecting and most effective novel in years.”
–The Miami Herald
“Marvelous . . . brilliant . . . Prepare for magic when reading Shalimar the Clown, the kind of magic that comes from a novelist weaving a story worthy of his genius–and the kind of magic that comes from a novel that opens you to seeing the world as you never supposed.” –Detroit Free Press
“A masterpiece–a beautiful, painful, terrifying book, both fantastical and harshly realistic, filled with complex and memorable characters, and completely unpredictable in its blend of political thriller, folktale, melodrama, reportage and even science fiction.” –Seattle Times
“Mischievous, masterful . . . a whirling dervish of a story that unfolds from Los Angeles and Strasbourg to Kashmir and New Delhi. The vastly entertaining high jinks involve high diplomacy, low politics, illegitimacy, assassination, innumerable assignations, frequent hallucinations, media saturation, and post-9/11-style terrorism.”
–Elle
“Rushdie is a master of ambiguity, but his belief in beauty’s influence, perhaps most tellingly in denial, makes Shalimar the Clown his most uncompromising novel yet. This glittering jewel of the storyteller’s art justifies Rushdie’s faith in beauty and is the best antidote I know for post-9/11 despair.”
–Providence Journal
“Eye-popping . . . daring . . . poignant.”
–Boston Globe
“When all is said and done, Shalimar the Clown . . . is a timely novel that tells us something about Kashmir, a distant valley that has been thrown into the limelight for the wrong reasons. It is also an important book about the world we all live and die in.”
–The Wall Street Journal
“Complex and intriguing . . . Rather than seek for anything as trite as a ‘message,’ I should guess that Rushdie is telling us, No more Macondos. No more Shrangri-las, if it comes to that. Gone is the time when anywhere was exotic or magical or mythical, or even remote.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“Shalimar the Clown . . . finds [Rushdie] working once again at the top of his powers. The book deftly mixes dark comedy with high politics, sex and war and terror, romance and mythology. . . . Rushdie’s prose rises to moving, chantlike crescendos. . . . a geopolitical love story with gusto and excitement.”
–Chicago Tribune
“It circumnavigates the globe and the last half of the 20th century like a hyperactive satellite, but Salman Rushdie’s rich and restless new novel, Shalimar the Clown, has an ominous stillness at its center. . . . [The novel] is a grand tour of recent world history led by a honey-tongued polymath. It’s also a passionate love letter to beleaguered Kashmir . . . and, like Kashmir, it is a multifarious, patchwork world where realist characters and events live harmoniously among fantastical ones, ancient eastern fables alongside modern western logics.”
–Baltimore Sun
“Richly detailed, intricate, exhilarating . . . an important work that entertains and illuminates.”
–Pittsburgh Tribune Review
“An occasion to celebrate the astonishing voice [Rushdie] has brought into the world of English-language fiction, a voice whose language and concerns have stretched the boundaries of the possible in English literature . . . Shalimar the Clown is an impressive addition to an oeuvre that has already narrated a vision of the subcontinent into being and is doing the same for the world.”
–Financial Times
“Ingenious and beautiful . . . Shalimar the Clown is a wonderful example of Rushdie’s trademark ability to mix high and low culture, to quote bits of Baudelaire as well as scenes from ‘The Magnificent Seven’. . . . As a prose stylist, Rushdie is in fine form here, his delicate sentences seamlessly taking the reader from English to Urdu and back. Add to this the characteristic humor and unflinching observation of a master storyteller, and you have Rushdie’s best work in many years.”
–The Oregonian
“Shalimar the Clown, like all Rushdie’s best work, has the energy and color and speed that only cartoons can offer.”
–The New York Sun
“A masterly deployment of interconnected narratives spanning six decades. . . . Dazzling. . . . A magical-realist masterpiece that equals, and arguably surpasses, the achievements of Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Moor’s Last Sigh. The Swedes won’t dare to offend Islam by giving Rushdie the Nobel Prize he deserves more than any other living writer. Injustice rules.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The. . .transformation of Shalimar into a terrorist is easily the most impressive achievement of the book, and here one must congratulate Rushdie for having made artistic capital out of his own suffering, for the years spent under police protection, hunted by zealots, have been poured into the novel in ways which ring hideously true. . . . Shalimar the Clown is a powerful parable about the willing and unwilling subversion of multiculturalism.”
—Publishers Weekly
From the Hardcover edition.
Salman Rushdie was born in 1947. He is the author of eight previous novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury. He has published a collection of short stories, East, West, a book of reportage, The Jaguar Smile, two collections of essays, Imaginary Homelands and Step Across This Line, and a work of film criticism about The Wizard of Oz.
Salman Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children, was awarded both the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers,” as the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. His other accolades include the Whitbread Novel Award, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Salman Rushdie lives in London and New York.
From the Hardcover edition.
Salman Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children, was awarded both the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers,” as the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. His other accolades include the Whitbread Novel Award, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Salman Rushdie lives in London and New York.
From the Hardcover edition.
Le informazioni nella sezione "Su questo libro" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.
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