Step Across This Line : Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Anthology
Review: Rushdie manages pour his considerable intellectual firepower into every line that he writes; his work is so full of veiled references, wordplay, puns, and double entendres that almost any passage can be read and re-read and still produce some sort of new meaning each time. These gymnastics never fail to impress, but ironically they don't create the optimal framework upon which to construct a coherent novel. Literary flash abounds, but in my opinion Rushdie often moves important elements (like, say, character development?) to the back burner.

However, all of the features of Rushdie's style that I occasionally consider to be ill-suited to long fiction I find to work perfectly in this collected anthology of short nonfiction. A little focus is a wonderful thing, and in Step Across This Line Rushdie dissects thoughts and attitudes in the real world with laser-like lucidity and precision.

These essays and columns range in subject matter from Arthur Miller to the rock band U2 to his struggle with the infamous Iranian fatwa. Both the weighty (example: a reevaluation of Ghandi's legacy) and the trivial (example: the relevance of the aging Rolling Stones in the world of rock music) are examined with wit and depth - and even the trivial themes are used to shine a light on not-so-trivial aspects of our modern society.

Most importantly, I left each essay with a new opinion and point of view - with many of which I agreed and all of which I found in some way illuminating. In the long essay Step Across This Line he examines the way that borders and frontiers shape the evolution of cultures. In summary: an excellent collection of thoughtful and concise essays. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Crossing the Frontiers with Rushdie
Review: Rushdie's latest book lays bare a mind that is on the one hand poetic and reflective, and on the other incisive, witty and analytical. It collects essays, newspaper pieces and columns on diverse topics written and published over the last ten years. The subjects include the children's classic, The Wizard of Oz, essays on specific individuals (like Angela Carter, J.M. Coetzee, Arthur Miller), `Messages from the Plague Years' (select pieces written during the 10 years of the fatwa), syndicated columns for the New York Times (including the outstanding piece on `Amadou Diallo'), and the recent Tanner Lectures delivered at Yale. Altogether they make impressive reading, the musings of a brilliant author inviting the reader to take up challenges, step across all daunting lines of control, and explore new territories.

Rushdie can be ruthless and hardhitting, as in his piece `Not About Islam?' which calls a spade a spade. He can be maddeningly provocative, as in the Introduction to his Vintage Anthology of Indian Writing in English (collected here as `Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!' with a half-sheepish footnote and a slight toning down of his earlier abrasive remarks on regional literatures). He can be passionate in his indignation against racial injustice, and expansive in his appreciation of rock music. But at all times his good humour, his sense of mischief, plays peek-a-boo with his most profound beliefs. He thumbs his nose unselfconsciously at stuff-shirts, no matter how high a pedestal they occupy. He refers en passant to Shashi Deshpande's `curdled judgments'; he dismisses with a shrug the divine aspirations of `dharma bums'; he does not like the way J.M. Coetzee writes (not surprising this, for Rushdie and Coetzee are two writers as different from each other as the strong and gusty autumnal wind is from the brilliant but freezing December sun!).

Rushdie is a superb raconteur. He does not get freighted down with his sweeping range of knowledge nor does he resort to obfuscating jargon (behind which a lot of contemporary theorists love to take refuge). Punctuating his torrent of ideas with interesting anecdotes and asides, he can hammer home his ideas. On page after page we encounter the unexpected bends and rugged textures of his terrain as he shows us the different trees that he can climb. Sometimes he tosses us ripe mangoes, sometimes we get the pits!

The over-riding metaphor of the two Yale lectures in particular, and the entire volume in general, is the frontier and its host of connotations. This `fixed and shifting' line is the backdrop against which he chooses to view human existence. What is the `frontier consciousness' that we must cope with? How are borders made and what do these artificial, man-made dividing lines symbolize today? -- such questions are raised and the author gives us tentative answers. The idea of freedom is involved in his metaphor, so is the figure of the frontier-less migrant who emerges as the archetypal figure of the present times.

What an Indian reader would perhaps look for, and sadly miss, in the present volume is some Indian inspiration. True, there is a free sprinkling of names and events from India, but in these pieces composed over the last decade, the soul seem to be alien. While Rushdie waxes eloquent on U2, Shaggy, film festivals, electoral scenes and other events that make popular news in the western world, he seems to have moved far from the Midnight era and lost touch with the mass culture of India, the popular icons, the songs and singers, the prolific Bombay film industry et. al. Quite understandable, given his circumstances, but saddening all the same.

Moreover, through all the discussion on stepping across different lines, one would look - and look in vain - for some reference to the Lakshman Rekha, which is probably the first idea that would strike a reader from the Indian subcontinent. And in all those pages on the frontier one would expect at least one mention of `sarhad' - the highly evocative and irreplaceable word (from the author's own mother-tongue!) for the dividing line between two nations, invoking the sarhad-i-suba and all the myths and legends of the frontier province. But, no. Apparently Rushdie has moved far from his roots, too deep into American culture. In the last thirteen years he has crossed many frontiers and each frontier-crossing, as he tells us, changes us: we become the frontiers we cross. So the consciousness that we encounter in this volume is one that belongs to the world: it is not an Indian spirit but a spiritus mundi that pervades his works.

As an author he takes his job seriously. For him, inspired by the poet Faiz, a writer has a dual role - part private and part public, part dream and part responsibility. `The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves that we are underlings,' he quotes Shakespeare. We are what we choose to be: we may choose to remain underlings and `find ourselves dishonorable graves' or we may step out of the `underling' slot, face the risks involved, attempt to change the world - and be irrevocably changed in the process. The choice is ours.

`When the imagination is given sight by passion,' says Rushdie, `it sees darkness as well as light. To feel so ferociously is to feel contempt as well as pride, hatred as well as love. These proud contempts, this hating love....' all this and much more are offered here in Step Across This Line.

Rating:
Summary: Salman Rushdie is brilliant
Review: Salman Rushdie is one of my favorite novelist' The Ground Beneath Her Feet' and 'The Moor's Last Sigh' are just two of his masterpieces. Rushdie has but together a collection of wonderful Essays. Rushdie gives his thoughts and insights on the Wizard of Oz, Arthur Miller, rock music, leavened bread, Ghandi ( did you know he liked to sleep with naked young girls to show everyone he could do it without indulging). Soccer (not even Rushdie can make that boring game sound interesting).

I didn't need to know about movies that where never made, And some of his answers for problems seemed rather naive. But most of all he made me thing a different way on a lot of subjects.

Rating:
Summary: Turning journalism into literature
Review: Salman Rushdie is perhaps one of the most famous writers alive mainly on account of his magic-realist novels, which has won him both bouquets and brickbats, the latter most infamously in the form of Iranian fatwa for his novel Satanic Verses.

Not surprisingly for a writer as tough-talking and opinionated as Rushdie, he is also a prolific journalist and essayist. His latest book ¡§Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002,¡¨ offers a glimpse into the writings of Rushdie, the essayist.

Frequent readers of global newspapers may have come across some of his columns, written especially in the aftermath of the 9-11, many of which may very well be included in the ¡§Best of Post 9-11 Essays,¡¨ if a publisher decides to embark on such a project.

For having suffered the wrath of the radical Islam for his writings, which they have denounced as blasphemous, he seems to thrive when commenting on the consequences of the tensions between the radical Islam and the West.

Consider the dazzling following line from one of his columns in which he argued that to defeat terrorists one must first learn how not to succumb to the threats of terror.

¡§To prove him (the fundamentalist) wrong, we must first know that he is wrong,¡¨ he writes. ¡§We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world¡¦s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons.¡¨

The first part of the book is a collection of early essays, the second part is a compendium of his syndicated columns in the New York Times, followed by his languorous, and rather abstract, Tanner Lectures delivered at Yale, which gives the book its cover title.

In these writings, he ruminates on a broad array of pressing issues of our time. He writes on politics (Palestine, Kosovo, Kashmir, U.S. elections), Literature (Arthur Miller, J.M.Coetze, Angela Carter, Arundhati Roy), Arts (photography, movies, rock music), and other most visible icons of our age (such as cricket, soccer, Princess Diana, Taj Mahal).

Nor does his pen escape other fellow public intellectuals. Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, whose writings he doesn¡¦t particularly admire, the late professor Edward Said, who he sympathizes and defends, and that other great writer of Indian origin, Nobelist V.S. Naipaul, whose pro-Hindu politics he does not subscribe to.

One of the best pieces in the book is piece, A Dream of Glorious Return, originally published in the New Yorker, which describes his return to India with his son 21-year old, Zafar, and his visit to a controversial ancestral home in the North Indian town of Solan. He says the exile is ¡§a dream of glorious return.¡¨

For the readers of his novels, lot of these essays may seem familiar and the traces of them can be found in his novels: the Midnight¡¦s Children, the Satanic Verses, the Moor¡¦s Last Sigh, the Ground Beneath the Feet, the last of which some critics have called the Rushdie¡¦s ¡§first American novel¡¨.

If the Ground Beneath her Feet (which traces the rise and fall of a jet-setting Bombay born rock musician) is not American enough, then his latest novel Fury surely seem to have completed that process of Americanization. (¡§Everybody has two homes,¡¨ he has written. ¡§His own country and America.¡¨)

Published in September 2001, Fury was oddly prophetic if you like, particularly in its depiction of Islamic rage, in the fury of immigrant taxi drivers in New York city. (He currently lives in New York.)

But like all exiled writers, he is still best writing about his home from afar, reminiscing the India of his boyhood from a great distance, the India of his imagination, which he left behind in his teens when his parents packed him to a boarding school in England. His is that familiar voice of a rootless artist-intellectual finding home only in the figment of his own rich imagination. And it is exactly in this frontierless land of "unbelonging" he said he has finally found what he calls his "artistic country."

Connecting this broad and disparate canvas of writings is a central idea, his defense of freedom: a characteristic Rushdie, ¡§tough-talking, spirit-dazzling¡¨ argument for artistic and literary freedom and the freedom to travel (and in his case, the freedom to return home) .

As Thomas de Quincy noted that there are two types of literature: ¡§Literature of knowledge and literature of power.¡¨ His non-fiction may belong the latter category - for its ability to provoke you, move you and make you laugh at the most ordinary of events.

Rushdie himself have said he is known for writing ¡§difficult books,¡¨ but his non-fiction offers an easy and accessible guide to his view of the world, a sort of ¡§Rushdie Lite.¡¨ And after reading them, you still come across convinced that he is a tireless man of letters, not only deeply in love with literature but not a bit afraid to write what he believes in.

Rating:
Summary: Grasping for attention from a disappearing author
Review: STEP ACROSS THIS LINE is Salman Rushdie's second collection of essays, which range from 1992 to 2002. Like his first collection IMAGINARY HOMELANDS, I do not think that this is essentially reading for anyone but dedicated Rushdie fans, but the collection stands out as a commentary on Rushdie's place in the current literary scene.

For ultimately what pervades this collection is a sense of desperation. During the early 1990s Rushdie didn't want to speak about the contraversy of THE SATANIC VERSES and the fatwa, prefering to make the media concentrate on his newer works. However, the two novels which appeared during that time, THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH and THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET, did not gain large critical or public acceptance, and essentially put Rushdie on the way out of public consciousness and critical esteem. In STEP ACROSS THIS LINE Rushdie starts talking about the fatwa and fundamentalist Islam again, and one gets the impression that he is only looking for some way to reach the public again because his latest novels have bombed.

That's not to say some of his insights are not thought-provoking. In "Not About Islam?" he bluntly calls the September 11 attack a manifestation of a sickness indeed widespread in the Muslim world and deplores America's insistence - for the purposes of coalition-building and not rocking the boat - that the attacks have little to do with Islam. He also bemoans the sectarian violence in India, for Rushdie has greatly benefited from mixture and melange - his first big novel MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN welded a Western genre with uniquely Indian storytelling, and to see people creating divisions and violence saddens him.

If you've never read Rushdie before, try THE SATANIC VERSES, which is a superb novel full of exciting fantasy and at the same time all too real social criticism. STEP ACROSS THIS LINE is an okay read for diehard fans.

Rating:
Summary: Astonishing curiosity and analysis with a contradiction
Review: This is a collection of essays and opinion columns encompassing Salman Rushdie's arrival in New York and his continuing work as a novelist and critic.

His essay on THE WIZARD OF OZ is a beautiful piece, written as a migrant and a father, in which he explores "one final, unexpected rite of passage," when we must inevitably disappoint the expectations of our child and be exposed - like the wizard as portrayed by Frank Morgan - as humbugs.

At times, Rushdie's thought seems constrained by double standards. Although the long section relating the story of the campaign to defend him from Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence is valuable, I was disappointed it did not include his own infamous public embrace and then disavowal of Islam. Perhaps it is a moment he would rather forget, even though he could submit this as evidence of the fact that scripts were continually being forced upon him by various parties during his years in hiding. There is even a darkly amusing echo here of Muhammad's disavowal of the so-called "Satanic" verses mentioned in a certain famous novel. It is, however, an event that belongs in the record.

Rushdie's views on the September 11 attacks and the war on terrorism (which is to some extent a war on violence wrought in the name of Islam) is surely of interest given his personal experience with radical Islamists. Yet a contradiction in his moral reason appears over the course of his writing. He upholds, as a basic principle of morality, the view that an individual is responsible for his murders no matter what his rationale is. Hence, it is unacceptable to excuse terrorism on the basis of anti-Americanism. On the other hand, Rushdie is willing to relieve individuals of personal blame in order to blame religion itself for murder. He writes, "...religion is the poison in the blood... What happened in India, happened in God's name. The problem's name is God."

If an individual kills for the sake of a totem, why is that God's fault rather than the individual's? Why is it okay to blame a person's religion, but not their politics?

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Viewpoints.
Review: This is the first book I have read by Salman Rushie and did not know what to expect. I was pleased to find it enjoyable. I do admit, however, of scanning some essays that did not hold interest for me. In the book Salman Rushie provides unique insights and perspectives for examining contemporary issues. The book will make you think.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent, 3.7 stars
Review: This is the second collection of non-fiction by Salman Rushdie and like its predecessor "Imaginary Homelands," it covers a decade's worth of writing. Unlike the previous volume it contains fewer book reviews and literary criticism. Instead, it can be divided into four parts. More than half the book consists of various essays and articles. The second consists of articles Rushdie wrote against the fatwa imposed on him by the Iranian theocracy for writing "The Satanic Verses." The third consists of the monthly columns he has been writing for the past few years and the fourth consists of the title essay.

What is the result? Let's start off with the columns, which are generally the weakest part of the book. They are mostly unremarkable journalism and are often facile. Particular examples would include Rushdie's pieces on the new millenium, an outburst of creationism in Kansas, the rise of Jorg Haider and the apotheosis of Joseph Lieberman. But not all of them are so average. There are good pieces on the crisis in Kashmir, the military regime in Pakistan, the campaign against destructive and wasteful Indian dams, and the civil war in Fiji. There is a rather sharp and critical piece against J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace." He has an amusing jibe against James Cameron's claim that his remake of "Solaris" will combine "2001" with "Last Tango in Paris": ...There is one particular turn of his phrase in his article on the police killing of Amadou Diallo. Rushdie states that it would be "unimaginably awful" to have Diallo's killers patrolling the street, and then he stops himself: it would all be too "imaginably awful" to have that, given the persistence of police brutality and the ineffective measures against it. There is also his denunciation of V.S. Naipaul for his callous response to the pogroms in Gujarat.

A reader may have concluded from the previous paragraph that much of Rushdie's best writing is about India and the Indian subcontinent. And while this is not true of all his writing (one highpoint of "Imaginary Homelands," was a lovely review of "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller") it is largely true of this one. There are good pieces on Gandhi, the 50th anniversary of Indian independence, and Indian literature in English, as well as an account of his return to India. The latter is quite good on the sinister BJP government, the impotence of the Congress party, and the widespread corruption, poverty and sectarianism. India, Naipaul once commented, is not a very subtle country, and Rushdie reminds us of that fact in the contrast between billions spent on nuclear weapons instead of relieving the horrible droughts that ravage much of the country. It is actually rather honest of Rushdie to include a paragraph which in retrospect somewhat belittles the terrorist threat from Afghanistan, when it would have been easier to highlight those columns which supported the American overthrow of the Taliban. One striking article is a short one Rushdie wrote on the Taj Mahal. He notes how the building is a classic example of kitsch and cliche, and how the entrance is surrounded by swarms of unpleasant peddlers. He also notes that it was in fact the British who preserved the building from the 19th century onwards. But notwithstanding all these reservations Rushdie points out that the Taj Mahal is still a stunningly beautiful building. Rusdhie also includes an interesting essay about the unsuccessful filming of "Midnight's Children," which was scotched because the governments of India and Sri Lanka rather cowardly and bigotedly refused to allow the BBC to film there.

There is a certain element of nostalgia in some of the other pieces. One can see it in the review of the Rolling Stones' 1994 concert. It is also present in the long essay on "The Wizard of Oz," which is full of many interesting details about the movie (Frank Morgan's coat was bought second-hand and it turned out to have been owned by L. Frank Baum himself), and where Rushdie makes some piccuant comments. (Such as that the conclusion to the movie is a cop-out, and less often remarked on, that if the Wicked Witch of the East is so evil, how come the Munchkins live in a such a pleasant and attractive place?) Rushdie clearly admires the film as a seminal experience in opening his mind, and says little about the novels. (He seems unaware of Baum's socialist and rather daringly feminist ideas-one central point of the later novels is how one character changes from a boy to a girl). There is a rather weak essay in response to George Steiner's comments on the decline of the European novel. Rushdie may be able to name 13 great novelists of the past half century. But none of these are of the stature of Proust or Kafka, and one could name far more from the first half of the 20th century. On the other hand there is an interesting essay about soccer (Rushdie is a fan), and the articles where he writes in his own defence are important to read. They are not important to read simply because Rushdie is a brilliant writer being attacked by a cruel theocracy, but also because they remind us that he is not alone, that brave people are struggling to support secularism and democracy in the Muslim world, and whether in Turkey or in Bosnia or in India, they deserve our support. As a result this book reminds us more of the author of "The Satanic Verses," and "Shame," rather than of "Fury" and "The Ground Beneath Her Feet."