Books, Arts & Manners: Absolutely Fabulist

The Moor’s Last Sigh, by Salman Rushdie (Pantheon, 448 pp, $25)

SALMAN Rushdie’s first novel since The Satanic Verses reveals once again that he is a writer with an astounding fertility of imagination. But it is hard not to come away with the sense that all this story-telling and linguistic invention is only for showing off and that Rushdie has written the book in order to demonstrate that he can write it. His subject, in the end, is his own cleverness, and the one illusion he has no interest in creating is the illusion of reality. Back in the Middle Ages, a fabulist like him would have gone to considerable lengths to convince us that the marvelous tales he was about to relate were true by citing some well-respected auctor as their source. Rushdie, by contrast, glories in the fact that he made it all up himself. If you were to start to believe that it was real, you might get into trouble.

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James Bowman

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The Moor’s Last Sigh, by Salman Rushdie (Pantheon, 448 pp, $25)

SALMAN Rushdie’s first novel since The Satanic Verses reveals once again that he is a writer with an astounding fertility of imagination. But it is hard not to come away with the sense that all this story-telling and linguistic invention is only for showing off and that Rushdie has written the book in order to demonstrate that he can write it. His subject, in the end, is his own cleverness, and the one illusion he has no interest in creating is the illusion of reality. Back in the Middle Ages, a fabulist like him would have gone to considerable lengths to convince us that the marvelous tales he was about to relate were true by citing some well-respected auctor as their source. Rushdie, by contrast, glories in the fact that he made it all up himself. If you were to start to believe that it was real, you might get into trouble.