The Shelter of the World, by Salman Rushdie : Fiction: The New Yorker
I have only ever read Rushdie’s Shame, and having just read the wiki article, I realized that all of the social and political commentary was completely lost on me at the time (I found about a third of the book to be boring). However! I did love Rushdie’s style, which I can only describe as being a mixture of sad nostalgia and large amounts of whimsy, which I find really fun to read.
I used to be a much more prolific reader (the Internet doesn’t count), and it dawns on me now how much sass, wit and commentary I regularly miss in lots of art works, be they film or paintings or novels dwelling on Indian-Pakistani history.
When we were at the Musee d’Orsay, I found that I appreciated the audio guide’s stories much more than most of the paintings or sculptures themselves. I’m far too uneducated in art to appreciate their technique in of itself, other than “that looks pretty”, and at any rate that’s long ceased to be impressive on purely aesthetic terms: we’re all overexposed to hundreds of years of art. I imagine it must’ve blown people’s minds back when we didn’t which format of high-definition television we should adopt (The sheer scale of some of these paintings is still impressive, mind you. The 500x600 pixels on Wikipedia hardly compare).
Take, for instance, Olympia by Manet, which shocked his contemporaries because the nudity depicted wasn’t cast in ancient Greece, and prostitutes are vulgar, anyways. Similarly, this portrait of Emile Zola is immensely more interesting once it is explained to you that he was good friends with Manet, and defended Olympia when it first came out (spy in the top right corner a sketch of Olympia, some other Impressionist period whose name I forget, next to a sample Japanese prints that was all the rage at the time).
I mean, I’m sure this is all obvious to Art History folks, but for a humble Computer Scientist this went from a “that’s pretty” to a “that’s so neat!”. I think inside jokes like that should always be explained for the benefit of people like me, since I personally find witty jerk-i-tude to be the ultimate goal in art.
Anyways, the story I’m linking to incorporates all of fun elements I found in Shame without any of the need to understand the history behind it. I suspect it will be a long while before I’ll be able to “get” the The Satanic Verses, so for now I’m going to read up on the Bhuttos and try Shame again.
