Abused by a scholar who takes her in, she soon becomes something of a prophet, granting two men who enter her orbit a bag of seeds and knowledge that they can plant a new city and its inhabitants, no different than crops.įrom this encounter is born the town and then empire of Bisnaga. Pampa Kampana, named after and soon possessed by the goddess Pampa, is only a child when, after a bloody battle in which her people are overrun, she watches her mother step willingly into a burning pyre, part of a collective suicide. The novel opens in 14th-century southern India and runs almost the entire 247-year span of its central character’s life. Salman Rushdie still feels gratitude after stabbing left him blind in his right eye and struggling to write Victory City is many things – an Indian historical epic, a centuries-long fable, a meditation on the self-ruinous nature of power – but perhaps more than anything else, it is a story about the immortality of stories, the way a tale told will always outlive a sword swung. … In fact they seemed incapable of expressing what they truly wanted, food, or shelter, or someone to explain the world to them and make them feel safe in it, someone whose soft words could grant them the happy illusion of understanding what they could not understand.” “There was a good deal of shouting, and of crying, and some of the people were rolling on the ground and kicking their legs in the air, punching the air as if to say, where am I, let me out of here. Very early on in Victory City – Salman Rushdie’s grand and conflicted new novel – the fathers of a fledgling city take a look at their infant creation and find that the human beings who populate it seem to be having a real hard go of things:

On chapel sands review