There might not be an obvious connection between Salman Rushdie and Canada’s veteran singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, but a surprising link emerges in Rushdie’s latest novel, Victory City..
Other novels by Rushdie do cite the likes of Bob Dylan – notably The Ground Beneath Her Feet and The Golden House – indeed, the former even quotes the title of a Mitchell album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns from 1975. Those are novels with a contemporary setting, in which citing rock-era songwriters makes sense. Victory City, however, is set well back in Indian history and would not appear an obvious location for smuggling in such a reference.
Nonetheless, on page 27 at the beginning of chapter three, in the description of a Portuguese trader, we find: ‘He had seen the world from Alpha to Omega, from up to down, from give to take, from win to lose, and he had learned that wherever he went the world was illusion, and that that was beautiful’.
There is an allusion here that will be obvious to anyone who knows Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Both Sides Now’, which first appeared on her 1969 album Clouds and has subsequently been recorded by numerous artists. The first of the song’s three stanzas is about clouds and concludes: ‘I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now / From up and down, and still somehow / It’s cloud illusions I recall / I really don’t know clouds at all’. The second and third stanzas evoke respectively love (‘from give and take’) and life (‘from win and lose’). The resemblance with Rushdie’s formulations is not fortuitous: whether consciously or not, Salman Rushdie has been influenced by Joni Mitchell!
Note: I reviewed Victory City on this blog on 13 March 2023.
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