This month’s reading group, to mark the 70th anniversary of Indian partition, will be – as chosen by the traditional lot – Shame by Salman Rushdie. It looks set to be a fascinating book.
At this stage, I admit don’t know much about the novel beyond the fact that it was the novel Rushdie wrote between Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988) and that it has been consequently overshadowed by those two famous books. But fortunately, some excellent explanations of why this is an important book were posted on the nominations blogpost. Palfreyman’s is worth quoting at (delightful) length:
So, just in case it isn’t clear, I’m nominating Shame. My reasons work thusly.
1. Midnight’s Children is great, but Shame works even better. While neither is, strictly speaking, about the partition itself, both are about the destinies of the two countries thus untimely ripp’d from their place in the world and born at the time.
2. Rushdie is a writer many want to read but haven’t yet, and Shame is genuinely an easier and more rewarding way in than Midnight’s Children.
3. We will never find out ‘all’ about the partition. We can choose [historical account Freedom at Midnight] Lapierre and Collins and many (most?) will scorn it. The same fate awaits any work of nonfiction that we might try to use as a literary, but educational text.
4. I am suggesting Rushdie as a kind of universal because he ticks many boxes – of Indian origin, of Muslim origin, a genuine child of partition/independence – a person with perspective on it, though, through having lived and studied in the west as well … A great literary writer, whose edges haven’t been worn smooth by translation, who understands and uses the Indian idioms of his childhood, but uses them in English. He is both close enough to it and far enough from it, and he writes both specifically and universally.
5. So, if we give up on the idea of a single canonical partition narrative, let’s at least begin with one that has something for everyone, and a lot for most. We can always, if fascinated by it, continue our reading, no?
Well, I’m convinced. It was also pointed out that Shame is an eminently “doable” 288 pages, as well as being “a knockout. And a corrosive kick up the bum to all and sundry.” Which sounds like just the kind of thing we should be reading.
Plus, Salman Rushdie may be controversial, and he may have his detractors, but he sure can write.
If all that isn’t inducement enough, please also take a look at this fantastic 1983 New York Times review by Robert Towers, who declares that: “It is probably easier to play croquet (as in Alice in Wonderland) with flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls than to give a coherent plot summary of Shame.” But Towers also says: “I found Mr Rushdie’s style a source of delight, a bright stream of words that lifted me happily past the most threatening snags and whirlpools of this impossible tale.” And, eerily prescient: “What he invents, with enormous gusto, is ‘a sort of modern fairytale’, which the author says nobody need take seriously and which, since it is set in ‘not quite Pakistan’, need not provoke the authorities to ban the book or have it burned.”
That would be his next book. Anyway, Shame sounds intriguing. I’m looking forward to reading it immensely and I hope you’ll join me.
And thanks to the lovely folk at Vintage, we have copies of the novel to give to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive suggestion in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Phill Langhorne with your address (phill.langhorne@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to him, too.
