Neither One nor the Other. A Reading of Shalimar the Clown

Abstract

 Salman Rushdie, always considered an intercontinental narrator between East and West, addresses the unresolved fractures that run through the world in his recent novel Shalimar the Clown (2005), producing a chain reaction, and showing how globalization, which draws up and mixes cultures, at the same time accomplishes disasters. It is a story of betrayal and revenge: desire draws up culturally distant subjects, but generates a tear that can no longer be pacified, partly because of stiffness and misunderstandings that afflict their behaviour, both traditional and modern, as well as their communities. All the characters perform actions of which they do not calculate the consequences and fatal outcomes, until the last scene of clash, left unresolved in the final page. In this novel, the use of magic which Rushdie has often accustomed to us is less relevant, although not entirely absent: there is rather the presence of history, from the resistance against the Nazis to terrorist and fundamentalist outbursts. More than in other texts, in Shalimar the Clown Rushdie has wrapped his novel in a gloomy and hopeless weather, with the intent to strike precisely the absence of easy solutions and to awaken the reader to consciousness, because, despite all the difficulties of mediation and unresolved fractures that are found there, the meaning of the book is a call to freedom and a condemnation of the blindness of power, whichever the uniform it wears.