Of the handful of nonfiction works I’ve read by Rushdie, this one feels like the most important and essential one. There’s some significant strengths in this one, so very necessary commentary, and nuanced understandings that either exist less in his later writing, or possibly exist less in his later thinking. If we’re thinking less of Rushdie as a public individual with a variety of views and a changing orientation toward the world and more of a writer who is presenting his views on these particular subjects, this is a truly excellent collection, when it’s really clicking.
There’s nothing wrong with the following parts of the collection, but they are less strong than the other sections I will mention next. There’s a lot of book critcism in this collection that might very well round out your reading list, or perhaps, if you feel like your taste is similar to Rushdie’s (it might be!!) then these might be very good. There’s aboslutely a few books reviewed here that I am more interested in now than I was before, and in some cases was interested in hearing about Rushdie had to say about them. For example, I read the final Graham Greene novel The Captain and the Enemy last fall, and it’s reviewed here, and since no one was really talking about it when I read it, thirty plus years after it came out, perfect. But these are limited in part because they’re older reviews, and also because most of them are 250-500 words in length and so while they might contain some interesting commentary, no depth really.
The two main thrusts in this collection where Rushdie shines through in his anti-colonial and anti-racist essays, and there’s several of these. His ideas, very clearly stated, show a prescience on the topic and a lot of what’s he saying still holds up now. The other section is his commentary on Islam, especially his conversation with Edward Said, and then in reaction to the Iranian fatwa against his life after the publication of The Satanic Verses. He knows a thing or two about some attempted “cancelation” but he doesn’t give into reactionaries in this writing. He refuses to budge on his positions that a novel is a novel, not a polemic; that free speech is vital and important to healthy discourse; and that the enemy of your enemy is not the same thing as your friend. He comes out very strong against those on the Right who would use his position to promote racist anti-Islamic polemics of their own. He’s also clearly very hurt, and his writing in this section is deeply sympathetic.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/537762.Imaginary_Homelands)
