Grimus is a 1975 fantasy and science fiction novel by Salman Rushdie. It was his literary debut. The story loosely follows Flapping Eagle, a young Native American man who receives the gift of immortality by drinking a magic fluid. Thereafter, Flapping Eagle wanders the earth for 777 years 7 months and 7 days, searching for his immortal sister and exploring identities before falling through a hole in the Mediterranean Sea. He arrives in a parallel dimension at the mystical Calf Island, where those immortals who have tired of the world but are reluctant to give up their immortality exist in a static community under a subtle and sinister authority. Published in 1975, Grimus was Salman Rushdie's first published novel. To a large extent it has been disparaged by academic critics; though Peter Kemp's comment is particularly vitriolic, it does give an idea of the novel's initial reception: "His first novel, Grimus (1975), a ramshackle surreal saga based on a 12th-century Sufi poem and copiously encrusted with mythic and literary allusion, nosedived into oblivion amid almost universal critical derision." Style Amongst other influences, Rushdie incorporates Sufi, Hindu, Christian and Norse mythologies alongside pre- and post-modernist literature into his construction of character and narrative form. Grimus was created with the intention of competing for Rushdie's then publisher, Victor Gollancz Ltd's "Science Fiction Prize". As an intended work of science fiction, it is comparable to David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus in that there is very little actual science fiction. Rather inter-dimensional/interstellar travelling provides a narrative framework that loosely accords to the bildungsroman narrative form to allegorically encounter and investigate multiple social ideologies whilst in a search for a coherent centre of identity. It can be seen as growing out of and extending the techniques and the literary traditions identified with Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, or Sir Thomas More's Utopia, in that its journey traverses both outer and inner dimensions, exploring both cultural ideologies and the ambivalent effects that they have on one's psychological being. Like much of Rushdie's work, Grimus undermines the concept of a "pure culture" by demonstrating the impossibility of any culture, philosophy or Weltanschauung existing in sterile isolation. This profoundly post-structuralist approach gains overt expression, for example, in Virgil's comment on the limitations of aesthetic theories that attempt to suppress their own contingencies: "Any intellect which confines itself to mere structuralism is bound to rest trapped in its own