Although there are chapters set in Bombay, much of the novel takes place in London, Mr. ''The Satanic Verses,'' in contrast, concerns itself less with political events than with the consequences of cultural exile and the more personal matters of identity and metamorphosis. Although the book received some positive reviews in Pakistan, that country later banned it. ''Shame,'' published in 1983, focused even more closely on political issues, using Mohammad Zia ul-Haq's brutal rise to power as the President of Pakistan as a springboard for creating a phantasmagorical portrait of a country that was ''not quite Pakistan.'' Peopled with a cast of petty, self-righteous fools, ''Shame'' offered a portrait of a country teetering precariously on the edge of absurdity like one of the fictional countries in Evelyn Waugh's black comedies.
Gandhi threatened to sue for libel over a passage that implied she bore responsibility for her husband's death. After the book's publication in 1981, Mrs. Rushdie to the forefront of a new generation of British writers, stands as a dark parable of Indian history since independence: the decline of the book's hero - from a brilliant childhood into adult cynicism and despair - became a metaphor for the country's own fate, its high hopes of democracy crumbling in the the tumultuous period of emergency rule declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975. ''Midnight's Children,'' which won England's prestigious Booker Prize and brought Mr. Rushdie's novels and the least overtly political.
Born in Bombay to a Muslim family (which later moved to Karachi, Pakistan), Salman Rushdie has spent the last two decades living in England, and in all his fiction, he has used his multi-cultural perspective - what he calls his ''stereoscopic vision'' - to look at the subcontinent both from within and without.Īlthough the novelist has written of the responsibility of writers to deal with public, as opposed to private, issues, his new book ''The Satanic Verses'' (Viking Penguin), which has prompted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to call on Muslims to kill him, remains the most autobiographical of Mr.
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