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Zusatztext FROM THE NEW INTRODUCTION BY Anita Desai: “Rushdie's writing resembles a horse at full gallop that will not halt and wait. He creates an epic by turning his characters into symbols and archetypes so that their histories are lived out at several levels at one time-real and fantastic! metaphorical and symbolic . . . He is a writer of an epic-secular! irreligious! irreverent! subversive! both comic and profoundly serious . . . in short! an epic of our times.” “Huge! vital! engrossing . . . in all senses a fantastic book.” -THE SUNDAY TIMES LONDON “In Salman Rushdie . . . India has produced a glittering novelist-one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources! a master of perpetual storytelling. Like García Márquez . . . he weaves a whole people's capacity for carrying its inherited myths-and new ones that it goes on generating-into a kind of magic carpet . . . Saleem Sinai . . . is dramatizing his past life as a prophecy! even universalizing his history as a mingling of farce and horror and matching it with thirty years of the Indian crowd's collective political history . . . As a tour de force his fantasy is irresistible.” -V.S. Pritchett! THE NEW YORKER “One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation.” -THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS Informationen zum Autor Salman Rushdie; Introduction by Anita Desai Klappentext A classic novel, in which the man who calls himself the "bomb of Bombay" chronicles the story of a child and a nation that both came into existence in 1947-and examines a whole people's capacity for carrying inherited myths and inventing new ones. Leseprobe The Perforated Sheet I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate—at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time. Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, overused body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning—yes, meaning—something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity. And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into...
