Salman Rushdie has nothing to prove. Yet he finds himself, in his early 70s, deeply out of fashion. Too old to seize a moment, too active to be redisc

In ‘Languages of Truth,’ Salman Rushdie Defends the Extraordinary

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2021-05-25 20:00:05

Salman Rushdie has nothing to prove. Yet he finds himself, in his early 70s, deeply out of fashion. Too old to seize a moment, too active to be rediscovered, he’s been subject over the past two decades to some of the unkindest reviews ever delivered to a talent of his magnitude.

The magazine Cahiers du Cinéma once had a rating system that included a black dot for “abominable.” If critics could be handing Rushdie these dots, they would be. It has to sting.

The rap against Rushdie’s fiction is that it’s become increasingly “magical,” wonder-filled and windy, as if he were typing in turquoise and burnt sienna. His novels are tricked out with genies and tarot cards and magic mirrors and references to things like evil chicken entrails powder and witches and dragon ladies. These productions feel forced: talky, infelicitous and banal. They have no middle gear, and no real humans wander through them.

Reading these novels, one begins to feel like the English academic Hugo Dyson who, while J.R.R. Tolkien was reading aloud from an early draft of “The Lord of the Rings,” was heard to comment: “Oh [expletive omitted], not another elf!”

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