The "Wizard of Oz" by Salman Rushdie

The "Wizard of Oz" by Salman Rushdie

The Wizard of Oz 'was my very first literary influence, ' writes Salman Rushdie in his

account of the great MGM children's classic. At the age of ten he had written a story,

'Over the Rainbow', about a colourful fantasy world. But for Rushdie The Wizard of Oz

is more than a children's film, and more than a fantasy. It's a story whose driving

force is the inadequacy of adults, in which 'the weakness of grown-ups forces

children to take control of their own destinies'. And Rushdie rejects the conventional

view that its fantasy of escape from reality ends with a comforting return to home,

sweet home. On the contrary, it is a film that speaks to the exile. The Wizard of Oz

shows that imagination can become reality, that there is no such place like home,

or rather that the only home is the one we make for ourselves.

Rushdie's brilliant insights into a film more often seen than written about are

rounded off with his typically scintillating short story, 'At the Auction of the Ruby

Slippers, ' about the day when Dorothy's red shoes are knocked down to $15,000 at a

sale of MGM props .

In his foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of

the BFI Film Classics series, Rushdie looks back to the circumstances in which he

wrote the book, when, in the wake of the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses

and the issue of a fatwa against him, the idea of home and exile held a particular

resonance.

Luka and the Fire of Life; Grimus; Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker); Shame; The Satanic Verses; Haroun and the Sea of Tales; The Moor's Last Sigh; The Ground Under Her Feet; Fury; Shalimar the Clown; The Enchantress of Florence; Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights; The Enchantress of Florence; The Enchant Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Over This Line are among his nonfiction works, and he coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Tales 2008. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Rushdie, a former president of the PEN American Center, was knighted in 2007 for his contributions to literature.