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Tolerance and intolerance are often both passionate. At either end of this spectrum of love and hatred are kindness and violence. In between, at least in Salman Rushdie's latest novel, is the valley of Kashmir.
In SHALIMAR THE CLOWN, tolerance and intolerance clash in Kashmir as a tragic love story unfolds. Boonyi, a beautiful young Hindu dancer, and Noman Sher Noman (also known as Shalimar the Clown), a handsome Muslim tightrope walker, fall in love in the village of Pachigam. Despite their religious differences they are allowed to marry after their relationship is discovered. The Hindus and Muslims of Pachigam are one undivided community and feel that the marriage of the two symbolizes the harmony of the village. But soon after she weds Shalimar, Boonyi begins to long for more than what rural life can offer her.
When she dances for the charming and powerful American ambassador to India, Max Ophuls, Boonyi sees him as her ticket out of her village home and into freedom. Max sets her up in an apartment far from Kashmir, but she has neither the discipline for the education he provides for her nor the talent to become a famous dancer. She longs for Kashmir and Pachigam but, shamed, cannot go back home. Her homesickness and the realization that she is being used by Ophuls as a sexual object drives her to many addictions: food, tobacco and drugs. The once beautiful and graceful Boonyi grows ugly, sick and obese, and then finds herself pregnant.
Boonyi eventually makes her way home to Pachigam, but without her daughter. In her absence she has been declared dead and so returns to the village a ghost. In the meantime Shalimar has hardened with hate and rage, and has vowed to kill both Boonyi and Ophuls. He becomes a soldier and an assassin fighting against Hindus in Kashmir, and eventually he too makes his way home to Pachigam.
SHALIMAR THE CLOWN weaves the story of Boonyi and Shalimar in and out of the story of modern Kashmir. Both the relationship and the region are full of love and passion as well as violence and hatred. We follow both the wonderfully written Max Ophuls and the daughter he has with Boonyi (less developed and so far less interesting than many other characters) across the world to California where we meet Shalimar one last time.
Rushdie's latest novel is complex and wordy, full of names and places, history and mythology, and hard-to-remember military and political acronyms. Readers are immersed in a Kashmir rich and conflicted, a place of elaborate feasts, traditional entertainment, wonderful stories, age-old superstitions, diverse religious beliefs and bloody battles. All the characters are compelling and the story itself is interesting. However, SHALIMAR THE CLOWN is not as successful as such classic Rushdie novels as MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN and THE SATANIC VERSES. The prose is too heavy, too contrived in places, and thus here and there the novel is not quite readable.
But for those willing to indulge Rushdie in his idiosyncratic (sometimes dull, sometimes confusing, always original) style, SHALIMAR THE CLOWN is great storytelling worth reading. Not only does Rushdie give readers an honest exploration of love and heartache, he also sets it against the brutality, hatred and fear of contemporary terrorism and the very real struggle for Kashmir.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
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