Word: shames
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Indian-born Author Salman Rushdie, 36, puts up. Those unfortunate gobblers are not the only fanciful creatures in Shame, his third novel. The book is crammed with the grotesque and improbable. Many pages are devoted to introducing the hero, Omar Khayyam Shakil, and the three sisters who all claim to be his mother. Then he grows fat and disappears from the scene for long stretches. "I am a peripheral man," he announces near the end. "Other persons have been the principal actors in my life story...
...fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality." The personal reference needs an explanation, and Rushdie later offers one: "I am an emigrant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two (England, where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my will)." Shame is a looking-glass fable about a country that was actually made up, arbitrarily sundered from India in 1947, written by a native son who has never called the place his home...
...bloody civil war that led to the transformation of East Pakistan into independent Bangladesh in 1971 is mirrored here: "The final defeat of the western forces, which led to the reconstitution of the East Wing nation as and an international autonomous basket (that's a case ..." laugh) But Shame is not a point-for-point alle gory of reasonably recent events...
Other characters display unusual gifts. One woman bears a mathematical progression of children on the same date of each succeeding year (first twins, then triplets, etc.). There is a brain-damaged girl who psychically absorbs the shame that others should but do not feel until she becomes a ravening albino panther, be heading animals and humans alike. These surreal people do not simply stand for such concepts as overpopulation or guilt; they also take their places in what the au thor calls "the infinitely rich and cryptic texture of human life...
...political candor ("May I interpose a few words here on the subject of the Islamic revival?"). But his literary accomplishments are uniquely his own. A Westerner by adoption and choice, looking back on a country where he would assuredly be silenced if he tried to write a book like Shame, Rushdie has produced an imaginative tour of obliquities and iniquities. - By Paul Gray