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:
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.
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