Reviews of Shalimar The Clown

Salman Rushdie’s newest novel, Shalimar the Clown, comes out today, and reviews have started to trickle in. Here is The Independent:

Rushdie has always grabbed whatever he wants from literature and pop culture (on page one alone, he brings together Scheherazade, the Star Trek language Klingon, and Sigourney Weaver) and there is nothing wrong with this tactic. Indeed, it seems a perfectly sensible way for a 21st-century novelist to view the world. But such borrowing only works when it is in the service of a narrative strong enough not to be overburdened by the name-checking. Here the story holds up admirably.

The L.A. Times review (by Jonathan Levi) is also a rave:

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.

And here is Nisid Hajari’s write-up in Newsweek:

In prose if not in person, Rushdie seems galvanized by the resonances. Where his most recent novels have foundered on small-bore fripperies “Fury” reads like a journal of Rushdie’s early days partying in New York”Shalimar” swells to fill a larger, tragic frame. Its ideas are more deeply engaging, its sense of loss more universal.

Rushdie is due to make a stop in Portland in a couple of weeks. Mark your calendars, kids.