Shalimar the Clown

Rushdi in this book is an Orientalist, almost in the Edward Said sense. Romantic tribalist, anti-modernist - is he for real? or is he just pretending? we don't know and we'll never know for sure, but we can be confident that "Oriental tribal paradise lost" is the message of "Shalimar the Clown".

From this viewpoint Max Ophüls operatic and incongruous figure can be understood. While all other characters in Rushdie's fairy tale are presented through the magic realism lens and "make sense" magically and realistically, as fairy tale charachters should, Ophüls is presented as a caricature, and he's the only evil incarnate in the novel.

All other sins can be forgiven - and are forgiven - in the fairy tale world we are shown. All evildoers are forgiven, even iron mullah Maulana Bulbul Fakh - because of one single redeeming quality: sincerity. Ophüls is a "man without qualities" - and yes! Rushdie does quote the title of Musil's novel in "Shalimar the Clown" - and "man without qualities" can't be forgiven, since he's the real destructing force behind all others.

So this is why Rushdie used film producer's Max Ophüls name: to underscore "generic Western" origin of corruption, and Jewish - as quintessentially Western modernizing force/influence (see "The Jewish Century" by Yuri Slezkine).

Surely Rushdie hates any and every government: Indian, Pakistani, American - because the governments are run and owned and the strings are pulled by "men without qualities", which are insincere, untrue by definition.

This is why the part "Max" in the middle of the book reads worse than a James Bond novel, where everything is fake: heroism, suffering, sacrifice, even the evildoers are fake, as this Nazi woman seduced by Ophüls: she bites and claws him during sex which he heroically (ridiculously) endures.

“Ambassador Max Ophuls these days was supporting terror activities while calling himself an ambassador for counterterrorism, had been in charge of liaison with Talib the Afghan's branch of Muj.” [Rushdie’s Last Lost Homeland: Kashmir in Shalimar the Clown]

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