“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
Salman Rushdie

Growing up in India in the eighties and early nineties, I remember that the literary columns of most newspapers and magazines would often focus on two names as the ‘big two’ in Indian writing in English – Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. While Seth’s writing (his early poems, The Golden Gate, A Suitable Boy and From Heaven Lake) in gentle, formal prose is nostalgic both in terms of form and content and flows like a river, Rushdie’s rich voice with its many layers of allusions, inter-textuality and effervescent wordplay cascades through the pages like a waterfall, challenging and at times, tending to overpower the reader.

“It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

I started reading Rushdie with Imaginary Homelands, a fascinating collection of essays that include literary criticism of his contemporary writers (Gunter Grass, Marquez, Calvino, Vonnegut and Barnes among others), travelogues, memoir, reflections on the literary life, colonialism, racism, religion and empire, and his personal definition of what home means, and what it means to be an exile.

“The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.”
― Imaginary Homelands

“He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.”
― Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

The meta-fictional fable Haroun and The Sea of Stories was my first introduction to his fiction – a book that remains one of my favourites to this day. It can be read at various levels, as a metaphysical fable about the power of fiction, as a political satire on the storyteller’s freedom of expression or simply as an entertaining young adult story based on the hero’s journey.

“I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.”
Salman Rushdie

I next read Midnight’s Children and was mesmerised by the book which won the Booker and the Booker of the Booker prizes. I remember the days passing like a delirious, gripping dream while I was reading this masterpiece of a novel. The pages turned as though by themselves, compelling me to keep watching as places and characters came alive through the words, and projected the story, scene by scene, sharply on my mind. The actual movie version which I saw last year left me underwhelmed. In spite of the character names and events, the film seemed to bear no trace of that magnificent novel.

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Salman Rushdie

Shame, East, West, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence were good but nowhere as great, while Fury, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and The Moor’s Last Sigh were lesser literary siblings of the illustrious Midnight’s Children.

Luka and the Fire of Life was a beautifully written sequel to Haroun. However, Luka’s story did not quite touch the peaks scaled by his elder brother’s tale.

“There are places in the world where nothing ever happens, and Time stops moving altogether. There are those of us who go on being seventeen years old all our life, and never grow up. There are others who are miserable old wretches, maybe sixty or seventy years old, from the day they are born. We know that when we fall in love, Time ceases to exist, and we also know that Time can repeat itself, so that you can be stuck in one day for the whole of your life.”
Luke and The Fire of Life

I read Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights with a great deal of pleasure, a book which I am looking forward to re-read later this year along with The Golden House , and look forward to reading many more books from this master author, who remains at the top among the world’s greatest contemporary writers.

If you like literary fiction, you will love The Reengineers:
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