Luka and the Fire of Life

mandy — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 16:00:00 +0000

The world according to Salman Rushdie post-fatwa is a very bad place. If his books from this era are anything to go by, most people are judgmental, small-minded, and intolerant. In this book, and its prequel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie is passing that same worldview on to his sons. Buried under verbal twists and turns and puns and slapstick, Luka and the Fire of Life is about a boy undertaking a quest through a mythical world (created, it seems, by his father’s stories) to save his father’s life. He braves great challenges and finds courage he did not know he had. Ostensibly, Luka is on a quest to find his own voice, but the voice he actually finds his father’s.

While I was reading the book, I kept trying to imagine a twelve-year-old boy reading it, but I couldn’t. The references to video games are a bit sad—like a sixty-year-old father trying to appear cool by getting into what his pre-teen son likes—and wouldn’t fool any kid. The adventures were too wordy and too weighty to really pull me along, let alone a mile-a-minute boy. Luka and the Fire of Life left me with an overwhelming sense of a man desperate to prove his own relevance—to everyone, but maybe mostly to his son.

And where is Luka’s mother in all this? Soraya is a flat character, given to pronouncements about how hilarious the men in her family are, more often tut-tutting than actually speaking. She sits uselessly by Rashid’s bedside while her son goes out to save the world. I wondered what kind of quest Rushdie would think of for her if he could. She does appear in an alternate form in the fantasy world, helping Luka on his way, but she does not present any counterweight to his father or his father’s image of the world.

Rushdie was at his peak with The Satanic Verses, a book I believe was as close to genius as anything written in this generation, when Rushdie was forced into hiding. It is impossible to imagine the impact a worldwide death sentence would have on a creative mind, but if Rushdie’s books of this era are any indication, then the fatwa killed the spark built in Rushdie’s early work.

I remember the hate and the close-mindedness of the fatwa; for many in the West, it may have been one the first glimpses of the power and reach of extremist Islam. But I also remember the courage of the many who stood with Rushdie and protected him in those years. I remember rallies at University and writers and others risking their lives to stand up for Rushdie. Where is that alternate worldview in his books? Tragically for his readers, Rushdie seems yet to see this side of this momentous event.

It seems like today—when religious extremisms and hate seem to be winning the war of words, when secularism and so-called blasphemy can get even the Governor of Punjab killed—Rushdie could help us see the other realities. He could show the world beyond it and behind it, not just point us through it, as if it were the only truth and, like it or not, we have to navigate it, with just a dancing bear and a singing dog and a few words of advice from an aging storyteller. I want the Rushdie of The Satanic Verses back; he really knew how to cut the legs out from under the small-minded power of intolerance.

Written by: Khadijah Fancy, February 5th 2011

2010 Wall Calendar: Anne Taintor

admin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:50:00 +0000

By Anne Taintor

Chronicle Books

“She was one cocktail away from proving his mother right” is the text accompanying a modestly dressed, yet sexily posed, 1950s woman that adorns the cover of the 2010 Wall Calendar by Anne Taintor. Why is it that these satirical sentences bring a smile to our faces? Why does it give us such pleasure to poke fun at these Leave it to Beaver prototypes? Whatever the analysis, it works. It’s downright funny, as is Taintor’s calendar.

When you open up to January, two “perfect” housewives are looking at a ham that is fresh from the oven. “Ta-daa! Now let’s have a cocktail...” reads the caption. I can just imagine my college roommate, now a few decades later, saying the same thing. Although I’m not sure she’d wait until the ham finished baking.

The Women’s History Month scene is hysterical: “If by ‘happy’ you mean 'trapped with no means of escape' then yes, I’m happy.” I suppose considering marriage a trap is women's equivalent of men calling their wives a ball and chain. Marriage, of course, isn’t the trap it used to be, but there are some who would like to wind back time to when it was—perish the thought!

Turning the pages of the calendar, I am most amused at the jokes centered on drinking (“Why do dishes when you can do daiquiris?"), and I decided to take a look at Taintor’s web site. The tag line—“Making smart people smile since 1985”—greets me on her home page. Wow, in a split second I’m feeling like a smart woman who laughs at drinking, domesticity, and dumbness.

While I love the retro images paired with witty captions, I have to point out that the calendar isn’t very functional. The size allotted for the days of the month is small, and it doesn’t allow much room to write notes, like I usually do. The fonts for the days and holidays are also very small. While it’s a large wall calendar with full size images, the calendar itself has a lot of white space that could have been better utilized. That said, I expect a full year of laughs to compensate for this shortcoming, a problem which could easily be solved by pairing it with Anne Taintor's 2010 Engagement Calendar.

Written by: Joan Dawson, November 5th 2009

sarcasm

Luka and the Fire of Life

2010 Wall Calendar: Anne Taintor