He amusingly quotes the newly elected Playmate of the Year respectfully saying to him, at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles: “I’m sorry, sir, I haven’t read any of your books.” “ Shame is your Lear.” The unfortunate result is that Rushdie has become the Dreyfus of literature, a writer more written and talked about than read. “ The Satanic Verses is not your Lear,” the Indian writer Gita Mehta told him.
Instead, that role fell to The Satanic Verses, which in Rushdie’s harshest self-assessment was “a little gawky”, and in the opinion of other critics (among them Hermione Lee, Claire Tomalin, George Steiner, John Berger, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, Bernard Levin, Roald Dahl) was perhaps less wonderful than his earlier work. In another era, it would be easier to champion Salman Rushdie for what he is, a writer of prodigious if uneven talent who deserves his international reputation if, for example, Midnight’s Children or Shame had been the novel called upon to test “the mighty principle” of free speech.
0 kommentar(er)
