{"product_id":"shalimar-the-clown-isbn-9780679783480","title":"Shalimar the Clown","description":"\u003cb\u003e“Dazzling . . . Modern thriller, Ramayan epic, courtroom drama, slapstick comedy,  wartime adventure, political satire, village legend—they’re all blended here magnificently.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Absorbing . . . Everywhere [Rushdie] takes us there is both love and war, in strange and terrifying combinations, painted in swaying, swirling, world-eating prose that annihilates the borders between East and West, love and hate, private lives and the history they make.”—\u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This is the story of Maximilian Ophuls, America’ s counterterrorism chief, one of the makers of the modern world; his Kashmiri Muslim  driver and subsequent killer, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the  clown; Max’s illegitimate daughter India; and a woman who links them, whose revelation  finally explains them all. It is an epic narrative that moves from California to  Kashmir, France, and England, and back to California again. Along the way there are  tales of princesses lured from their homes by demons, legends of kings forced to  defend their kingdoms against evil. And there is always love, gained and lost, uncommonly  beautiful and mortally dangerous.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Washington  Post Book World, Time, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Christian Science Monitor Rocky  Mountain News\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A sprawling tale of love and politics. . . . A daring aesthetic and political balancing act that traffics in many of the major concerns of post-colonial literature, but always within an evolving and bravely empathetic story. . . . One of Rushdie's best, and an important and rewarding must-read.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNational Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Read \u003cb\u003eShalimar the Clown\u003c\/b\u003e for the effervescent fun factor that is always present in Rushdie's work. . . and for its devastating portrait of the destruction of Kashmir.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Globe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[\u003cb\u003eShalimar the Clown\u003c\/b\u003e] is that rare highwire act, a literary thriller. It seems a vigorous rebutal to the recent dismissal of fiction by V. S. Naipaul, to the effect that 'if you write a novel... it's of no account.'\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e (UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A masterly deployment of interconnected narratives spanning six decades. . . . Dazzling. . . . A magical-realist masterpiece that equals, and arguably surpasses, the achievements of \u003cb\u003eMidnight’s Children\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eShame\u003c\/b\u003e and \u003cb\u003eThe Moor’s Last Sigh\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e. \u003c\/i\u003eThe Swedes won’t dare to offend Islam by giving Rushdie the Nobel Prize he deserves more than any other living writer. Injustice rules.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“The. . .transformation of Shalimar into a terrorist is easily the most impressive achievement of the book, and here one must congratulate Rushdie for having made artistic capital out of his own suffering, for the years spent under police protection, hunted by zealots, have been poured into the novel in ways which ring hideously true. . . . \u003cb\u003eShalimar the Clown \u003c\/b\u003eis a powerful parable about the willing and unwilling subversion of multiculturalism.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for Salman Rushdie:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Our most exhilaratingly inventive prose stylist, a writer of breathtaking originality. . . . He has become, as much for his convictions as for his creativity, the finest English writer of India.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eFinancial Times \u003c\/i\u003e(UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"With Rushdie one is always in the presence of a true original. . . . More than any other contemporary English writer, Rushdie makes the page sing with his prose.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A master storyteller.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Standard\u003c\/i\u003e (UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A great novelist, a master of perpetual storytelling.\"\u003cbr\u003e—V. S. Pritchett\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eFury\u003c\/i\u003e:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"An exhilarating read. . . . One page of \u003cb\u003eFury\u003c\/b\u003e is worth a thousand pages of the grey, risk-averse prose that passes so often for contemporary literary fiction.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Globe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A beautifully written and carefully constructed novel. . . . [\u003cb\u003eFury\u003c\/b\u003e] ricochets back and forth between well mannered realism and [Rushdie’s] own brand of what might almost be called surrealism — manic, absurdist, biting, over-the-top and very funny.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Vancouver Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eSalman Rushdie\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of fourteen previous novels, including \u003ci\u003eMidnight’s Children\u003c\/i\u003e (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), \u003ci\u003eShame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eQuichotte,\u003c\/i\u003e all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, \u003ci\u003eEast, West;\u003c\/i\u003e a memoir, \u003ci\u003eJoseph Anton;\u003c\/i\u003e a work of reportage, \u003ci\u003eThe Jaguar Smile;\u003c\/i\u003e and three collections of essays, most recently \u003ci\u003eLanguages of Truth\u003c\/i\u003e. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN\/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America. His books have been translated into over forty languages.\u003cp\u003eChapter 1\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt twenty-four the ambassador’s daughter slept badly through the warm,    unsurprising nights. She woke up frequently and even when sleep did   come her  body was rarely at rest, thrashing and flailing as if trying   to break free of dreadful  invisible manacles. At times she cried out in   a language she did not speak. Men  had told her this, nervously. Not   many men had ever been permitted to be present  while she slept. The   evidence was therefore limited, lacking consensus; however,  a pattern   emerged. According to one report she sounded guttural, glottal-stoppy,    as if she were speaking Arabic. Night-Arabian, she thought, the   dreamtongue of  Scheherazade. Another version described her words as   science-fictional, like Klingon,  like a throat being cleared in a   galaxy far, far away. Like Sigourney Weaver channeling  a demon in   Ghostbusters. One night in a spirit of research the ambassador’s   daughter  left a tape recorder running by her bedside but when she heard   the voice on the  tape its death’s-head ugliness, which was somehow both   familiar and alien, scared  her badly and she pushed the erase button,   which erased nothing important. The  truth was still the truth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese agitated periods of sleep-speech were mercifully  brief, and when   they ended she would subside for a time, sweating and panting,  into a   state of dreamless exhaustion. Then abruptly she would awake again,   convinced,  in her disoriented state, that there was an intruder in her   bedroom. There was  no intruder. The intruder was an absence, a negative   space in the darkness. She  had no mother. Her mother had died giving   her birth: the ambassador’s wife had  told her this much, and the   ambassador, her father, had confirmed it. Her mother  had been Kashmiri,   and was lost to her, like paradise, like Kashmir, in a time  before   memory. (That the terms Kashmir and paradise were synonymous was one of    her axioms, which everyone who knew her had to accept.) She trembled   before her  mother’s absence, a void sentinel shape in the dark, and   waited for the second  calamity, waited without knowing she was waiting.   After her father died—her brilliant,  cosmopolitan father,   Franco-American, “like Liberty,” he said, her beloved, resented,    wayward, promiscuous, often absent, irresistible father—she began to   sleep soundly,  as if she had been shriven. Forgiven her sins, or,   perhaps, his. The burden of  sin had been passed on. She did not believe   in sin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo until her father’s  death she was not an easy woman to sleep with,   though she was a woman with whom  men wanted to sleep. The pressure of   men’s desires was tiresome to her. The pressure  of her own desires was   for the most part unrelieved. The few lovers she took were  variously   unsatisfactory and so (as if to declare the subject closed) she soon    enough settled on one pretty average fellow, and even gave serious   consideration  to his proposal of marriage. Then the ambassador was   slaughtered on her doorstep  like a halal chicken dinner, bleeding to   death from a deep neck wound caused by  a single slash of the assassin’s   blade. In broad daylight! How the weapon must  have glistened in the   golden morning sun; which was the city’s quotidian blessing,  or its   curse. The daughter of the murdered man was a woman who hated good   weather,  but most of the year the city offered little else.   Accordingly, she had to put  up with long monotonous months of   shadowless sunshine and dry, skin-cracking heat.  On those rare mornings   when she awoke to cloud cover and a hint of moisture in  the air she   stretched sleepily in bed, arching her back, and was briefly, even    hopefully, glad; but the clouds invariably burned off by noon and then   there  it was again, the dishonest nursery blue of the sky that made the   world look childlike  and pure, the loud impolite orb blaring at her   like a man laughing too loudly in  a restaurant.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn such a city there could be no grey areas, or so it seemed.  Things   were what they were and nothing else, unambiguous, lacking the   subtleties  of drizzle, shade and chill. Under the scrutiny of such a   sun there was no place  to hide. People were everywhere on display,   their bodies shining in the sunlight,  scantily clothed, reminding her   of advertisements. No mysteries here or depths;  only surfaces and   revelations. Yet to learn the city was to discover that this  banal   clarity was an illusion. The city was all treachery, all deception, a   quick-change,  quicksand metropolis, hiding its nature, guarded and   secret in spite of all its  apparent nakedness. In such a place even the   forces of destruction no longer needed  the shelter of the dark. They   burned out of the morning’s brightness, dazzling  the eye, and stabbed   at you with sharp and fatal light.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHer name was India.  She did not like this name. People were never   called Australia, were they, or Uganda  or Ingushetia or Peru. In the   mid-1960s her father, Max Ophuls (Maximilian Ophuls,  raised in   Strasbourg, France, in an earlier age of the world), had been America’s    best-loved, and then most scandalous, ambassador to India, but so what,   children  were not saddled with names like Herzegovina or Turkey or   Burundi just because  their parents had visited those lands and possibly   misbehaved in them. She had  been conceived in the East—conceived out of   wedlock and born in the midst of the  firestorm of outrage that twisted   and ruined her father’s marriage and ended his  diplomatic career—but if   that were sufficient excuse, if it was okay to hang people’s    birthplaces round their necks like albatrosses, then the world would be   full  of men and women called Euphrates or Pisgah or Iztaccíhuatl or   Woolloomooloo. In  America, damn it, this form of naming was not   unknown, which spoiled her argument  slightly and annoyed her more than   somewhat. Nevada Smith, Indiana Jones, Tennessee  Williams, Tennessee   Ernie Ford: she directed mental curses and a raised middle  finger at   them all.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“India” still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial,    suggesting the appropriation of a reality that was not hers to own, and   she insisted  to herself that it didn’t fit her anyway, she didn’t feel   like an India, even if  her color was rich and high and her long hair   lustrous and black. She didn’t want  to be vast or subcontinental or   excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or  ancient or noisy or   mystical or in any way Third World. Quite the reverse. She  presented   herself as disciplined, groomed, nuanced, inward, irreligious,   understated,  calm. She spoke with an English accent. In her behavior   she was not heated, but  cool. This was the persona she wanted, that she   had constructed with great determination.  It was the only version of   her that anyone in America, apart from her father and  the lovers who   had been scared off by her nocturnal proclivities, had ever seen.  As to   her interior life, her violent English history, the buried record of   disturbed  behavior, the years of delinquency, the hidden episodes of   her short but eventful  past, these things were not subjects for   discussion, were not (or were no longer)  of concern to the general   public. These days she had herself firmly in hand. The  problem child   within her was sublimated into her spare-time pursuits, the weekly    boxing sessions at Jimmy Fish’s boxing club on Santa Monica and Vine   where Tyson  and Christy Martin were known to work out and where the   cold fury of her hitting  made the male boxers pause to watch, the   biweekly training sessions with a Clouseau-attacking  Burt Kwouk   look-alike who was a master of the close-combat martial art of Wing    Chun, the sun-bleached blackwalled solitude of Saltzman’s Moving Target   shooting  gallery out in the desert at 29 Palms, and, best of all, the   archery sessions in  downtown Los Angeles near the city’s birthplace in   Elysian Park, where her new  gifts of rigid self-control, which she had   learned in order to survive, to defend  herself, could be used to go on   the attack. As she drew back her golden Olympic-standard  bow, feeling   the pressure of the bowstring against her lips, sometimes touching  the   bottom of the arrow shaft with the tip of her tongue, she felt the   arousal  in herself, allowed herself to feel the heat rising in her   while the seconds allotted  to her for the shot ticked down toward zero,   until at last she let fly, unleashing  the silent venom of the arrow,   reveling in the distant thud of her weapon hitting  its target. The   arrow was her weapon of choice.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe also kept the strangeness  of her seeing under control, the sudden   otherness of vision that came and went.  When her pale eyes changed the   things she saw, her tough mind changed them back.  She did not care to   dwell on her turbulence, never spoke about her childhood, and  told   people she did not remember her dreams.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn her twenty-fourth birthday  the ambassador came to her door. She   looked down from her fourth-floor balcony  when he buzzed and saw him   waiting in the heat of the day wearing his absurd silk  suit like a   French sugar daddy. Holding flowers, yet. “People will think you’re  my   lover,” India shouted down to Max, “my cradle-snatching Valentine.” She   loved  the ambassador when he was embarrassed, the pained furrow of his   brow, the right  shoulder hunching up against his ear, the hand raised   as if to ward off a blow.  She saw him fracture into rainbow colors   through the prism of her love. She watched  him recede into the past as   he stood below her on the sidewalk, each successive  moment of him   passing before her eyes and being lost forever, surviving only in  outer   space in the form of escaping light-rays. This is what loss was, what   death  was: an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable   speed of the light-years  and the parsecs, the eternally receding   distances of the cosmos. At the rim of  the known universe an   unimaginable creature would someday put its eye to a telescope  and see   Max Ophuls approaching, wearing a silk suit and carrying birthday   roses,  forever borne forward on tidal waves of light. Moment by moment   he was leaving  her, becoming an ambassador to such unthinkably distant   elsewheres. She closed  her eyes and opened them again. No, he was not   billions of miles away amid the  wheeling galaxies. He was here, correct   and present, on the street where she lived.\u003c\/p\u003eNew York Times bestseller; [quote]--Los Angeles Times","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302061691109,"sku":"NP9780679783480","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679783480.jpg?v=1767736450","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/shalimar-the-clown-isbn-9780679783480","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}