Luka and his father Rashid Khalifa one day walks down the fictional city of Kahani in the land of Alifbay. They pass the Great Rings of Fire circus, where a dog and bear act and interract to tell their past stories.
Does it all sound magical ? Salman Rushdie is out with magic realist prose all over again in his new book Luka and the Fire of Life, a novel that is supposed to be a sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written perhaps as Rushdie says for his thirteen year old son. But how far a thirteen year old will be able to keep pace with the tedium of the book is difficult to tell particularly when the adults with more patience may find the book quite difficult to drag through.
The overwhelming feeling after reading this book is of an immense waste - of the reader's time, of the writer's undoubted talent which would have shone had he adopted some restrain.
Over two decades after Satanic Verses sparked a never-ending controversy and provoked a fatwa for his head, author Salman Rushdie has only one thing to say to his detractors: 'I did not write it for the mullahs.'The India-born controversial writer, who has lived for years under the shadow of his 1988 book, now liberally jokes about the issue.
But it is also true that Rushdie would not have perhaps been read so much had he not been embroiled in a fatwa. Rushdie primarliy writes for the Christian English world and much of his popularity comes from his Islam bashing postures. Not many peopla have perhaps read his other books but almost anybody knows that he wrote 'Satanic Verses' .
This is the irony of our times. Controversies are more important that talent.
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