In compliance with The Conference of the Birds, union and annihilation are therefore closely linked, although Sufi fusion is transposed from the spiritual to the material realm. If heaven and earth were to burst into minute particles it would be no more than a leaf falling from a tree; and if everything were to be annihilated, from the fish to the moon, would there be found in the depths of a pit the leg of a lame ant? Normally I would rate it 3 stars, but this early language, that leaves a space for surprise (if Rushdie decides to go young-crazy again, maybe, in the future, despite of his mature now life and style).

I'm giving it two stars solely for the writing and the ideas, 'cause everything else about this book is cringe-worthy. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops to the rigidly enforced positronic brain patterns of Asimov’s robots to the Storm-troopers of Star Wars and the Borg of Star Trek, the need to escape the confines of conformity is ubiquitous. Through a series of thrilling quests and encounters, Flapping Eagle comes face-to-face with the island’s creator and unwinds the mysteries of his own humanity. The use of parentheses to emphasize Flapping Eagle’s divided self is a device the author resorts to at the end of the novel as well, showing that there is no evolution whatsoever from scission to union: “(I was Flapping Eagle.Thus, Flapping Eagle’s conformity is hidden under a surface of non-conformity as he travels the course that Grimus has set for him, the course of a continually alienated outsider who is always trying to fit in to whatever society he happens to be in at the time. There is some talk of you and me and then / The curtain falls and you and I dissolve” (qtd in Nakosteen 225).

I must admit that what kept me going was pure intrigue for the many questions presented at the beginning. A Kafkaesque sense of the absurd permeates the quest, creating an impression of gratuitousness, 13 confirmed by Flapping Eagle’s weariness: “O hell, he said. With its adolescent conceits and punning, its loss of narrative control and its uninvolving characters, it is very much a test-run for the successful novels of the 1980s” (12). His speech should be open and frank; he should be in all events fearless of hardship and its consequences; he should avoid fruitless dialogues and wasteful arguments; he should be oblivious to praise or blame. Then he meets this figure again, and he gets thrown to Calf Island, which seems to be in a different dimension.Grimus takes a literary conceit ─ the idea that the universe is irrelevant once one reaches mystical union with God ─ and turns it into a personal, egotistical conceit. More explicitly, the protagonist describes himself as the one through whom wholeness is reached: “In themselves, neither was complete; through him, they both attained completion” (172). The problem here is that while Grimus may share theme with the rest of Rushdie’s work, it does not necessarily imply that all the works share genre – and different genres interpret themes differently. Owing to the two meanings of the prefix para-, which means both “counter, against” and “beside,” parody literally means “to sing along,” “out of tune”.