Salman Rushdie. The Shelter of the World. A review
by Jacob Russell on February 23, 2008
Originally posted at: Jacob Russell's Barking Dog
tags: salman rushdie, short story review,Leave a comment
At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces of the new “victory city†of Akbar the Great looked as if they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage.
So begins The Shelter of the World, Salman Rushdie’s mirage of a tale in The New Yorker ( February 25, 2008). It would difficult to classify this story, not that classification, slipping it into the proper box, would tell us better how to read--or how to judge it; but that the question hangs there when you put it down, a distraction, a tease: an Oriental Tale, perhaps, from someone who knows the territory inside out--who might, in another time and place, have written the real thing, but--by way of saying that we are all outsiders and expats now, looking back, mining our memories and putting them on display as a kind of exotica--writing instead, a parody of a European’s fantasy of an exotic tale from the mysterious East.
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