Reader Score
80%
80% of readers
recommend this book
This is the story of Maximilian Ophuls, America' s counterterrorism chief, one of the makers of the modern world; his Kashmiri Muslim driver and subsequent killer, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown; Max's illegitimate daughter India; and a woman who links them, whose revelation finally explains them all. It is an epic narrative that moves from California to Kashmir, France, and England, and back to California again. Along the way there are tales of princesses lured from their homes by demons, legends of kings forced to defend their kingdoms against evil. And there is always love, gained and lost, uncommonly beautiful and mortally dangerous.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post Book World, Time, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Christian Science Monitor Rocky Mountain News
Entrepreneur, Investor @VillageGlobal, Co-Author of The Startup of You and The Alliance. https://t.co/7W5h75ZB7H
This Salman Rushdie news is horrible. He's a literary gift to the world. A dozen years ago I was engrossed in his perhaps lesser known novel "Shalimar the Clown" -- a tour de force that alternates between Los Angeles and Kashmir, about love and betrayal. https://t.co/jCZTj15IlF
A fab library in the historical school of Charles Darwin. Follow us for news, events and information, and the odd joke too! Tour: https://t.co/tsrkjkbhxy
@WMLibraries Cats love boxes don't they? So, does this one become the Crate Catsby when they find one? Reading Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie right now. What an incredible writer he is :)
A writer, martial artist, cinephile, realist, & student of humanity. (he/him)
Salman Rushdie has been on my mind all day. I found SHALIMAR THE CLOWN in my early 20s, and it floored me. I’d read a lot in my life, but I didn’t know that a writer could do THAT. That was only the start. I hope with all my heart that he’s able to pull through this and recover.
"Read Shalimar the Clown for the effervescent fun factor that is always present in Rushdie's work. . . and for its devastating portrait of the destruction of Kashmir."
--The Globe and Mail
"[Shalimar the Clown] is that rare highwire act, a literary thriller. It seems a vigorous rebutal to the recent dismissal of fiction by V. S. Naipaul, to the effect that 'if you write a novel... it's of no account.'"
--Financial Times (UK)
"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
Praise for Salman Rushdie:
"Our most exhilaratingly inventive prose stylist, a writer of breathtaking originality. . . . He has become, as much for his convictions as for his creativity, the finest English writer of India."
--Financial Times (UK)
"With Rushdie one is always in the presence of a true original. . . . More than any other contemporary English writer, Rushdie makes the page sing with his prose."
--The Washington Post Book World
"A master storyteller.
--The Standard (UK)
"A great novelist, a master of perpetual storytelling."
--V. S. Pritchett
Praise for Fury
"An exhilarating read. . . . One page of Fury is worth a thousand pages of the grey, risk-averse prose that passes so often for contemporary literary fiction."
--The Globe and Mail
"A beautifully written and carefully constructed novel. . . . [Fury] ricochets back and forth between well mannered realism and [Rushdie's] own brand of what might almost be called surrealism -- manic, absurdist, biting, over-the-top and very funny."
--The Vancouver Sun