Omnibus Review by Anita Mathias of Rushdie, Ishiguro, Lahiri, and Manil Suri | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias

Omnibus Review

Commonweal Magazine.

Salman Rushdie’s dazzling, densely textured maximilist novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Picador USA, $16, 575 pp.) tracks the brilliant rock stars, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, a contemporary Orpheus and Eurydice, through three great cities, Bombay, London, and, inevitably, New York; and through the familiar story of fame, desperately pursued, turning out to be less delicious than imagined, leading to paranoid, reclusive misery. Though Rushdie’s characters are often mere embodiments of an idea–Vina, like the painter Aurora in The Moor’s Last Sigh (Pantheon), incarnates the destructive concept of the artist as sacred monster, sacrificing morality, decency, and love for art–I found myself moved by the dumb, stoic suffering of Ormus Cama, an immensely gifted musician who wanted nothing more than calm married love, but loved the wrong woman for that life. The Ground offers vintage Rushdie: his erudition and humor; his magpie allusiveness and multicultural jokes; the lyricism, playfulness, and sheer plenitude of his style; and his trademark ricocheting between the sublime and the silly, popular culture and high art, all incarnated in the voice of the narrator, Rai, ostensible friend of Ormus, and Vina’s secret lover. “An everything novel,” Rushdie calls The Ground. Finally, in an uncharacteristic and Shakespearean peaceful conclusion, after the mythic figures of Vina and Ormus vanish–Vina dies in an earthquake, and Ormus is shot dead by Vina’s ghost in a tiresome flash of magical realism I wish Rushdie would abandon–the lesser artists, the photographer, Rai, and the popular singer Mira Celano, settle down to a life of mutual accommodation and domestic happiness.

The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton, $24.95, 256 pp.), a first novel by Manil Suri, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, presents five rambunctious families in an apartment building in Bombay, squabbling over the expenses of the dying (in the cosmos of the novel, reincarnating) janitor, Vishnu. Suri gives us a dead-on and hilarious portrayal of the melodramatic quarrels of the materialistic Asranis and Pathaks, and the simmering pettiness and viciousness engendered by a claustrophobically close society. In a conscious imitation of the progress of the soul in Hindu theology, the higher floors of the apartment building house the more evolved. These include Muslim Mr. Jalal, who desperately seeks the common truth underlying all religions (and, in a chilling scene, is lynched by a Hindu mob when his son elopes with the Asranis’ daughter), and the widower, Vinod Taneja, who has loosened all cords of desire. Though the dying Vishnu’s hallucinatory memories of love and the Hindu myths feel tacked-on and obtrusive, the book is a sprightly, realistic, funny portrait of lower-middle class Indian life and its pretensions.

The polished, elegant surfaces of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of nine short stories, An Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin, $12, 198 pp.) belie the howling emptiness at their depths. In her carefully observed, minimalist tales, Indian immigrants discover the nightmarish price of the American dream of lots of stuff. Strangers in a strange land, imperfectly understanding, imperfectly understood, missing their community-oriented society, they wrestle with unfamiliar New World problems–loneliness, depression, and isolation which destabilize the marriages that, in at least five stories, agonizingly disintegrate. In a savage story, “A Temporary Matter,” a suffering couple, Shoba and Shukumar, tell each other erstwhile secrets, and we watch them steadily, viciously destroy each other as they face the death of their love and marriage. “Mr. Pirzada” and “Mrs. Sen” present Indian faculty couples, alienated and adrift in a foreign world. More restfully, the final story, “The Third and Final Continent,” details the not uncommon odyssey of the restless Indian (like Lahiri’s and my own and, it’s rumored, Rushdie’s) from India through England to America; and the advent of love within the confines of an arranged marriage.

An Artist of the Floating World (Vintage International, $12, 206 pp.), a slender, perfect novel by the British-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro, explores the stream of consciousness of a self-deceived man in postwar Japan (reminiscent of Stevens, the butler in Ishiguro’s better-known, poignant The Remains of the Day). In fascinating sections, Masuji Ono, an artist dedicated to depicting the ukiyoe, “the floating world” of “the nightless city” of the pleasure district, pours himself into his art, painting fifteen-hour days as a student, and later as a sensei, a master. Later, exposed to Japan’s poverty, he asks the age-old question of the moral artistic spirit: Isn’t making art unconscionable in a world of pain? Consequently, he betrays his gift, and supports the Imperial Japanese armies. After Hiroshima, he faces a Japan craving amnesia, with the militarist faction shunned, and an epidemic of public harakiri, honor suicides. In imagistic dreamy sections, Ono reflects on his life, unable to face the tragedy of betraying his gifts, his promise, his joy for chimerical ideals, yet finding hope in the buoyancy of the young in the new Japan. Part of the novel’s pleasure lies in decoding Ono’s classic unreliable narrative, and the Japanese facade of invincible politeness. Ishiguro is a stunning writer with absolutely perfect pitch. His flawless novel, suffused with sadness and beauty, has the delicacy and restraint of the ukiyoe prints of the moon, cherry blossoms, migrating birds, and dreamy geishas with their admirers, sipping away all sorrow.