You know me: avid reader of Steve King since the sixth grade, for good or ill--and I've followed the man and his singular voice for these thirty-plus years or so, as a constant source of great fiction, essays and the like. Luckily for me, the man has not been stingy in his tendency to share his favorite authors and their favored works with us, the Constant Readers; his recommendations and reflections of all that is good, great, and/or bad-but-enjoyable has not failed to suggest literally dozens of fine writers with excellent chops and a flair for excellent storytelling: Lovecraft. Ellison. Ed McBain. Westlake. Straub, and Rob Bloch, and Bradbury! Oh my...
I recently came across a "Stephen King's Favorite Ten Books" list, and was not surprised to see Rushdie's The Satanic Verses there, and being someone who can testify that my taste might be well described as at least fleetingly akin to that of our Uncle Stevie, I trotted on down to the Bowie Public Library to see if a copy rested there--alas, Dr. Sleep was devoured very quickly after its initial release, and we've a month or three until the next King novel arrives for consumption, so, what the hey? I've done a lot worse on my own--reading piles of Anne Rice and Hunter H. Thompson and those old mid-80s 007 retreads by poor old dead John Gardner. Though I've enjoyed all of them, there's a shabby nobility in admitting that when in crisis, I go to a professional, Jack: I've always wondered how Stephen King would react (and what would his retainer cost?), if he was aware that I've kept him in my own selfish employ as a "fiction stylist" since the 80s, when he encouraged me to unearth some of the old short fiction by Harlan Ellison, via his piece on horror writing in the excellent Danse Macabre...
But alas, my local public house of borrower's copies does not include the notorious The Satanic Verses. What I found instead was an interestingly titled and cover-illustrated novel called Shalimar the Clown. "Hmm," I thought. "Well, let's give it a go."
Seven weeks later (not a proud pace by any means, but my reading is down to a half-hour a day or so--I'm busy, man!), I'm fifty pages from the conclusion of what has been a very interesting, quite poetically sound fable of hope and consequences, told against the backdrop of a more than four decades' worth of one decidedly non-nuclear family's origins and conflicts, in sometimes very funny, often times spiritually irrelevant, and almost always somewhat neurotically tragic adherence to tradition at the cost of understanding. Sounds confusing, I know--but listen, I'm no critic, just an everyday, "common" lover of fiction, and that's my best attempt at describing what I think Mr. Rushdie has given me to work with...
Thus far I've been surprisingly pleased with the work in general, and I can recommend Shalimar the Clown to any adventurous reader who isn't "put off" by scores of hard-to-pronounce character names and locales, and who won't mind the author really taking frequent opportunities to let the words take on a dancelike lilt of their own, to really play with the language; think Pete Straub in Koko or A Dark Matter and you'll have a pretty concise idea of what Rushdie is capable of. As for the story, like I said: while perhaps not a barn-burner, there is at least one mosque and several villages that wind up firebombed into oblivion, and their devastation--and that of the characters who come to life in this story--is not something you'll walk away from unaffected, I'll wager.
Just my two cents; give it a go if you're out of stuff to read, and let me know if Shalimar the Clown is something you'd call worth the investment of a bit of time and a place in your heart, Constant Reader. I'll keep an eye out for ya.
Okay,
Bobbo
I recently came across a "Stephen King's Favorite Ten Books" list, and was not surprised to see Rushdie's The Satanic Verses there, and being someone who can testify that my taste might be well described as at least fleetingly akin to that of our Uncle Stevie, I trotted on down to the Bowie Public Library to see if a copy rested there--alas, Dr. Sleep was devoured very quickly after its initial release, and we've a month or three until the next King novel arrives for consumption, so, what the hey? I've done a lot worse on my own--reading piles of Anne Rice and Hunter H. Thompson and those old mid-80s 007 retreads by poor old dead John Gardner. Though I've enjoyed all of them, there's a shabby nobility in admitting that when in crisis, I go to a professional, Jack: I've always wondered how Stephen King would react (and what would his retainer cost?), if he was aware that I've kept him in my own selfish employ as a "fiction stylist" since the 80s, when he encouraged me to unearth some of the old short fiction by Harlan Ellison, via his piece on horror writing in the excellent Danse Macabre...
But alas, my local public house of borrower's copies does not include the notorious The Satanic Verses. What I found instead was an interestingly titled and cover-illustrated novel called Shalimar the Clown. "Hmm," I thought. "Well, let's give it a go."
Seven weeks later (not a proud pace by any means, but my reading is down to a half-hour a day or so--I'm busy, man!), I'm fifty pages from the conclusion of what has been a very interesting, quite poetically sound fable of hope and consequences, told against the backdrop of a more than four decades' worth of one decidedly non-nuclear family's origins and conflicts, in sometimes very funny, often times spiritually irrelevant, and almost always somewhat neurotically tragic adherence to tradition at the cost of understanding. Sounds confusing, I know--but listen, I'm no critic, just an everyday, "common" lover of fiction, and that's my best attempt at describing what I think Mr. Rushdie has given me to work with...
Thus far I've been surprisingly pleased with the work in general, and I can recommend Shalimar the Clown to any adventurous reader who isn't "put off" by scores of hard-to-pronounce character names and locales, and who won't mind the author really taking frequent opportunities to let the words take on a dancelike lilt of their own, to really play with the language; think Pete Straub in Koko or A Dark Matter and you'll have a pretty concise idea of what Rushdie is capable of. As for the story, like I said: while perhaps not a barn-burner, there is at least one mosque and several villages that wind up firebombed into oblivion, and their devastation--and that of the characters who come to life in this story--is not something you'll walk away from unaffected, I'll wager.
Just my two cents; give it a go if you're out of stuff to read, and let me know if Shalimar the Clown is something you'd call worth the investment of a bit of time and a place in your heart, Constant Reader. I'll keep an eye out for ya.
Okay,
Bobbo