It is impossible to talk about Salman Rushdie’s work without acknowledging that he is that Salman Rushdie. The Rushdie who went into hiding because of the 1989 fatwa over his book “The Satanic Verses,” eventually reentered public life, big-time, and was brutally attacked onstage last August. Rushdie is a novelist whose writing is prolific, exuberant, extravagant, magical, expansive, mythological, brilliant — and he is also the man who has lived under decades of threats that are all too real.
As he releases a new novel, “Victory City,” Rushdie has returned to seclusion, declining media requests. He has not made a public appearance since the attack that left him gravely injured. Rushdie’s absence speaks volumes. How can we tell the dancer from the dance? The writing and the writer are one.
Rushdie knows a lot—too much—about backlashes and their horrors. It would be easy to read the antics of his post-fatwa novels as pure defiance: If he stops playing the jester, the terrorists win. There’s some truth to that, and in the face of a deadly threat that curtailed his freedom of movement for more than three decades, his staunch drollery has been remarkable. But he was a clown from the beginning. His verbal excess, his vamping, his characters’ exaggerated traits—his general shenanigans—are parts of a whole, a commedia dell’arte performance drawing on his personal suffering, yes, but also on the great dramas of our time, in which he played a role only because he was forced to. Chief among these dramas, for Rushdie, are the struggle between authoritarianism and noisy, messy democracy, and the efforts of the humorless and hierarchical to quash irreverence and equality. No matter what else is happening, in the theater of this author’s mind, the masks go on and are taken off. He stands in the wings, ready with the next one. He mugs for the audience. Points are made, but lightly, lightly. When you think about it, Rushdie’s novels are a miracle. May the goddess grant him strength to write another one.
As the years went by and the magazine grew fatter and glossier, there was only one little problem: the typeface on my essays became smaller and smaller and increasingly hard to find between the Jimmy Choo ads. When I would ask a good friend who had been a New Yorker editor for decades and then the editor of the Times Book Review to read a piece I was particularly pleased with, he would come back to me and say that he had looked through the magazine and couldn’t find it. “Too many ads,” he declared. On the one occasion he took the time to actually read through the whole magazine he was impressed and wondered why he hadn’t known how good the writing was before.
Of course it’s not just ads that have changed magazines forever. The larger problem for women’s magazines, and magazines in general, is that money has moved from print to online in a way that has changed reading habits dramatically.
So until someone digs up an earlier example, the best working theory of why designers and layout editors have been filling pages with a garbled version of a 1st century BCE treatise that says, in so many words, “No pain, no gain,” for 60-odd years is that some marketing exec at Letraset tasked with generating placeholder text for an ad heroically declined to hit the pub with her colleagues and reached instead for her 1914 Loeb facing translation of De Finibus, then settled down to the hard, thankless task of absolutely butchering it.
Mourning is important to every human life that gets as far as adulthood. That is because every such life is framed and inflected by the unpreventable and irretrievable loss of everything that contributes to its flourishing: love, health, meaning, happiness, accomplishment, wealth, beauty, and eventually itself. Pascal writes that the last act is bloody no matter how fine the rest of the play, and that the end is always the same: the grave. The situation is made worse by the fact that the grave opens not only for you but also for everyone and everything you have ever loved. Christians, and some others, have the consolation of hope. But the losses are nevertheless unavoidable, and mourning is one of the few things we can do in the face of them—perhaps the only thing we can do that does face them.
But what, exactly, is mourning, and how does doing it well contribute to a fully human life? These are good questions, addressed too rarely.
The challenge of pizza is to cook each element to peak deliciousness at once. When ice and shipping are added to the equation, that becomes even more complicated. Fresh mozzarella becomes clumpy, tomatoes dry out, crusts become soggy.
New freezing technology and affordable access to express shipping have made it possible for more options to slide into freezers. But they’re not coming out of frozen-food factories owned by industry giants like Nestlé or Rich’s. These new pies are wood- or coal-fired, hand-pulled and made with organic and Italian ingredients.
Now, in a political period not dissimilar to the chaos of the 1960s, the opportunity to change the tone of political comedy is upon us. And the activist-comedy of that era can be our new blueprint. We no longer need it to spread information or "make fun of" news cycles that are already absurd. Political comedians on the left have the opportunity to "motivate us to be part of the resistance." Rather than acting as journalists, sharing information in a palatable way, they push conversation forward. Stewart himself has made this shift a bit, with his activism for 9/11 first responders. But now the new voices of liberal comedy can pave the way.
A Country of Eternal Light functions as a window into its protagonist’s life, spanning many years, multiple countries, two children, several grandchildren, heartbreak, holidays and a fatal diagnosis. First-person present-tense is the perfect space from which to recall the past with clarity, without neglecting hindsight. The chronologically fragmented retrospective structure makes this journey all the more intense for the reader, who is able to witness the protagonist’s life from outside an embodied perspective.