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If love is not all, then it is nothing: this principle, and its opposite (I mean, infidelity), collide down all the years of my breathless tale.

And breath-taking it was, this epic saga on the rise, thriving and fall of four generations of an eccentric, wealthy Indian family - at least, such is the imprint the novel left on me, having read it about twenty years ago.



Deception, hatred, revenge and murder are the ingredients of an exhilarating story ultimately revolving around love: scorching pepper love, motherly love, love of beauty and art (one of the characters, Aurora Zogoiby, is inspired by the painter Amrita Sher-Gil). Like in Midnight's Children and Shame, Rushdie emerges as a fabulous storyteller, sailing airily on the waves of his powerful imagination and wit when interweaving the fortunes of the da Gama-Zogoiby families with twentieth century Indian history and religious issues (Partition, Hindu nationalism), blending fiction and real historical events.




I wanted to cling to the image of love as the blending of spirits, as mélange, as the triumph of the impure, mongrel, conjoining best of us over what there is in us of the solitary, the isolated, the austere, the dogmatic, the pure; of love as democracy, as the victory of the no-man-is-an-island, two’s-company Many over the clean, mean, apartheiding Ones. I tried to see lovelessness as arrogance, for who but the loveless could believe themselves complete, all-seeing, all-wise? To love is to lose omnipotence and omniscience. Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, I told myself, still, without that leap nobody comes to life. The leap itself is a birth, even when it ends in death, in a scramble for white tablets, and the scent of bitter almonds on your beloved’s breathless mouth.

The vigorous narrative pace, the kaleidoscopic range, the alluring settings (Cochin, Bombay, Spain) and Rushdie’s characteristic style and prose (almost baroque, surrealistic, fast, dancing forwards, recoiling, tiptoeing sideways, digressing, almost baroque, coloured with word play and amusing references to film, music and literature) left me bedazzled and somewhat word-enebriated. Though the story lines and the many characters have mostly faded, I remember my younger self adored the flavour of Salman Rushdie’s writing, wondering now if the more mature reader self still would be enraptured by his spicy exuberance.




Als liefde niet alles is, dan is ze niets.

Bedrog, haat, wraak en moord vormen de ingrediënten van een spannend verhaal waarin alles uiteindelijk om de liefde draait: verzengende peperliefde, moederliefde, liefde voor schoonheid en kunst. Rushdie is een rasverteller met een uitzonderlijk rijke verbeelding. Luchtig en spitsvondig verweeft hij de lotgevallen van de families Da Gama en Zogoiby met de Indiase geschiedenis en religieuze kwesties. Rushdies taal is zwierig, bijna barok en krioelt van woordspelletjes en persiflerende verwijzingen naar film, muziek en literatuur. Een wervelend boek dat je onderdompelt in een heel eigen wereld.