She had picked him like a flower and now she wanted him between her teeth, she had ordered him like a take-home meal and now she alarmed him by the ferocity of her appetites, because she began to feast upon him the moment the door of the limo was closed, before the chauffeur had time to raise the partition that gave the passengers their privacy.
The Ground Beneath her Feet, by Salman Rushdie
In honor of Salman Rushdie, who hours before the attack, had spoken with PEN America about helping Ukrainian writers in need of safe refuge.
Rushdie has been targeted for his words for decades but has never flinched or faltered.
And he’s never flinched or faltered in his writing. We could feast upon the many stunning sentences in this novel and his other works. His writing pulses with exuberance and energy, in part because of the playfulness of his imagery, his long sentences with their sense of abundance and joy of life. There’s a happy, rollicking freedom in his daring, uninsured sentences.
In this sentence, Rushdie uses two similes. Vina Apsara, a beloved pop star, picks up a man at last night’s event at the city’s convention center. This stranger is compared to a flower and a take-home meal. Maybe you’ve tried two similes in a sentence. Maybe you’ve been in a writer’s workshop when someone—perhaps the teacher—told you to choose one. But now you see the proliferation of imagery can give a sentence vitality and playfulness.
You’ve also probably been told never to use a comma splice—connecting two independent clauses with a comma. Here, Rushdie, fortunately, doesn’t consult the grammar book and uses a comma splice to create speed and cohesion: She had picked him like a flower and now she wanted him between her teeth, she had ordered him like a take-home meal…
The comma splice also compresses and so accentuates the syntactical pattern of “She had… and now.”
The Making
Start with an independent clause and include a simile that elaborates your verb. Here, Rushdie’s verb is “had picked.” (Rushdie’s novel is told in the past tense, so he uses the past perfect (had) to convey the past. If you’re writing in the present tense, you’ll use the simple past (no need for ‘had’). How did she pick him? Like a flower. To help find the right simile, remember to think about the world as different domains. There’s the human domain and the plant domain.
Add a conjunction “and” followed by “now.” What does your protagonist want to do with the image that’s introduced by the simile?
Add a comma (here’s your comma splice) and write a second independent clause and use a new simile that again elaborates upon your verb. Here, Rushdie used “ordered.”
The verb narrows your choice of simile imagery. What is associated with “ordered”? A take-home meal.
Add another conjunction, “and” followed by “now.” What does your protagonist do with this image?
Can you include a subordinate clause that further modifies what your protagonist does with this image? Here, Rushdie writes: “because she began to feast upon him the moment the door of the limo was closed…”
Then one more modifier that further adds more precision to what your protagonist does with this image. In this last part of Rushdie’s sentence, he captures the ferocity of her appetite. “…before the chauffeur had time to raise the partition that gave the passengers their privacy.”
With this long sentence, as with any longer sentence, there are plenty of opportunities for cohesion and repetition of sounds:
Assonance: flower/now; between/teeth/feast; ordered/home/limo/closed/before/chauffeur;
And alliteration, with the cluster of “p” sounds at the end: partition/passengers/privacy
Try it!
What else do you see in this sentence?
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― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
Thank you for this stunningly gorgeous passage and post. I have not read much Rushdie; must remedy this! His writing feels like the literary equivalent of the Big Bang, and all that comes after. Such a generous soul. Long may he live and write, pissing off the rigid-minded, until they open like…a rose.
She had left her bed like a crack severs a glass vase and now she wants to sweep its shards away, she had rescued an insect from floundering in a cup of soup and now she waits anxiously for its wings to dry, because she finds herself in a mess of her own making, out in a gigantic world with its own grander design.