Katherine A. Evans on Salman Rushdie

A book like Luka and the Fire of Life, the latest novel from Salman Rushdie, warrants a personal response. It is tempting (perhaps even easy) to write about the literary elements of such a book: Rushdie’s puns and allusions, his vivid language, his forays into the world of magical realism. But Rushdie has always been known as much for his personal and political life as he is for his writing, and Luka and the Fire of Life, though not explicitly autobiographical, is a personal book — a gift to his youngest son, Milan, and a meditation on the relationship between fathers and their children.

So, I will begin this review with a personal confession: I love Rushdie, but I do not love, or play, video games.

Luka and the Fire of Life is the companion novel to Rushdie’s earlier young adult book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Haroun was written for Rushdie’s eldest son, Zafar, who, while Rushdie was at work on The Satanic Verses, requested that his father’s next book might be a novel for children. Haroun and the Sea of Stories was Rushdie’s first adventure in children’s writing and followed the young Haroun Khalifa on his adventure to save the voice of his story-telling father Rashid. With one question — “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” — Rashid, the renowned Shah of Blah, the Ocean of Notions, finds all his story-telling powers dried up. To save him, Haroun visits the Earth’s second moon, to the source of all story-telling, and restores both his father’s genius and his family’s happiness. The novel, published in 1990, was the first novel Rushdie published after the fatwa, and his story emphasizes both the political and personal trials of this part of his life. [. . .]

Read the rest of Katherine's review at The Critical Flame!