The Jaguar Smile
A Nicaraguan Journey
By Salman Rushdie
(Holt Paperbacks, Paperback, 9780805053111, 160pp.)
Publication Date: June 1997
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback
Categories: Essays & Travelogues, General
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This edition includes a new Preface by the author to the 1997 paperback edition. In this portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of a revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986, "harboring no preconceptions of what he might find." What he discovered was for him overwhelming: a culture of heroes who had turned into inanimate objects and of politicians and warriors who were poets, a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions. Rushdie came to know an enormous range of people, from the Foreign Minister--a priest--to a midwife who kept a pet cow in her living room. His perceptions always heightened by his special sensitivity to "the views from underneath," Rushdie reveals a land resounding to the clashes between history and morality, government and individuals. In The Jaguar Smile Rushdie brings us--as few Americans or Europeans could--the true Nicaragua, where nothing is simple, everything is contested, and struggles to the death are daily fare.
Salman Rushdie is the author of six novels: Grimus, Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and one work of short stories titled East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Mirrorwork (co-edited with Elizabeth West).
"Salman Rushdie's extraordinary book . . . is a masterpiece of sympathetic yet critical reporting graced with his marvelous wit, quietly assertive style, odd and yet always revealing experiences . . . To say of The Jaguar Smile that it is a work of art is to take full note of its literary allusions, its uncompromising sensitivity to death and destruction, its ready political eye for the funny and grotesque, and above all its understated and gripping eloquence."--Edward Said
"A vivid and probing introduction for perplexed outsiders trying to make senses of Nicaraguan dilemmas."--Dan Cryer, Newsday
"Stirring and original . . . It gives us a picture of the country in bright, patchwork colors unavailable in your usual journalistic dispatches."--The New York Times
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