East West by Salman Rushdie is a short collection of fiction published in 1994. It centres the voices of Indians, both within the country and outside of it, but it also is a sort of experimental exploration of story. There’s use of magic realism to confuse the reader and send us reeling. I found the way that Rushdie combines comedy, cultural narratives and historical lore to be effective and also quite funny.
The first story is a simple tale of a woman’s lack of opportunities, choices, what home means to one person and how much more important that is sometimes than a life of luxury. By the middle of the book we have stories of people named Hamlet, Muhammad Ali, and Christopher Columbus mixed in together, competing for dominance and yet living together within the same tale.
Added to this, we see western cultural voices like Star Trek’s Chekov and Sulu playing a kind of spy game (which turns out to be their paid work). Eventually we find that there are real world consequences to their choices, but that some characters made decisions as if there weren’t. It shows the carelessness the west often plays with eastern countries, like it is only a game.
Rushdie complicates these stories further by interjecting Indian words, Indian English phrases or translations and other spoken things into the stories. If unfamiliar with these cultures you might not understand what he’s doing. If you are, you might be endeared to it.
And on top of all of this there’s this underlying narrative in each story about where women physically are and aren’t, what they do and can’t or won’t do, perhaps especially in this period of time and before. We see the women in the background simply existing, or sabotaging choices to live a life they prefer. Sometimes they might choose to sabotage others. We see women who live with men they understand too well in some ways and not at all in others, which maybe points to the way women are encouraged to living a life through one social sphere and barred from others.
Rating: 3/5
I give East West a 3/5, because I think I was not in the space to completely receive it and take the time to think about each story. I think each story deserves a well thought-out analysis and time spent understanding. It’s a book I was assigned for a South Asian Literature class many eons ago and then had to drop for mental health reasons. I kept it in my collection though, because I wanted to indulge more in South Asian literature and hope that this year I’ll continue trying to do that.
If you, however, feel like you’re the type of reader who loves to take your time with words, thoughts, intent and love post-modernism and magic realism, I think you would enjoy this collection a fair bit.
To get a copy of East West by Salman Rushdie and you’re in the USA, you can purchase it at Bookshop.org. If you’re in Canada you can get a copy at Book Outlet.
You can also read more of my book reviews here.
