Victory City

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.

This is my first book by Salman Rushdie and overall I really enjoyed it. It's styled as a sort of modern recounting of a (fictional) ancient Indian epic poem about the rise and fall of a city grown from magic seeds created by a young woman who gains a god's powers after witnessing injustice. The story is poignant and beautiful but also really funny in places. I docked a star because I felt like some of the gender related magic in the middle section wasn't that well executed but overall I would absolutely recommend.