THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502160328
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
EAST, WEST
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Pantheon. 214 pp. $21.
WHAT DANGER WILL enchant, beguile and finally destroy its willing victim? The menace in question, neither dragon nor drug, is unveiled in Salman Rushdie's new book of short stories, East, West.
Indian-born and British-educated, Rushdie has been in hiding since 1989, when the Islamic clergy condemned him to die (a ``fatwa'') for his novel, The Satanic Verses. Now without a homeland, the author, like many of his characters, is between two cultures, displaced by his own fiction. It's no wonder, then, to find this wry warning in East, West:
``Fictions. . . are dangerous.
``In fiction's grip, we may mortgage our homes, sell our children, to have whatever it is we crave. Alternatively, in that miasmal ocean, we may simply float away from our desires, and see them anew, from a distance, so that they seem weightless, trivial. We let them go. Like men dying in a blizzard, we lie down in the snow to rest.''
In East, West, Rushdie shows mastery of the storytelling form as he explores - and pokes fun at - this dangerous demon, fiction. In effect, Rushdie tickles the dragon with its own tail.
``East,'' the first section, contains three Eastern-style moral fables, in the manner of Scheherazade. Each story explores a character in the grip of a fiction - a wish, illusion or belief. In ``Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies,'' a man who makes his living by giving advice (that is, lying) encounters a woman so lovely that he, in a weak moment, tells her the truth. In ``The Free Radio,'' a young man lives on broadcasts from a fictitious transistor radio ``. . . conjuring reality. . . out of the hot thin air between his cupped hand and ear.''
Stories in the middle section, ``West,'' play skillfully with contemporary Western forms: ``At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers'' is a surrealistic fantasy in which exiles real and imagined, from political emigres to E.T., bid on the magic footwear of Oz. This story, central to the book, depicts a world obsessed with fictional shoes from a fictional setting, because they offer return ``to normalcy'': ``They promised to take us home.'' Two more droll pokes at the fiction dragon ensue: a let's-tell-it-all historical fiction, ``Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship,'' and a postmodern revision of ``Hamlet'' from the viewpoint of a descendant of Yorick.
In the final section, East, West, the characters, like the author, dangle between two cultures. This is Rushdie at his finest. With gentle irony he records the struggles of immigrants from the East as they try to rewrite themselves in Britain.
``Harmony of the Spheres,'' in the guise of a traditional coming-of-age story, conveys as much about the culture gap through the nuances of dialogue as through the plot. A very English chap describes hunting: ``Nothing like it to cheer a fellow. . . blasting the life out of one's furry and feathered friends, doing one's bit for the food chain. Marvelous.'' Assessing the hunter, the narrator's bicultural girlfriend doesn't mince words: ``What is he? Some English mess-head, only. Get my drift, writer-sahib? I mean, thanks for the intro, etcetera, but now you should drop him, like a brick.''
``Chekov and Zulu'' returns to the dangers of fiction with two Indian spies in Britain who reinvent themselves as ``Star Trek'' heroes. Gradually, the lines between their actual and their fictional lives begin to blur.
The last story, ``The Courter,'' describes a London house, full of Indian families, presided over by an Eastern European porter. The language problems, both between the Indians and the British and the porter and his tenants, are a source of hilarity and misery.
In a final irony, the language barrier gives the porter a new identity and allows him to enter a fiction of his own:
``English was hard for Certainly-Mary. . . The letter p was a particular problem, often turning into an f or a c. . . As the elevator lifted her away, she called. . . `Thank you, courter!'. . . `Courter,' he repeated to the mirror. . . People called him many things. . . But this name, this courter, this he would try to be.'' MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a short-story writer and poet and associate fiction
editor of The Crescent Review. She lives in Virginia Beach. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Salman Rushdie's latest book, ``East, West,'' reflects his
precarious position between cultures.
by CNB