Zoe Heller disembowels Rushdie memoir
The Salman Rushdie Case by Zoe Heller in the NY Review of Books.
Excerpts:
“One is struck here, not just by the implied disregard for the free speech of other writers who might not qualify for “the quality defense,” but also by the lordly nonchalance with which Rushdie places himself alongside Lawrence, Joyce, and Nabokov in the ranks of literary merit.”
“A man living under threat of death for nine years is not to be blamed for occasionally characterizing his plight in grandiloquent terms. But one would hope that when recollecting his emotions in freedom and safety, he might bring some ironic detachment to bear on his own bombast. Hindsight, alas, has had no sobering effect on Rushdie’s magisterial amour propre. An unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as an embattled, literary immortal-in-waiting pervades his book. He wants us to sympathize with the irritation he felt when the men in his protection team abbreviated his grand, Conradian-Chekhovian alias to “Joe.””
“Some of his most egregiously uncharitable moments occur when writing about his four marriages. Rushdie has a habit of excusing his own fairly frequent infidelities and betrayals with reference to the imperative nature of his own desires. (“His own needs were like commands,” he recalls when explaining why he had to leave his third wife, Elizabeth West, and young son to go gallivanting in America.) The various failings of the wives—their money-grubbing and nagging, their jealousy of his talent, and so on—are not so readily excused.”
“Rushdie’s shuddering hauteur at this moment may strike the reader as a bit rich, coming from a man who spends much of his memoir recalling encounters with pop stars, Playboy bunnies, and “hot” pop-star girlfriends in the breathless style of a young Austen character writing up her first visit to the pump rooms at Bath. But Rushdie would have us understand that his copious accounts of nightclubbing with celebrities are the record of a doughty man’s will to survive, of his commitment to a moral duty…”
Oh read the whole thing.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
December 11th, 2012 at 21:17
Antaray!
December 11th, 2012 at 21:48
Tawagin ba naman ang sarili niya ng pinaghalong Joseph Conrad at Anton Chekhov…na walang kasamang biro o irony.
December 11th, 2012 at 22:39
Grabe ang yabang at pagkapa-importante niya. The level of conceit is outstanding. Buti nga sa kanya na tinarayan siya ni Heller.
December 11th, 2012 at 22:47
I was born in the 80s so i’m not very familiar with Rushdie and the fatwa thing. Now I’m curious and will probably read articles about him…but after reading Zoe’s article, I have a feeling I won’t like him.
December 11th, 2012 at 23:00
Rushdie is fair game.
December 11th, 2012 at 23:52
I knew that Salman Rushdie was going to be a pompous one after trying – and failing – to finish the very first chapter of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. (Why Bono managed to tolerate that book enough to write a song about it, I’ll never know why.)
Heller’s review, incidentally, is not the first one I’ve read that cites Rushdie throwing Padma Lakshmi under the bus in the worst possible way. I’m not even a fan of Padma – and I don’t know what happened in that marriage, exactly – but this one confirmed what I’ve suspected all along: Ano’ng akala ni Salman sa sarili niya, si George Clooney? Pwe!
December 12th, 2012 at 00:22
I’m currently reading Midnight’s Children haha. Unang chapter pa lang so hindi ko pa masabi kung maganda ba talaga.
December 12th, 2012 at 00:36
Maganda yan. Ang tanong ay: May nasulat ba siyang maganda pagkatapos ng fatwa? Kung wala, ibig sabihin ba’y nanalo ang mga fundamentalist?
December 12th, 2012 at 08:12
@stellalehua: Oo, nga. Akala mo kung sinong gwapo. Shet.
December 12th, 2012 at 11:37
Salman Rushdie, he likes to paint himself as a hero and a victim but he’s just a whiny douche and a misogynist. ugh!
so yeah, disembowel is the word, haha, yay Ms Heller! wish i could write something as eloquently scathing like so. I guess one has to be readily armed with an array of adjectives at hand to perfectly nuke your intended. I suddenly remembered Joey of Friends in one of the episodes using the Thesaurus for the first time. Aside from composing an otherwise incomprehensible letter, he signed it as Baby Kangaroo.
Mr Rushdie on the one hand should be synonymous with self important delusional pig for starters. Or, should I first read his book to justify that?
December 13th, 2012 at 04:47
The Atlantic just had a similarly scathing review:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/how-the-mullahs-won/309170/
I just got Midnight’s Children, curious as to why it won the Booker of Bookers. Aside from this book and The Satanic Verses, which I love if only for incurring the ire of the nuts , Rushdie’s only redeeming value now it seems is that Hitch loved him so much and was willing to defend him to death.
P.S. I think we should do away with the labels “moderate” and “fundamentalist”. You either believe the scriptures or you don’t; there is no middle ground in faith. The former term was invented by the “religious” to separate themselves from those who are truly familiar with and believe in what is written without all the creative interpretation one has to convolute oneself into just so one couldn’t be labeled medieval or neanderthal. All it does is to make them feel better about themselves.