Victory City
Ratings16
Average rating4
'A total pleasure to read, a bright burst of colour in a grey winter season' Sunday Times She will whisper an empire into existence - but all stories have a way of getting away from their creators . . . In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga - literally 'victory city' - the wonder of the world. Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana's life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga's as she attempts to make good on the task that the goddess set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and as years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, Bisnaga is no exception. 'A celebration of the power of literature and the endurance of storytelling' Guardian
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Complex, rich, convoluted, exquisite. Inconsistent. Often irritating. Am I talking about the book or about humanity? Maybe both: Rushdie has an impressive talent for showing us our reflections. And wow, can he write. Some books you can relax into, this one I felt slightly on edge the entire time. Not in a bad way; I just had to pay attention, and after finishing I can confirm that the energy cost was worth it. This is a memorable book that rewards careful reading.
The first surprise was the narrative gimmick: purportedly a distillation of a “long-lost history,” like a Cliff's Notes version of Gilgamesh, but told first person in an oddly subjective voice: warm and personal. Biased pretty heavily in favor of the main character. It's an intriguing device, new to me, and effective: it lent the book an overall tone of closeness, of caring, that I find hard to describe.
Irritations: wishy-washy sex positivity, which I know partly reflected regime and epoch changes but it felt wedged in. Overly handwavy treatment of war and violence. Blatant lookism, sheesh, does he really need to remind us every other page of how “beautiful” or “handsome” the favorite characters are? (Very) infrequent deep dives into boring religious crap, which I skipped and assume were not important. And, grumble, “goats slathered in chilies.” In the Fourteenth century. O Editors, Where Art Thou? (Okay, that last one is just a pet peeve. The others did, to me, genuinely detract from the story. A little.)
Anyhow... not a spoiler, but DAE raise an eyebrow when they first read how many years Pampa would live? Did you do some quick mental arithmetic, subtract it from the book's year of publication, then double-check it? Maybe wonder if all that cruelty, the empire born from seeds, the colonizing and war-in-the-name-of-peace, the tremendous extremes of good and evil and prosperity and neglect, the theocratic tendencies, might be Rushdie's allegory for a different decaying empire? Yeah, me either. Just coincidence.
