Bob

The memoir is often thrilling, insightful, and beautiful--all the things you'd expect from Salman Rushdie. He is at his best considering the implications of the fatwa, and the larger questions of the artist's role of the documentarian in cultures both hostile and indifferent to art. Rushdie's thoughts on his own work, the origin and inspiration for his novels, are equally intriguing. He is less objective, of course, about his personal life and the narrative sags when he considers the emotional strains on his marriages and his pop-culture "successes" (particularly when they collide in his last marriage; and his association with the Famous Rock Band).

The narrator of this audiobook, when performing the "dialogue" of American "characters," affected such a strange "accent"- - snide parody - - not at all what I experienced on the page when reading and not listening. Was this an actor's choice? Director's? Did this audiobook have a director? In any case, it snapped me out of the dream of this memorable and fascinating story each time the narrator switch from his sophisticated, Euro-Indian accent to the "Valley Girl/hillbilly" American grunt.