Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy by Vijay Mishra (review)

• Published in: Modern Fiction Studies Vol. 66; no. 4; pp. 798 - 801
• Main Author: Ramone, Jenni
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.12.2020
• Subjects: Archives & records; Authorship; Autobiographies; Intertextuality; Literary characters; Literary translation; Literature; Narratives; Novels; Rushdie, Salman; World literature; Writers
• ISSN: 0026-7724; 1080-658X; 1080-658X
• DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2020.0041

Responding to Rushdie’s own assertion that “the process” (2) and therefore the resulting archive “[are] not very interesting” in the first chapter, Mishra offers convincing evidence that the opposite is true, explaining that his aim is to “flesh out diverging narratives that throw light on the other archive, the already edited and therefore already censored archive which constitutes the writer’s published corpus” (30). For a fan and/ or scholar, the items included indiscriminately (perhaps accidentally) by Rushdie among his archived papers—“a necklace with ‘Salman’ written on a grain of rice inside a liquid-filled bulb” (5), a set of tarot cards, a pair of broken spectacles worn by the author to receive the Booker Prize, and a “Salman Rushdie puzzle”—offer fascinating new dimensions to consider. While these objects tantalize, Mishra demonstrates the potential of archival research in recuperating some of Rushdie’s less acclaimed novels, including a reading of Fury which understands it as a translation of, and intertext for, Ovid’s story of the grief of the Furies, weeping for the first time over the song of Orpheus.