The Jaguar Smile

“Written with a novelist’s eye for irony and metaphor… [Rushdie] is able to make us see that the factual reality of this country already verges on the surreal.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“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 W. SAID

“A look at intelligence struggling, with limited success, not to be entirely extinguished in the service of faith … an account of the confusion any one of us might feel if we visited Nicaragua and gave it a chance to affect us, because it is an inescapably affecting land, crashing through abrupt change that escapes the easy categories of ideologues … good reading.”

—The New York Times

“The account that emerges… is, as one would expect, quickened by a novelist’s eye.… Compelling.”

—Time