Geoffrey Himes explores Salman Rushdie's Victory City and how his latest work fits into the tapestry of his larger legacy.
, creates an entire kingdom in the southern half of what is now India. When she is orphaned at age nine, after her mother has thrown herself onto a funeral pyre in the book’s dramatic opening, she is possessed by the goddess Parvati. Nine years later, she discovers that she has the power to use seeds of grain to grow an entire city and fill it with soldiers, bakers, poets, and more.
Rushdie has famously been the enemy of Islamic utopians. In early 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death, after the author had depicted Mohammed as a complex human being in the 1988 novel,and seeing it published, Rushdie was nearly killed when a fatwa-inspired young man stabbed him repeatedly in the face, neck, and abdomen last August on a stage in Chautauqua, New York.
Early in the book, Rushdie describes how Pampa Kampana supplied inner lives to the thousands of people she had raised from seeds in the desert sand. While she’s in the middle of that whispering campaign, the empire’s new crown prince brings a Portuguese trader to observe. Even as Pampa Kampana is making her world more defined and believable, Rushdie is doing the same with his.
The act of creation has its moments of ecstasy, Rushdie accurately reports, but it also has its moments of frustration. Sometimes you want the words to come, and they stubbornly refuse. Sometimes you want your characters to act a certain way, and they refuse. If you’ve done a good job of creating them—if you’ve raised them like independent children—they will have their own desires, their own agendas, and will resist yours.
“She would have to persuade many of them,” Rushdie writes, “that the cultured, inclusive, sophisticated narrative of Bisnaga that she was offering was better than the narrow, exclusionary, and, to her way of thinking, barbarian official narrative of the moment. It was by no means certain that the people would choose sophistication over barbarianism. The party line regarding members of other faiths—we are good, they are bad—had a certain infectious clarity.
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