Imaginary Homelands (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Even before THE SATANIC VERSES provoked international controversy, Salman Rushdie had established himself as one of the most important writers in contemporary Britain. His second novel, MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN (1980), was awarded the prestigious Booker prize; his third, SHAME (1983), was also highly praised. Throughout the 1980’s, Rushdie also wrote essays, eloquently and often: about the politics of religion and race in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Indira Gandhi’s India, and Zia ul-Haq’s Pakistan; about writers and books from India and Pakistan, Africa, Britain, Europe, South America, and the United States; about the vocation of the writer and the powers of literature, the potential of the imagination and the dangers of censorship; and, repeatedly, about migration as the archetypal experience of the twentieth century. IMAGINARY HOMELANDS brings most of these essays together with the several major statements he has written in the wake of THE SATANIC VERSES to form an extraordinary intellectual autobiography.

Migration—losing one country, language, and culture and finding oneself forced to come to terms with another place, another way of speaking and thinking, another view of reality—is Salman Rushdie’s great theme. Metamorphosis is its metaphor. And reflections on migration and metamorphosis permeate these essays as thoroughly as embodiments of them populate his novels, making many of these pieces essential statements about contemporary urban society’s conflicts.

Rushdie also displays a mordant sense of humor. His response to Thomas Pynchon’s fabled desire for privacy, for example, is the funniest sentence to have appeared on the front page of THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW in recent memory. “So he wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address,” Rushdie writes in the argot of one of Pynchon’s zonked-out space cadets. “I can dig it, I can relate to that (but, like, he should try it when it’s compulsory instead of a free-choice option).”

IMAGINARY HOMELANDS is full of similarly witty observations on other subjects, as well as of careful, insightful, and provocative readings of several dozen writers. The collection’s last section includes three statements of self-defense—of himself and of art—that are alone worth the price of admission.

Sources for Further Study

The Atlantic. CCLXVII, June, 1991, p. 120.

Booklist. LXXXVII, March 15, 1991, p. 1434.

Chicago Tribune. June 16, 1991, XIV, p. 8.

Kirkus Reviews. LIX, March 1, 1991, p. 309.

Library Journal. CXVI, April 15, 1991, p. 94.

London Review of Books. XIII, April 4, 1991, p. 18.

New Statesman and Society. IV, March 29, 1991, p. 32.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVI, June 2, 1991, p. 15.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVIII, March 8, 1991, p. 61.

The Times Literary Supplement. March 29, 1991, p. 61.