Vintage International
2 total works
What do we do when the world's walls - its family structures, its value-systems, its political forms - crumble? The central character of this novel, 'Moor' Zogoiby, only son of a wealthy, artistic-bohemian Bombay family , finds himself at such a moment of crisis. His mother, a famous painter and an emotional despot, worships beauty, but Moor is ugly, he has a deformed hand. Moor falls in love, with a married woman; when their secret is revealed, both are expelled: a suicide pact is proposed, but only the woman dies. Moor chooses to accept his fate, plunges, into a life of depravity in Bombay, then leaves for London where he becomes embroiled in a major financial scandal. The novel ends in Spain, in the studio of a painter who was the lover of Moor's mother: in a violent climax Moor has, once more, to decide whether to save the life of his lover by sacrificing his own.
In these nine short stories Salman Rushdie looks at what happens when East meets West, at the forces that pull his characters first in one direction, then the other. Fantasy and realism collide as a rickshaw driver writes letters describing his film star career in Bombay; a mispronunciation leads to romance and an unusual courtship in sixties London; two childhood friends turned diplomats live out in a violent world fantasies hatched by STAR TREK; and Christopher Columbus dreams of consummating his relationship with Queen Isabella. The Stories in EAST, WEST show the extraordinary range and power of Rushdie's writing. With great skill and a tenderness that is often deeply moving, Rushdie explores the complicated relationship of coloniser and colonised, the intimacy and distance, the shared history and the misunderstandings that both bind and separate East and West.