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.
Despite its homage to happenstance, a consistent design runs through this miscellany. From the Indian-Persian-Arabic tales of the One Thousand and One Nights to classic American fiction with its 'comedy and tragedy of the reinvented self,' Mr. Rushdie salutes the 'protean' and 'metamorphic' art of change and multiplicity ... Languages of Truth stretches from blazing manifesto to nostalgic reminiscence, close-focus review to polite podium utterance. It shelters a few duds—ephemeral or routine records of the writer as public figure—but plenty of gems ... Even in such a ragbag, Mr. Rushdie makes his trademark leap from art to life as he frames all humankind—not only migrants—as 'constant adapters of ourselves' ... His years as headline and symbol have often occluded the wit and fun of Mr. Rushdie’s work. That zestful spirit makes a comeback here.
I read Rushdie’s arguments with much interest and little agreement, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. used to say. He is fencing with a poorly stuffed straw man ... Much of the rest in Languages of Truth is limper and less interesting. The book contains several sleepwalking commencement speeches, semi-obligatory memorial lectures and the introductions to books and speeches delivered on behalf of PEN America, of which he was president from 2004 to 2006 ... He may be right. But the irritable Rushdie felt like the real one, or at least the wide-awake one. If his arguments about the state of fiction in Languages of Truth don’t convince, at least they’re genuine signs of life.
... Rushdie serves up a confused vision of this century, presenting a self-absorbed and exhausted thinker whose eye has been tracking yesterday’s concerns ... The volume arrives without a preface that might lay out a rationale for its necessity ... readers will be hard-pressed to perceive any historical or political arc at play. The tome is divided into four parts, but because these parts do not have titles, the logic of their organization is a mere intimation. Readers are left without a roadmap through the collection, or any way of understanding Rushdie’s intentions, turning the book’s eclecticism into a liability. Things do become clear once we settle into Rushdie’s criticism, which evinces a catholic cultural appetite ... commitment to a global literature avant la lettre comes to the fore in the collection’s most coherent moments, showcasing Rushdie’s belief that literature is naturally rooted in multiplicity, migration and exchange. Rushdie’s belief feels almost quaint in a moment when people are content to tie themselves up in the straitjacket of cultural ownership. Unfortunately, it’s the most vital observation on cultural politics this volume has to offer. Elsewhere, Rushdie is prone to bromides that feel determinedly bland, always skirting the edge of interesting ... Elsewhere, he repeats his well-worn attacks on religious faith, objectionable not because they are offensive but because they are as blinkered and dogmatic as the theisms he wants to leave behind ... an agonizing lack of self-awareness ... These essays are at their best when Rushdie trains his attention on literature ... It’s too bad, then, that the actual criticism of literature in these writings leaves so much to be desired. Rushdie is given to easy observations that don’t require keenness of thought on his part ... a book that feels limited in its political concerns, and out of touch with the most pressing questions facing contemporary literary culture in this century.
Rushdie’s language is in the main broad, his assertions general, and his assumptions sweeping. His enthusiasms are not scholarly but do have the frisson of the eclectic and sometimes the presumptuous. Whether you agree with him or not he is always engaging, mostly interesting. Part of that appeal is this side-stepping of academic rhetoric for the popular and accessible language of the opinionated enthusiast ... he wears much of his learning lightly ... Rushdie is very good on the migration of stories through culture and time ... Rushdie comes back to himself and his own writing, regardless of the subject of his essay ... One could argue that such an approach is self-serving ... it’s as a defender of free speech that Rushdie is most convincing and in illuminating the oppression many writers around the world suffer.
Languages of Truth, mingles jokey allusions to Charlie Brown and Eminem with the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, Franz Kafka and 'my old pal Marianne Faithfull' (the name-dropping is a Rushdie trademark). Included are a couple of addresses Rushdie made to north American university students on their graduation day ('Dear class of 2015'). These are bin-scrapings but Rushdie is eminent enough to merit their inclusion ... Rushdie’s stance of atheist superiority is no less intolerant or blinkered than that of believers. He calls himself a 'hardline atheist', but the world is not necessarily as he thinks it is, or wants others to think it is ... Though wide-ranging, many of the essays are marred by a portentous note ... In the closing essay, Pandemic, Rushdie chronicles his recovery from Covid infection last year. It’s the best piece in the collection: engagingly reflective and fear-ridden.
With reflections on everything from the rise of autofiction to Trump and Covid, a collection of Salman Rushdie’s 21st-century nonfiction ought to be a treasure trove, but it feels more like watching someone rooting around down the back of the sofa for loose change ... One problem is that, as a rule, these repurposed forewords, op-eds and speeches are plonked down without so much as a date, producing a kind of chronological whiplash as you yo-yo from one obsolete reference to the next ... The subtext, one can’t help feeling, is that Rushdie out-Márquezed Márquez without reading him and at the same time (thanks to some coyly offstage swotting) was wise – as are 'we' all – to what he borrowed from the literature of 19th-century Brazil.
What is the appeal of a collection of essays when its author’s views on many of its topics are already well known? In Rushdie’s case, it is the brio with which he expresses himself. But while Languages of Truth is an opportunity for Rushdie completists to find two decades’ worth of his pieces in one place, it lacks any sense of being a unified work ... the book still feels underedited, with too many forgettable inclusions—US college commencement speeches, for example—and repetitions ... Grandiose phrases recur throughout ... It is a shame, because there are the makings of a sharper, leaner collection. Some of the most powerful pieces concern Rushdie’s friends and heroes ... Writing about art forms other than literature brings Rushdie down from the lecture podium. He stops making generalisations and looks closely at individual works ... Here, Rushdie is astute and genially subjective, reminding us that his capacity for wonder has always been one of his best qualities and showing that he still has it.
Rushdie holds forth in what he once self-deprecatingly called 'a slightly messianic tone', whether he’s writing about Ai Weiwei or remembering Carrie Fisher. Though more than half the book is concerned with writing, there’s a persistent vagueness, a tendency towards platitude, in almost everything he says. He rarely reflects on his own practice—even when staring at an open goal, as in a lecture on his 'beginnings'—and relies instead on eroded touchstones and overplayed anthology moments ... Again and again Rushdie reveals the difficulty of reconciling his belief in the multiple and variegated, the ambiguous and disputatious, with a kind of rational, at times literal absolutism. 'I don’t pretend to have a full answer,' he says, but he could have come closer than he does ... Surely a taste for top-down utterances is at odds with a love of nuance and counter-example? ... Some things simply don’t hold up, no matter which poet you invoke.
Ravenous for life, stories, freedom, and justice, he is propelled on intellectual journeys between East and West, past and present, fact and fiction, words and image ... plunging into a grand array of subjects and fashioning ensnaring prose that is, by turns, erudite, caustic, and funny. Rushdie shares vivid family stories, celebrates 'wonder tales,' and argues for boldly imaginative fiction ... Engrossing and provocative testimony to our need for the 'languages of truth.'
Wide-ranging nonfiction pieces by the distinguished novelist, unified by his commitment to artistic freedom and his adamant opposition to censorship in any form ... Rushdie sets the tone in the opening essay of this stimulating collection, culled from various lectures, journalism, and introductions to books and exhibition catalogs ... This collection, however, showcases his generous spirit, dedicated to illuminating the work of fellow artists and defending their right to unfettered creativity. Formidably erudite, engagingly passionate, and endlessly informative: a literary treat.
