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Step Across This Line

Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

Rushdie Salman


Editeur - Casa editrice

Vintage

  Asia
India
Letteratura


Anno - Date de Parution

2002

Pagine - Pages

416

Titolo originale

Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

Lingua originale

Lingua - language - langue

eng

Ristampa - Réédition - Reprint

2003 Modern Library

Amazon.com (United States) - order this book
Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

Step Across This Line  

Step Across This Line showcases the other side of one of fiction’s most astonishing conjurors. On display is Salman Rushdie’s incisive, thoughtful and generous mind, in prose that is as entertaining as it is topical. The world is here, captured in pieces on a dazzling array of subjects: from New York’s Amadou Diallo case to the Wizard of Oz, from U2 to fifty years of Indian writing, from a tribute to Angela Carter to the struggle to film Midnight’s Children. The title essay was originally delivered at Yale as the 2002 Tanner lecture on human values, and examines the changing meaning of frontiers in the modern world -- moral and metaphorical frontiers as well as physical ones.

The collection chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual journeys, but it is also an intimate invitation into his life: he explores his relationship to India through a moving diary of his first visit there in over a decade, “A Dream of Glorious Return.” Step Across This Line also includes “Messages From the Plague Years,” a historic set of letters, articles and reflections on life under the fatwa. Gathered together for the first time, this is Rushdie’s humane, intelligent and angry response to a grotesque threat, aimed not just at him but at free expression itself.

 


Recensione in altra lingua (English):

For all their permeability, the borders snaking across the world have never been of greater importance. This is the dance of history in our age: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, back and forth and from side to side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines. --from Part IV
With astonishing range and depth, the essays, speeches, and opinion pieces assembled in this book chronicle a ten-year intellectual odyssey by one of the most important, creative, and respected minds of our time. "Step Across This Line concentrates in one volume Salman Rushdie's fierce intelligence, uncanny social commentary, and irrepressible wit--about soccer, "The Wizard of Oz, and writing, about fighting the Iranian fatwa and turning with the millennium, and about September 11, 2001. Ending with the eponymous, never-before-published speeches, this collection is, in Rushdie's words, a "wake-up call" about the way we live, and think, now.



Recensione in lingua italiana

Roughly one-fourth of these essays deals with the response of the media, various governments and Rushdie himself to what he calls the "unfunny Valentine" he received on February 14, 1989, from the Ayatollah Khomeini: the fatwa calling for his death. Everyone, it seems, had a script for Rushdie to follow, though none of these fantasies resembled the rather simple one the author fancied (and which seems to have been realized), which is that his problems gradually disappear and he be allowed to resume a more or less normal writerly life. To paraphrase an idea that appears in several of these essays, the problem is that frontiers cross us rather than the other way around: we are going about our business when our country is divided (as happened to Rushdie's native India in 1947) or we encounter a shocking work of art or our enemies declare they will kill us. Many respond to unnerving changes by embracing religion, but, says Rushdie, "ancient wisdoms are modern nonsenses"; in place of sectarian fervor, he recommends intellectual freedom, a simple concept yet a rigorous practice, as this book proves. These essays range over literature, politics and religion, as well as Rushdie's two private passions, rock music and soccer. They are united by a play of sparkling intelligence seasoned with sly wit, qualities that would serve the world at any time in its long, flawed history. After all, says Rushdie, the story he loved first and still loves best, perhaps the story of all humanity, is The Wizard of Oz, a fable that tells us the grown-up world doesn't really work, that adults can be good people and still be bad wizards.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
Thanks to some Iranian ayatollahs, Rushdie is probably the most famous writer still alive. Although he remains under partial protection, he has continued to write since 1989, producing several novels and many articles. This first collection of short nonfiction includes material about his life under the fatwa ("Messages from the Plague Years") but ranges from discussions of The Wizard of Oz and rock music to his February 2002 lectures on human values at Yale. The title is well chosen; Rushdie tends to be confrontational, and the white-hot publicity has not mellowed him-a 1999 piece debates whether Charlton Heston or Austrian writer Peter Handke, a supporter of Slobodan Milosevic, should be dubbed "Moron of the Year." Although some of the pieces themselves are a bit dated, Rushdie has added updates in footnotes, and in any case he always makes his point. For large collections or journalism special collections.


Biografia

Rushdie Salman

Salman Rushdie (nato il 19 giugno 1947, a Bombay, India) è un saggista e autore di opere di narrativa, in gran parte ambientate nel Subcontinente Indiano. Crebbe a Mumbai (allora Bombay) frequentò il King's College di Cambridge in Inghilterra. È un cittadino inglese. Il suo stile narrativo, che amalgama il mito e la fantasia con la vita reale, è stato descritto come collegato al realismo magico. Nel 2004, Rushdie si è sposato per la quarta volta, questa volta con una modella ed attrice indiana Padma Lakshmi.

Opere
La sua carriera di scrittore cominciò con Grimus, una fiaba fantastica, in parte fantascientifica, che venne ignorata dal pubblico e dai critici. Il suo romanzo successivo, I Bambini della Mezzanotte, invece, lo catapultò nella fama letteraria ed è considerato il suo miglior lavoro fino ad ora. Inoltre influì in modo significativo sul corso che la scrittura Indiana in Inglese avrebbe avuto nella decade successiva. Per quest'opera fu in seguito premiato con il premio 'Booker of Bookers' nel 1993; in seguito è stata selezionato come miglior romanzo a cui sia stato assegnato il Premio Booker nei suoi primi 25 anni. Questo fu visto in India come un attacco alla dinastia Nehru-Gandhi e Rushdie fu costretto a lasciare l'India per le minacce. Il successo delle reazioni che incitavano violenza nei confronti delle sue opere produsse molta pubblicità e libri venduti; una formula che ripeté nuovamente. Dopo il successo di Bambini della Mezzanotte, Rushdie scrisse un racconto, La Vergogna, in cui delinea i tumulti politici in Pakistan basando i suoi personaggi su Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ed il Generale Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Entrambi questi lavori sono caratterizzati da, oltre allo stile del realismo magico, l'occhio dell'immigrante del quale Rushdie è così conscio.
Rushdie è molto influenzato anche dalla letteratura moderna. I Bambini della Mezzanotte prende in prestito temi dal romanzo Il Tamburo di Latta di Günter Grass, che Rushdie sostiene lo abbia ispirato a diventare uno scrittore. I Versetti Satanici è chiaramente influenzato dal classico romanzo russo Il Maestro e Margherita di Mikhail Bulgakov.
India e Pakistan furono i temi, rispettivamente di I bambini della Mezzanottte e Vergogna. Nei suoi lavori successivi, Rushdie rovesciò il mondo occidentale con The Moor's Last Sigh, che esplora i collegamenti commerciali e culturali tra India e Penisola Iberica.
Nel 1999 Rushdie pubblica "La terra sotto i suoi piedi", romanzo che rivisita in chiave moderna, attraverso Mumbay, Inghilterra, Usa, il mito di Orfeo ed Euridice nelle due popstar Vina e Ormus. Tema principale del libro è quindi lo stretto rapporto di interdipendenza che esiste tra amore, morte e musica.
Rushdie ha ricevuto molti altri premi per le sue opere incluso l'European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature. È anche membro della Royal Society of Literature e Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. Rushdie è presidente del PEN American Center.

Grimus (1975)
Midnight's Children (1981) I figli della mezzanotte
Shame (1983) La vergogna
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987)
The Satanic Verses (1988) I versi satanici
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (1992)
East, West (1994)
The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
Fury (2001)
Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (2002)
The East is Blue (essay, 2004)
Shalimar the Clown (2005) Shalimar il clown

Consulta anche: Biografia Aggiornata in Wikipedia (english)
Consulta anche: Biografia in Wikipedia (italiano)