PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)If you’ve read Languages of Truth all the way from start to finish, you’ll be feeling bloated (did you really need that extra helping of commencement address?) yet admiring of your insistent, generous host ... readers who begin at the beginning might not make it very far. \'Wonder Tales\' and \'Proteus,\' the two Emory lectures that open the collection, feel as if they’ve come in for problematically heavy revision. (I think the technical term is \'gussied up\'.) They are twin manifestos, inadvertently revealing, only intermittently interesting. They suffer from the trait Rushdie professes to deplore: talkativeness ... But don’t leave the table just yet. After the first fifty pages, the prose clarifies. Sentences arrive at manageable length. Complacent puns make way for real humour ... And happily, from here the going continues to get easier. There are longueurs, but most of the time Rushdie is vital, expansive, the critic as storyteller, championing his subjects with gusto. If the pieces about other writers are necessarily toothless...Rushdie is unfailingly interesting when discussing a specific text ... The state-of-fiction schtick mirrors a grander grumpiness. Despite all the pop culture references, despite an apology on behalf of his generation, \'for the mess we are leaving\', it becomes hard to avoid a pervasive sense of \'it weren’t like that in my day\' ... Ironically, in these essays, which argue so fervently for the primacy of the unreal, it is when Rushdie is at his most directly personal, his most autobiographical, that the prose really comes to life ... Rushdie is still a writer to be reckoned with.
