(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Contemporary Fiction Views: Celebrating Rushdie's Victory City as he recovers [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-14 My Rushdie shelf Salman Rushdie's writing has always been rooted in the fantastic, the fabulous, in fables and fairy tales. His life has turned out to be something of the same, from surviving decades under a fatwa to starting to heal from a horrific attack inspired by that decree. His latest novel, Victory City, is a remarkable commemmoration of both his writing and his life. In a New Yorker profile by David Remnick earlier this month, the years that Rushdie spent under decree of death in a sentence declared by a wounded egoist, everything the writer did was examined and criticized. But "For Rushdie, keeping a low profile would be capitulation. He was a social being and would live as he pleased." He also knows how to poke fun at himself, from the Larry David show appearance to being asked where the loo was in Bridget Jones' Diary. It is a scampish trait that probably helped him cope for so many years in such strange circumstances. That existence was not easy-going initially, and led to one of his divorces. However he was forced, or chose, to live, the essential core of Rushdie is storyteller. The stories he absorbed, from youth onwards, the writers he listened to, have all worked together in a glorious alchemy in which Rushdie forged a way to tell stories that used language he could twist and turn as it described the amazing and the unlikely, the unreliable and the truth. Rushdie told Remnick that: “I hugely admire ‘A Passage to India,’ because it was an anti-colonial book at a time when it was not at all fashionable to be anti-colonial,” he went on. “What I kind of rebelled against was Forsterian English, which is very cool and meticulous. I thought, If there’s one thing that India is not, it’s not cool. It’s hot and noisy and crowded and excessive. How do you find a language that’s like that?” All of Rushdie's writing has been in service of creating that language. His biggest early novel, Midnight's Children, is the story of snot-nosed Saleem, born on the day India and Pakistan were partitioned, and the story of how both countries went wrong while trying to find themselves. From a long sojourn to the intricacies of pickle-making, nothing about Midnight's Children is a throwaway section. No wonder it was voted the Best of the Bookers. And then came The Satanic Verses. The novel is based in part on the story that Mohammed at one time honored three goddesses, but rescinded his proclamation that was inspired by Satan. Although it was widely reported that this was heresy to the ayatollah, and the basis of the fatwa, I contend it was the novel's depiction of a certain religious leader as petty, vengeful and just not really a good man of God. Other people died because of that fatwa. Rushdie initially went into hiding, then became more and more public. All because of his writing. In the meantime, he finished 16 novels. Victory City was finished last summer, before the Aug. 11 attack. Rushdie was even taking notes for a new work, although it appears that one has been set aside as he tries to regain his ability to write. The work between the fatwa's declaration and last summer's attack includes Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a book inspired by one of his sons and in which the son inspires the father to resume telling stories. The Enchantress of Florence, like Victory City, is focused on a strong woman in a male-centric world, especially as detailed in the Mughal capital city of Akbar the Great, and Florence in the time of Machiavelli. The Moor's Last Sigh is a family saga of exile. Joseph Anton is a fictionalized biography, with the protagonist taking his name from the two first names of Rushdie's favorite authors, Conrad and Chekhov. It's also an alias under which Rushdie frequently traveled. The book is wide-ranging in its emotions and is an attempt to make an honest assessment of who the narrator has become. It's also a look at the world in which he lives: Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. Indeed. And now Victory City. Pampa Kampana is a young girl who had just learned pottery, and thought she would spend years working with her mother. But after yet another unremarkable battle by an unremarkable would-be big king, in which most of the men of the village died, the women burned themselves in ritual mourning. Including Pampa's mother. As the flames take the women, the goddess Pampa begins to speak through the nine-year-old. The goddess is in her, and she is her vessel. She is told she will write an epic poem that will take more than 200 years to complete and that on the day she completes it, she will die. Along the way, she will create an empire that will be forgotten for hundreds of years. An empire for women. For Rushdie to take on the subject of female empowerment could be seen as a sign of his own growth, considering his failed marriages and the way he wrote about some of his ex-wives in Joseph Anton. And in writing about that empowerment, Rushdie uses enchantment as a narrative tool and as his vocabulary. The entire work is filled with the language readers expect from Rushdie, such as: "I am the mother of Bisnaga," she said. "Everything that has happened here, happened because of me. My seeds gave birth to the people, my art caused the walls to rise. I have sat upon the throne beside both the founding kings. What do I want? I want my true nature to be recognized. I don't want to be invisible I want to be seen." Whether any woman recognizes the divine in herself, or denies its existence, that is a true desire. 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