the ground beneath her feet
"I suspected her of whitewashing the past, and said as much more than once. It never failed to rile her. 'Extremes of experience is one thing,' she'd snarl. 'You know my views on that: I'm for 'em. Bring 'em on! I want to have them for myself?, not just read about them in the paper. But Bombay's Lolita I was not.'"
"And this in the far-off 1950s! In 'underdeveloped' India, where boy-girl relations were so strictly controlled! True, true: but permit me to say, 'underveloped nation' or not, one of our prime cultural artifacts was a highly developed apparatus of hypocritical disapproval, not only of any incipient change in social mores, but also of our historically proven and presently hyperactive erotic natures. What's the Kama Sutra? A Disney comic? Who built the Khajuraho temples? The Japanese? And of course in the 1950s there were no girl tarts in Kamathipura working eighteen hours a day, and child marriages never took place, and the pursuit of the very young by lecherous old humberts -- yes, we'd already heard of the new Nabokov shocker -- was utterly unknown. (Not.) To hear some people talk, you'd conclude that sex hadn't been discovered in India by the mid-twentieth century, and the population explosion must have been possible by some alternative method of fertilisation."
"He picks up one of the paperbacks abandoned in his cabin -- it must be Mull Standish who brought them aboard in the hope of pushing a little culture into his sons, who have promptly tossed them into the spare cabin, the one they never enter, the one that's now Ormus's little hole of privacy. Books by famous American writers, Sal Paradise's odes to wanderlust, Nathan Zuckerman's Carnovsky, science fiction by Kilgore Trout, a playscript -- Von Trenck -- by Charlie Citrine, who would go on to write the hit movie Caldofreddo. The poetry of John Shade. Also Europeans: Dedalus, Matzerath. The one and only Don Quixote by the immortal Pierre Ménard. F. Alexander's A Clockwork Orange."
the satanic verses
"There were plenty of difficult moments. She didn't know what he knew, what she could take for granted: she tried, once, referring to Nabokov's doomed chess-player Luzhin, who came to feel that in life as in chess there were certain combinations that would inevitably arise to defeat him, as a way of explaining by analogy her own (in fact somewhat different) sense of impending catastrophe (which had to do not with recurring patterns but with the inescapability of the unforeseeable),but he fixed her with a hurt stare that told her he'd never heard of the writer, let alone The Defence."
"'Baba, if that's in your top ten,' Gibreel said in the taxi home, 'don't take me to the places you don't like so much.'
"'"Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan,"' Chamcha replied. 'It means, "My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty." Nabokov.'
"'Him again,' Gibreel complained. 'What bloody language?'
"'He made it up. It's what Kimbote's Zemblan nurse tells him as a child. In Pale Fire.'
"'Perndirstan,' Farishta repeated. 'Sounds like a country: Hell, maybe. I give up, anyway. How are you supposed to read a man who writes in a made-up lingo of his own?'"
- Once again, many thanks to Abdellah Bouazza for the reference.
- More information on Salman Rushdie. (Free registration to The New York Times required.)
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