Margo Jefferson is the rare memoirist who is always daring the reader to keep up. You sense that he has arrived somewhere new after a long impasse and hope that it is a sign of good things to come.Ībhrajyoti Chakraborty £11.04 (RRP £12.99) -Ĭonstructing a Nervous System Margo Jefferson Rushdie is happy to record just what he sees and feels. The sentences carefully rise to the intensity of these moments. Midway through a memoir of celebrating Christmas as an atheist, he recalls climbing up the roof of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. Reading the artist Amrita Sher-Gil’s letters, he notices a sensibility moving “naturally towards the melancholy and the tragic”. Rushdie is a perceptive art critic, stirred alike by Mughal-era cloth paintings and Kara Walker’s contemporary silhouettes.
The final 50 pages or so – comprising pieces on painters, photographers and personal ephemera – contain probably the best nonfiction he has written in years. The trademark sentences, once full of showy allusions and turns, are now rife with chatty platitudes.Īnd yet, just when you think his late style has set in, you run into a different, more private, Rushdie. Rushdie’s own trajectory has been different: the effusive ambition of his early work has run out of steam. In a piece written after Philip Roth’s death, Rushdie admires the author of Portnoy’s Complaint for starting off as a “literary revolutionary” and branching out, with the late novels, into political prescience. The rare occasions of vulnerability – the too-late discovery, for instance, that his charming grandfather had actually been a paedophile – are hushed up in parentheses, snubbed for a more palatable narrative. There is the same uncomplicated nostalgia about growing up in Bombay 70 years ago: how the young Rushdie was obsessed with fairytales and fables, how they all fed into the magic realism of his novels. There is the same impervious sense of wonder about “storytelling”, difficult for the reader to share in the age of fake news and social media algorithms.
Many of the old rhythms course through the essays in this new book, at least across the first 200 pages. Rushdie has previously written here and there about his rookie years, and he writes about them again in his new collection of essays, Languages of Truth. He stretched out his advance over four months of travel, roughing it in 15-hour bus rides and humble hostelries, reacquainting himself with the country he had known as a child. But he still saw himself as an apprentice novelist who worked part-time for an ad agency in London. It was 1974, and he had just received an advance of £700 for his debut novel, Grimus.
The inspiration for Midnight’s Children came to Salman Rushdie on a backpacking trip around India.
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