Grimus

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After drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next seven hundred years sailing the seas with the blessing–and ultimately the burden–of living forever.

In essence, this type of SF novel shows the journey of a person learning the value of non-conformity. Do you deny that by choosing a man similar in appearance to myself I estimated exactly the effect of such a man on Virgil and on the town K? Genette carefully distinguishes parody from the related forms of travesty, transposition, pastiche, skit and forgery: parody emerges as a playful practice that is transformational (rather than imitative) in its relationship to the “target” text.

Through paronomasia, Rushdie immediately inscribes Grimus in the literary tradition of parody – defined by Linda Hutcheon (who is clearly averse to giving any transhistorical definition of parody and restricting its range of intent) 10 as “a modern recoding which establishes difference at the heart of similarity” (Hutcheon 8) – thus marking the beginning of a polyphonic conception of literature.

In “A Shell without a Form,” (192) the protagonist thus adopts various guises, mimicking the transforming qualities of the eagle in the Avesta and other Zoroastrian books. The symbol of the mirror is therefore subverted, since it does not stand for osmosis but sheds light on the proliferation of doubles. It is typical of the novel’s irony that Virgil should have ended up a gravedigger, interring instead of exhuming. Grimus, Salman Rushdie’s rewriting of The Conference of the Birds is characterized by a combination of repetition and disparity, respectful homage and utter irreverence.A submerged reference to Simone de Beauvoir is also to be found in one of Virgil’s first names, as the narrator notes that “He had three initials: V. After 777 years he wants mortality and to find his sister, eventually ending up on the metaphysical Calf Island.

Normally I would rate it 3 stars, but this early language, that leaves a space for surprise (if Rushdie decides to go young-crazy again, maybe, in the future, despite of his mature now life and style). Flapping Eagle is a young Axona Indian gifted with immortal life after drinking an elixir from his wayward sister. Likewise, at the very end of the novel, the protagonist is referred to as “the man who had been Flapping Eagle and was now part-Eagle, part-Grimus” (253). Read carefully the debate between Gribbs, Elfrida, and Irna about whether stories should be well tied together or not.Then he wanders around aimlessly for seven hundred years, during which he comes across a mysterious figure wielding a stone wand. Lightly bumped and sunned spine ends, dust jacket spine ends also lightly bumped, with a slightly sunned spine. As evinced by the “overtly phallic” (56) shape of the island, which undercuts the traditional representation of the utopian island as a womb, Grimus is a striking departure from utopia.

I decided to re-read the Divine Comedy while reading this book and it made the reading experience much more meaningful. Although this network of embedded subtexts has infinite resonances, The Conference of the Birds undoubtedly supplies the main model for Flapping Eagle’s journey: Grimus reads like a fictional reworking and refashioning of Attar’s twelfth-century Persian poem which relates the ascension of thirty birds towards mystical unity and annihilation on the Mountain of Qâf, the seat of the Sovereign Bird.

There are moments of mystery, but the drive to tie all the ends together makes it a bit too neat in the end. Also Rushdie's writing is restrained, considering that by his second novel his penmanship improved, Grimus' style comes as a tiny shock. Only rarely does a first novel appear that is so large in scope, so imaginative, and so engrossing that it leads the reader to believe that the author has been writing for years.