This story begins and ends in Los Angeles, so angels are on the author’s mind, as two not unusually overloaded sentences demonstrate: His plots proceed by verbal connection and elaboration as much as by character interaction. His prose hops with dropped names, compulsive puns, learned allusions, winks at the reader, and repeated bows to popular culture. His novels pour by in a sparkling, voracious onrush, each wave topped with foam, each paragraph luxurious and delicious, but the net effect perilously close to stultification. Why has Rushdie attached a gaudy celebrity name to a different sort of celebrity, preventing the Ambassador from coming into sharp, living focus on his own? It is partly, perhaps, characteristic Rushdiean overflow. counterterrorism chief.” His daughter is told, “Your father served his country in some hot zones, he swam for America through some pretty muddy water.” The real Ophuls was born in 1902 in Saarbrücken, near the French border in the Saar region of Germany, and died in Hamburg in 1957, after an adult life spent entirely in theatrical precincts, whereas Rushdie’s imaginary Ophuls is born around 1911 in the French city of Strasbourg and dies in Los Angeles in 1991, after distinguishing himself as the United States Ambassador to India from 1965 to 1967 and afterward as the “U.S.
The two have no connection save the name and a peripatetic life, including a period of Los Angeles residence and a child who becomes a maker of documentary films-the real Ophuls’s son, Marcel, made “The Sorrow and the Pity,” and the fictional Ophuls’s daughter, first called India and then called Kashmira, is the auteur of “Camino Real,” a filmed trip up the West Coast along the mission-planting trail taken by Fray Junípero Serra in the seventeen-seventies. Readers of this review will be spared, as the reviewer was not, the maddening exercise of trying to overlay Rushdie’s Ophuls with the historical one. Why, oh why, did Salman Rushdie, in his new novel, “Shalimar the Clown” (Random House $25.95), call one of his major characters Maximilian Ophuls? Max Ophuls is a highly distinctive name, well known to movie lovers as that of a German-born actor and stage director who, beginning in 1930, directed films in Germany, France, Russia, Italy, the Netherlands, and, after 1946, the United States.
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