- Paperback
- Publisher: Vintage (1995)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679757899
- ISBN-13: 978-0679757894
- Product Dimensions: 13 x 1.5 x 20.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 113 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #341,264 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Postmodern delight,
By
This review is from: East, West (Paperback)
As a student of literature and literary theory, I know I have a lot more speacialized knowledge of technique than the average reader so I can sympathize with how someone may not "get" Salman Rushdie. He is a post modern writer and as such delights in playing games with words, experimenting with the fluidity of meaning and putting great responsiblity on the reader to figure out what he's talking about. I've read him for class and for pleasure and both times had to keep my laptop next to me to use google or Wikipedia to research. His stories come alive when you embrace your intended interactive role as a reader and delight at how he plays with you. He's brilliant.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A standalone or a great companion piece,
By Lori Stone "Lori" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: East West : Stories (Vintage International) (Paperback)
I read this book of stories after having read 4 of Rushdie's novels (and enjoying them all!). I wish I had read this first, because the stories helped me understand some of the references to daily life that I had missed in his novels. I've never been to India or Pakistan, to my chagrin, and these stories fleshed out Rushdie's view of that experience. When I read the first story, "Good Advice is Rarer Than Rubies" (a story about a young woman's attempt to follow her husband to England) I understood some of the references in Satanic Verses that had blown by me. "The Prophet's Hair" illuminated a bit of Midnight's Children, and "Free Radio" was a great accompaniment to Midnight's Children as well as Rohinton Mistry's A FINE BALANCE.These stories stand beautifully well on their own. Each one has a flavor of its own, and each leaves you satiated and slightly hesitant to enter the next because it can't be as good (but of course it is!). If you've already read other books by Indian writers, it's a great accompaniment. If you are interested in beginning to read books by Indian writers (and you should), it's a great starting point.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not all he's cracked up to be.,
This review is from: East West : Stories (Vintage International) (Paperback)
I'm afraid that the stories in East, West, though occasionally interesting, really didn't do that much for me. It seems to me that the main reason for Rushdie being hailed as a great Eastern writer is that he is one of the very few currently well known ones, due to the publicity he got when clashing with Khomeini. I know he tried to write about life, to record on paper the lives of modern Indians in a modern age, except it doesn't feel very real. The dialogues are often bulky, sometimes clumsy. Maybe that's because of Indian conventions of speech translated into English. But it doesn't really seem like any of his characters could be real, breathing people, which is sort of the purpose of writing "about life". Maybe that's because these are short stories and the characters don't have enough space to be fleshed out. But then again, many famous writers of short stories managed to record whole lives very accurately in a few pages (Chekhov, anyone?).That's not to say these are necessarily terrible. They're interesting enough, and most come with twists at the end that will genuinely surprise you. "The Prophet's Hair" is a nice Arabian Nights-like diversion, "The Courter" is kinda poignant, "At the Auction..." is kinda reflective and philosophical. But it's really not a book that I would _buy_, to keep on my shelf and come back to over and over. After reading it, I have utterly no desire to return to it. High point of the book: "The Prophet's Hair" or "The Courter." They come the closest to making an impression. Low point of the book: Definitely "Yorick," yet another bad modern bastardization of Hamlet which tries to be "witty" and "literate." That story alone cost the book's rating a star.
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