Shalimar the Clown: A Novel

This is a beautiful tale about a family from Kashmir. The father is an ambassador with a modern-minded daughter in the U.S. Their earlier life in Kashmir follows them to the U.S. As usual for Rushdie, this novel is filled with wonderful prose along with touches of magical realism.

WWII europe, Kashmir, Modern-day LA, this book has all these stories that weave into one. Rushdie is a great story teller and I really love his characters. I wish he would have shaved 65 pages out of the middle. Loved the stories about Max and the French resistance against the Nazis. Hands down the best ending of any book I've ever read.

After several mediocre and self-indulgent efforts Salman Rushdie is on his game again with Shalimar the Clown. Rushdie is always a pleasure to read page by page but his novels, after Satanic Verses, have amounted to less than the sum of their parts with the magical often serving to extricate the writer rather than awe the reader. Happily not so for Shalimar the Clown where the magic is magical, the characters fantastic and believable at once, and the sense of place(s)awesome. This is a great read and an excellent book.

This is a typical Salman Rushdie book taking part both in the USA and in India. All of his book are written in his lengthy style. You probably love him or hate him, there is no in between. I love his books and this is no exception. I finished it in little less that a week. A beautiful story, in part about Kashmir and the troubles there. I recommend it with my whole heart.

What an incredible visit to Kashmir, meeting the multiple, unforgetable protagonists and learning their culture and history via the brilliant narration of Salmon Rushdie!

Why did I wait 3 years after buying SHALIMAR THE CLOWN to plunge in? No matter.

There are Mr. Rushdie's many other volumes waiting for me to savor.

Carole Roback Santa Monica, CA September 1, 2009

This book constantly gathers layers as we discover what the characters are about. The more you read the better it gets. I wasn't sure if I liked it to begin with but then as the connections and layers continued to multiply I became hooked, disturbed but mostly moved. My location is Tasmania and Salman Rushdie has a great fan base here! I would love to see Australia featured in a future novel. It would add a new dimension to his work. How would East meet West develop in Tasmania?

StC is a surpassing novel, transcendent. Rushdie ranks among the finest novelists ever. Some writers should be read. Others must be read. If you truly love fiction, you must read this novel. Enough said.

The book was very well narrated, and the story was captivating. A bit confusing at the beginning as the story jumped from character to character and between seemingly unrelated periods in time and place (from contemprorary San Francisco, to Kashmir in 1960s, to Europe in WWII).. All comes together, of course. The characters were complex, interesting, some, even bordering with mythical.

Rushdie's literary style is difficult at first. I think it is called magic realism. However, as you enter the world of Kashmir, it is an appropriate technique. As the book gathers steam (like a locomotive pulling out of the stattion)it becomes a much faster read and then the plots become compelling. I feel like I understand what has been lost in Kashmir in the past 50-60 year. Excellent. Will probably go back and look at some of his other works.

A geopolitical saga that is a melange of magical realism, historical and contemporary commentary, and romance, Rushdie's newest novel delves into the root causes of terrorism, and explores colliding world views competing for the same space.

I started this books several times knowing that it is a must read, and I should love Rushdie, because all the critics love him. I also had it as an audio book and tried to listen to it many times, yet each time I registered it as painful. I loved Midnight Children, and I liked Fury, but I couldn't go past the first 100 pages of this novel. The writing is verbose, artificial and cold. I tried very hard to like it, care for the characters and the story. For me Rushdie comes across a man with a huge ego, and with non disputable literary skills, but not an enjoyable. The only time I could easily finish one of his books was when I read Fury, another cold book with a big ego, but thanks goodness, less artificial and flowery. Not sure why men's fiction is considered better than women's fiction, maybe because most literary critics are (still) men?!

Certainly a novel should have character development and reader involvement in the characters (as well as in the story) which this book does not. Rushie is a political philosopher or a philosopher of history, not a novelist. We are to think the human lives he writes about parallel histoy; however I do not see any but a loose connection in this book. All seems like known old stuff to me. Use of language is poetic at times and way overdone at other times. . . .I resent his use of Rodney King to illustrate police terror. King was violently resisting arrest and it is VERY difficult for three men to control an adreniline hyped man. Obviously the police were exonerated by the courts, although who can say that they could not have stopped sooner? His criticism of American Hollywood culture is so common, so talked of all the time,so uninsightful, and even, although true to some degree, so radically exaggerated. The unredeeming tone of this book is fine for those who love to immure themselves in hate and sorrow. I don't.

This is the first Rushdie book I attempted to read and around page 150, I have given up on it and decided not to waste my time anymore. I like tightly wound literature. If Rushdie spends 1 page on the central plot, he spends the next 4 describing the melody of nature/human emotion or some such entity irrelevant to the plot. If I wanted to read a poem, I would. If I wanted a documentary on nature, I would watch National Geographic. I read fiction to feel connected with a plot and move with it seamlessly. Sure, all fiction works have some element of deviation from the plot, but when it is sprinkled in, it provides a change. Here the plot provides the change! Dan Brown, Crichton, Grisham... I've probably read all their work and sure some did not appeal as much as others did. But never before have I put down a fiction book just one third through it.

So to sum up, if you like 80% verbose prose and 20% of a plot woven in it, I'm sure you will enjoy this book.

Engineers, mathematicians, scientists and others whose thought process is like a flow chart, may not enjoy it.

If you like books that are pedantic, boring, that attempt to erect too elaborate of a framework from which to hang a plot, then this is the novel for you. Maybe things got better after page sixty-five, that's all the farther I got. It's probably not ethical to base a review on a book I didn't finish, but Rushdie leaves me so annoyed every time I read him that I really wanted to say something here. Why on earth is this man regarded as one of humanity's greatest novelists?

Excellent book! Terrible narration by Mandvi. I cannot understand why he did not learn to correctly pronounce the common Indian names in the book,... wasn't that the point of using an South Asian narrator?

I love Rushdie. Midnight's Children still ranks among my top 5 novels of all time. Loved Shame, and numerous other Rushdie novels. But this book is just too verbose, I got bored, and annoyed, and gave up after 50 pages. Maybe that's not giving the novel a for chance, but a novelist needs to capture me within 50 pages if I'm going to read on.