Brother Reade book list followers, you are about to be inundated with recommendations  of various and sundry works by Salman Rushdie.  I will make certain confessions up front:

1. This is one of my favorite writers.  His voice is completely current and relevant today but is also richly informed by timeless and classic storytelling conventions.  To be contemporary and not fear cliches of form is a fearless and admirable feat.  We are all obsessed with the new, while Mr. Rushdie repeatedly rearticulates our present with its valuable (and sadly dissociated) past.  These days we could use a little of this sort of perspective.

2. I read him all the time, everytime he puts out any book.  I do this entirely unskeptically, wholly receptive before turning the first page.  I am also aware that telling people about Salman Rushdie is a bit like telling people about Pink Floyd.  I know you probably know of him, but I’ve read three of his novels in the last two weeks and thought his work merited a lil mention on here.  I am sure i could be introducing you to works that are far more terse, obscure, and up-and-coming.  And I will, bear with me.  But not now.

3.  There is a slight connection between this post and the trending topic #iranelection on twitter (and in real life).  I don’t know exactly what it is, but Mr. Rushdie has–as most of you know–found little favor with the clerical elite of that country, and as a result has paid a dear price for airing dissent. I should mention, that the fatwa issued to Rushdie was wholly founded on a misreading of his work “The Satanic Verses”, a book that really deserves a life outside of the controversy it caused.  I think that time will be on his side.

This makes for a timely segue (no souljaboy-o):

Imagine you have been declared an enemy of Islam because of your last novel.  What do you follow it up with?  You could play the part, spew venom all over your declared enemies with satire after vitriolic satire.  If you weren’t assasinated, you could probably cash in.  If you were, then your people could at least cash in.  But perhaps you didn’t take the bait.  You took the high road (which is often called the high road only because it is the “not low” road).  Instead of executing the all-too-easy role of the seditious and decadent “modern” novelist, you decided to write a frank story about love, loss, family, and the importance of narrative–of “stories that aren’t even true”–to family and human cultural history.  If you did that I would think it was a boss move, and I would write about it on my blog.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is for me, not only a touching children’s story, but also is a perfect example of how not to become the monster you are made out to be.  Too often when engaging an adversary do we become what it is about them that we oppose.  In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie delivered (from a brand new exile) a story that exceeds even the most justifiable of selfish impulses, and will last longer than his life and his fatwa (may he live to be 1001).

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