: Salman Rushdie may not have won the Nobel Prize this year, but his novels are far from outdated #IndiaNEWS In an age of autofiction, lived experiences and hyperlocal narratives, some feel that Salman

Salman Rushdie may not have won the Nobel Prize this year, but his novels are far from outdated #IndiaNEWS
In an age of autofiction, lived experiences and hyperlocal narratives, some feel that Salman Rushdie’s novels are the literary equivalent of 1980s long-hair, oversized-shoulder-pads and head-to-toe sequinned outfits.A good way to start assessing such judgements is by moving hastily away from fashion metaphors and turning to literary eras for context. The 1980s were recently called a Golden Age for British fiction by John Walsh, former literary editor of the Sunday Times. The best novels of the period, he says, were “by turns violent, tender, vulgar, rapturous, cerebral, argumentative, seductive, hilarious, and obscene???. Among the authors who came to the fore were Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rose Tremain, and Salman Rushdie.These writers are often clubbed together to represent the period, despite their distinguishing characteristics. However, Rushdie’s work clearly stood apart from the rest, at that time and later. Take his linguistic dexterity and “chutnification??? of English; his use of magic realism in writing about the Indian subcontinent; and his carnivalesque treatment of politics and religion.The fabulous and the realThe qualities that felt striking and vibrant then are seen by some nowadays as tired and unappealing. Rushdie, they say, is over-ambitious and hyperbolic. One reviewer wrote that his novels are increasingly “wonder-filled and windy???....Read more

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