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Title details for East, West by Salman Rushdie - Available

East, West

Stories

by Salman Rushdie
Sunil Malhotra
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
A rickshaw driver dreams of being a Bombay movie star; Indian diplomats, who as childhood friends hatched Star Trek fantasies, must boldly go into a hidden universe of conspiracy and violence; and Hamlet's jester is caught up in murderous intrigues. In Rushdie's hybrid world, an Indian guru can be a redheaded Welshman, while Christopher Columbus is an immigrant, dreaming of Western glory. Rushdie allows himself, like his characters, to be pulled now in one direction, then in another. Yet he remains a writer who insists on our cultural complexity; who, rising beyond ideology, refuses to choose between East and West and embraces the world.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 1, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781501920639
      • File size: 143156 KB
      • Duration: 04:58:14

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Sunil Malhotra tackles the three "East" stories, and narrator Steven Crossley delivers the three "West" stories. Both share the "East, West" stories in separate narrations. With the challenge of delivering more accents and impersonations, Malhotra has, arguably, the harder assignment. But both successfully navigate these works, which move between Eastern and Western culture as well as the real and unreal. Stories as densely packed with references and inferences as these require close attention. Listeners may find themselves replaying passages to get their full flavor, but this is not a criticism. While these multicultural stories of isolation and companionship are not autobiographical, recalling that Rushdie wrote them while in hiding lends a certain intimacy to the listening experience. K.W. 2017 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from January 2, 1995
      ``I... have ropes around my neck... pulling me East and West,'' says the narrator of one of the nine haunting stories in this collection by the author of The Satanic Verses. In three tales set in India (``East'') Rushdie surveys his native culture with a mixture of fondness, bemusement and dismay. ``The Prophet's Hair'' has some of the bite and daring that got Rushdie into hot water with Muslim fanatics. Stories set in England make up the ``West'' section. In a droll leg-puller, a fusty, prolix narrator retells events in Yorick's life, making Shakespeare's jester husband to the fair Ophelia, who has terrible breath, ``the rottenest-smelling exhalation in the State of Denmark.'' The ``permeation of the real world by the fictional is the symptom of the moral decay of our post-millennial culture,'' says a character in ``At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,'' a futuristic piece displaying Rushdie's iconoclastic imagination and pardonably jaundiced view of life. But the full reach of his brilliant speculation and glancing wit are revealed in the stories in which East and West meet. The narrator of ``In the Harmony of the Spheres,'' a native Indian and perennial outsider in England, describes the suicide of his best friend, a British writer in the grip of paranoid schizophrenia, who manages posthumously to deal the narrator a psychic death blow. ``Chekov and Zulu,'' another teaser with layers of implication, is the best of the lot. Terse, hilarious, with a sinister edge and a stunning denouement, it follows two boyhood friends from India, forever known by their Star Trek nicknames, now diplomats (and secret spies)in England.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 18, 1995
      Rushdie's collection of nine highly postmodern stories probes the differences and connections between East and West, celebrating the hybrid nature of contemporary identity.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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