Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

I bought this book new, but cheap, on the street from a book vendor. I had not read anything by Rushdie before and assumed these short stories would be mostly about India. The author opens up this collection of essays and short stories with the influence the film The Wizard Of Oz had upon him. It is quite an intriguing read. There is a lot about India here and the affects that country has on the author. His perceptions and opinions are open for debate which he acknowledges and thats why reading him is invaluable.

This collection of Salman Rushdie's non-fiction spanning the early years of the Iranian Fatwa to the immediate post September 11th aftermath displays all the characteristic intellectual pyrotechnics that Rushdie is famous for. There is much in this book for readers who engage with global culture and politics to enjoy. The first essay is an extended piece of film criticism on Rushdie's first acknowledged literary influence - the Wizard of Oz, a movie which reflect's his accustomed condition of a person uprooted from his homeland and adjusting to a strange and, at times, unnerving new world. In 1989, Rushdie fell victim to one aspect of these turbulent modern times - Islamic Fundamentalism. Many of the essays focus on the terrorist threat that hung over Rushdie following the publication of the Satanic Verses, a satirical riff on the birth of Islam. Before that time, Rushdie was a staunch advocate of an approach to life that was founded on the principles of secularism, freedom of expression and liberty of thought, and his experience under the Fatwa strongly redoubled this conviction. The final essays entitled 'Step Across this Time' were written in the massively uncertain September 11th aftermath and discuss the nature of frontiers and their significance. Rushdie argues that we are all living in a frontier time in which great changes are thrust upon us all the time. We must develop a frontier spirit of humanistic liberalism, become custodians of freedom and justice in order to thrive in this current climate. This is the central thread of Rushdie's argument that he returns through repeatedly in these essays and he musters all his considerable intellectual powers to state a formidably powerful case for liberty. Step Across this Line is not just about the critical political issues of this era however. Also included are an exquisitely tounge in cheek autobiographical piece about Rushdie's experiences as a twenty year old living above a boutique in West London called Granny Takes a Trip. This was my favourite essay in the book and I hope Rushdie decides to write more autobiographical descriptions of his youth in the future. Essays on football and rock music link sublimely with more intellectual subjects such as post colonial Indian literature - a subject on which Rushdie is extremely knowledgable and a secular cry to the world's six billionth person to eschew the restrictive power structures of religion and embark on his or her own ethical development. Rushdie is a controversial writer who doesn't shy away from stating his opinions bluntly and forcefully, and his views on subjects such as religion are fiercely contested by those who reject his secular view of the world. But I would strongly recommend this collection of writing to intellectual readers who will appreciate these outpourings from a man who is a genuine global thinker, assiduously well read and a first rate writer.

Salman Rushdie is perhaps one of the most famous writers alive mainly on account of his magic-realist novels, which has won him both bouquets and brickbats, the latter most infamously in the form of Iranian fatwa for his novel Satanic Verses. Not surprisingly for a writer as tough-talking and opinionated as Rushdie, he is also a prolific journalist and essayist. His latest book ??Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002,?? offers a glimpse into the writings of Rushdie, the essayist. Frequent readers of global newspapers may have come across some of his columns, written especially in the aftermath of the 9-11, many of which may very well be included in the ??Best of Post 9-11 Essays,?? if a publisher decides to embark on such a project. For having suffered the wrath of the radical Islam for his writings, which they have denounced as blasphemous, he seems to thrive when commenting on the consequences of the tensions between the radical Islam and the West. Consider the dazzling following line from one of his columns in which he argued that to defeat terrorists one must first learn how not to succumb to the threats of terror. ??To prove him (the fundamentalist) wrong, we must first know that he is wrong,?? he writes. ??We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world??s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons.?? The first part of the book is a collection of early essays, the second part is a compendium of his syndicated columns in the New York Times, followed by his languorous, and rather abstract, Tanner Lectures delivered at Yale, which gives the book its cover title. In these writings, he ruminates on a broad array of pressing issues of our time. He writes on politics (Palestine, Kosovo, Kashmir, U.S. elections), Literature (Arthur Miller, J.M.Coetze, Angela Carter, Arundhati Roy), Arts (photography, movies, rock music), and other most visible icons of our age (such as cricket, soccer, Princess Diana, Taj Mahal). Nor does his pen escape other fellow public intellectuals. Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, whose writings he doesn??t particularly admire, the late professor Edward Said, who he sympathizes and defends, and that other great writer of Indian origin, Nobelist V.S. Naipaul, whose pro-Hindu politics he does not subscribe to. One of the best pieces in the book is piece, A Dream of Glorious Return, originally published in the New Yorker, which describes his return to India with his son 21-year old, Zafar, and his visit to a controversial ancestral home in the North Indian town of Solan. He says the exile is ??a dream of glorious return.?? For the readers of his novels, lot of these essays may seem familiar and the traces of them can be found in his novels: the Midnight??s Children, the Satanic Verses, the Moor??s Last Sigh, the Ground Beneath the Fe

Salman Rushdie is one of my favorite novelist' The Ground Beneath Her Feet' and 'The Moor's Last Sigh' are just two of his masterpieces. Rushdie has but together a collection of wonderful Essays. Rushdie gives his thoughts and insights on the Wizard of Oz, Arthur Miller, rock music, leavened bread, Ghandi ( did you know he liked to sleep with naked young girls to show everyone he could do it without indulging). Soccer (not even Rushdie can make that boring game sound interesting).I didn't need to know about movies that where never made, And some of his answers for problems seemed rather naive. But most of all he made me thing a different way on a lot of subjects.

Rushdie manages pour his considerable intellectual firepower into every line that he writes; his work is so full of veiled references, wordplay, puns, and double entendres that almost any passage can be read and re-read and still produce some sort of new meaning each time. These gymnastics never fail to impress, but ironically they don't create the optimal framework upon which to construct a coherent novel. Literary flash abounds, but in my opinion Rushdie often moves important elements (like, say, character development?) to the back burner.However, all of the features of Rushdie's style that I occasionally consider to be ill-suited to long fiction I find to work perfectly in this collected anthology of short nonfiction. A little focus is a wonderful thing, and in Step Across This Line Rushdie dissects thoughts and attitudes in the real world with laser-like lucidity and precision. These essays and columns range in subject matter from Arthur Miller to the rock band U2 to his struggle with the infamous Iranian fatwa. Both the weighty (example: a reevaluation of Ghandi's legacy) and the trivial (example: the relevance of the aging Rolling Stones in the world of rock music) are examined with wit and depth - and even the trivial themes are used to shine a light on not-so-trivial aspects of our modern society. Most importantly, I left each essay with a new opinion and point of view - with many of which I agreed and all of which I found in some way illuminating. In the long essay Step Across This Line he examines the way that borders and frontiers shape the evolution of cultures. In summary: an excellent collection of thoughtful and concise essays. Highly recommended.