Writers Notebook: On Rushdie.

A tribute, lament, and then-via the wire-a glint of hope regarding his health.

The Satanic Verses was the last novel my aunts and momma bonded on before their relationship went south. Coming from an extended family of lower working class book nerds, I viscerally remember Rushdie( and talks about his importance). Rushdie seemed the futurist extension of the Boom Writers my mother loved, the ecosystem of writers across the globe who alchemized Faulkner, Borges, Joyce, Kafka, Calvino, Woolf, and Beckett to make these cross-cultural tone poems strews that reached so many people around the globe.

I always remember Saladin Chamcha’s line as the plane is hijacked and about to blow up “ Damn you, India, you won’t get your hooks into me again; you cannot drag me back.” I remember how it did in and how Rushdie created endless intriguing questions burnished around his gift for weaving complex narratives and character sketches around conventional parables. Saladin’s story, of a wealthy, justifiably angry nihilist voice artist in contrast to Gibreel, his parallel of sorts as a Bollywood actor, and the journeys they go through as Satan and the Archangel Gabriel is idiosyncratically his. The questions they raise about the infinite nuances of heritage and history and how to deal with them, however, link both characters to Faulkner’s Compson’s, Morrison’s Sula, Nel, Guitar, and…