Tag: Salman Rushdie

Victory City by Salman Rushdie – Book

From a Google Image Search – American Kahani

Salman Rushdie, prolific and celebrated author, was born in Mumbai (Bombay) India. He was born to Islamic parents but became an atheist. One of his early books was The Satanic Verses. It was considered sacrilegious by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran who issued a fatwa on February 14, 1989, requiring the faithful to seek out Rushdie and kill him. For many years Rushdie lived in hiding in London under the protection of the British government. The Ayatollah died without lifting the fatwa, so it was never rescinded but Rushdie felt secure enough to live freely in NYC for many years. On August 12, 2022, standing on the stage at the Chautauqua Institute in New York Rushdie was attacked by 24-year-old Hadi Matar who stabbed him multiple times with a knife before security and participants were able to apprehend him. Rushdie was severely injured and lost the use of one eye.

Victory City is the first book Rushdie has published since his near-death experience. Salman Rushdie is back on home turf with this book. His heroine, as a nine-year-old girl, sees her mother walk into a fire to die as custom required of widows. She is shocked that her mother would chose the fire rather than stay with her. But she is given a gift from the goddess Pampa who she is named for. She is given two gifts by the goddess. She is gifted with long life. She is also gifted with the magical ability to sow seeds and grow her own city.

The goddess tells her, “You will fight to make sure that no more women are ever burned in this fashion, you will live long enough to witness both your success and your failure, you will see it all, tell its story and then you will die immediately. Nobody will remember you for 450 years until they unearth your verses.” (not an exact quote). It turns out that knowing your future often brings both joy and pain.

First Pampa Kampana spends years reaching her maturity in the cave (mutt) of a spiritual teacher and sexual predator, Vidyasagar. Fortunately, Vidyasagar studies for long hours as he memorizes all the holy texts, but he occasionally finds time to rape Pampa. The monk seeks the answers to two questions. The first is whether wisdom exists or there is only folly. The second question is to find out if there is such a thing as Vidya or true knowledge, or only many different kinds of ignorance. His goal is (ironically) how to ensure the triumph of nonviolence in a violent age. Although grateful for learning the contents of the holy books, she never forgets the humiliation she suffered when she was helpless to fight back.

When Pampa Kampana is eighteen two cowherds arrive at the mutt. She sends Hukka and Bukka Sangama out to sow the seeds of her city. She names the city Bisnaga or Victory City. Since her city is peopled by people who have no personalities, who know no history, who don’t know their identities, Pampa Kampana whispers to fill the minds of each individual in Bisnaga. It is a city created by magic. 

Magic is one of the best aspects of Rushdie’s writing. The existence of magic allows him to be a great storyteller in the Eastern manner. This book does not have Islamic roots; it celebrates Hinduism but as myth more than religion. It’s interesting that Pampa Kampana’s life and the life of Victory City are exactly 247 years, the same as the life of the American Republic (probably not an accident). There is plenty of commentary on the rise and fall of great cities, or great empires. Why are empires successful and why do they fail? Is failure inevitable? 

In our world we have no magic that we know of. We live in non-magical times. We can’t blame the gods and goddesses for our failure. We have only ourselves to blame. Still, a good story entertains us and makes us think in new directions. Victory City is an engrossing tale of magic and life that centers around a female heroine who builds a great empire, which is quite rare. Salman Rushdie is writing again and that is cause for celebration.

The Golden House by Salman Rushdie – Book

The Golden House, by Salman Rushdie

The author of The Golden House, Salman Rushdie, and I have lived through the same decades, but his life has been global and large; mine provincial and small. Mr. Rushdie was born in Mumbai, however his influences were both British and Indian. Everyone remembers that he lived in fear of his life as a Muslim under a fatwa because of his book, The Satanic Verses.

In The Golden House, Rushdie writes as a New Yorker. He tells a tale of a Mumbai family, hiding with new identities, under a mysterious veil of danger in New York City. Our narrator is a young American man raised by professorial and loving parents on the edges of the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens. (They’re real, look it up.) The Golden family lives at the other end of the Gardens and these recent arrivals are endlessly fascinating to René, the son of Gabe and Darcy.

The Goldens were “reborn” when they left Mumbai to live in America with their adopted Roman names. The father claimed the name of Nero, with all its end-of-empire symbolism. His first son took the name Petronius, the second chose Lucius Apuleius (Apu) and the third became Dionysus or D. The names were perhaps a bad idea.

René had always wanted to be a film maker but his life seems too prosaic until it becomes entangled in the low key, but rather tragic, lives of this family with no mother and, seemingly, no past. This novel is, among other things, an homage to great movies/films – European, Hollywood, Bollywood. Salman Rushdie, bursting still with crackling intellectual energy pulls into his story references to the movies he has loved, the same movies we love, except for a few so highbrow they may never have been available in the hinterlands I have inhabited. These movies still live vividly in his prodigious memory and in the minds of many a film buff.

As the Golden family comes apart, because you really cannot escape the past, a politician known as the Joker, guess who, a clownish grafter, is running for the American Presidency. (The parallels between American Democracy and the fall of Rome are hardly subtle.) As we know the Joker wins the election.

This is a very readable novel, without the Muslim/Indian baseline which is foreign to most Americans and makes some Rushdie novels seem somewhat dense. The Golden House is a tour de force by a man who is comfortable in cultures around the globe and does not mind splashing around in his literary bona fides for our enjoyment. Eliot’s “Prufrock” and Shakespeare get cameos among the films – “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Not yet, Mr. Rushdie, not yet.

Those of us who are shell-shocked with worry for American Democracy can find some comfort in the decision this British/Indian man made to put on his New York/American persona in order to help us through these chaotic days (and nights, and months, and years). What began as a comedy could easily become a classical tragedy. However, I think you will read this tragedy with a great big old smile on your face (at least some of the time).