Editorial Reviews
The New York Times Book Review, Robert Towers
Shame is a lively, amusing and exasperating work .... What he invents, with enormous gusto, is "a sort of modern fairy tale".... 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Sunday Telegraph
There can seldom have been so robust and baroque an incarnation of the political novel as Shame. It can be read as a fable, polemic or excoriation; as history or as fiction.... This is the novel as myth and as satire. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"Shame is and is not about Pakistan, that invented, imaginary country... The theme is shame and shamelessness, born from the violence which is modern history. Revelation and obscurity, affairs of honour, blushings of all parts, the recession of erotic life, the open violence of public life, create the extraordinary Rushdie mood." -- Malcolm Bradbury, The Guardian
"A pitch black comedy of public life and historical imperatives." -- The Times
Book Description
Winner of the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger
In his brilliant third novel, first published in 1983, Salman Rushdie gives us a lively and colorful mixture of history, art, language, politics, and religion. Set in a country "not quite Pakistan," the story centers around the family of two men—one a celebrated warrior, the other a debauched playboy—engaged in a protracted duel that is played out in the political landscape of their country.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
In this brilliant novel, Salman Rushdie masterfully combines history, art, language, politics, and religion. Set in a country "not quite Pakistan," the story centers around the families of two men -- one a celebrated warrior, the other, a debauched playboy engaged in a protracted duel that is played out in the political landscape of their country. Shame is a tour de force and a fitting predecessor to the author's legendary novel, The Satanic Verses.
From the Back Cover
"Shame is and is not about Pakistan, that invented, imaginary country... The theme is shame and shamelessness, born from the violence which is modern history. Revelation and obscurity, affairs of honour, blushings of all parts, the recession of erotic life, the open violence of public life, create the extraordinary Rushdie mood." -- Malcolm Bradbury, The Guardian
"A pitch black comedy of public life and historical imperatives." -- The Times
About the Author
Salman Rushdie is the author of seven novels, including The Satanic Verses, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Midnight’s Children for which he won the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers.”
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Ewomack "ewomack" (MN USA)
This, Rushdie's third novel, explores the universal theme of shame in the context of an - somewhat imaginary but simultaneously all too real - Islamic society. The characters swim up to their necks in the stuff. From the three sisters, Chhunni, Munnee, and Bunny (who remain locked up in "Nishapur" with their deadly dumbwaiter), who think more of their inheritance than their father's death to the immaculately conceived, fat, passive, and eternally inverted Omar Khayyam (but rumors fly that the sisters - who share in all the burdens of Omar's birth - scandously seduced Angrez men) to the self-proclaimed "simple soliders" who ultimately turn into brutal dictators (and some shamelessly use Islam to gain public support) to the public that grieves "Did we really do that? But we are ordinary people..." shame fills up and drowns every letter of this novel. And not just "shame", but the nearly untranslatable ultra-nuanced Urdu word "sharam". Even the "family tree" at the beginning of the book, with its numerous nicknames and references to "illegitimate children", seeps with shame. Most of all, the central character (according to the opening of part II), Sufiya Zinobia, physically and metaphorically embodies all of the horrors that shame can produce. The most violent and stomach-churning scenes in the book involve the manifestation of this "Beast" inside of the tiny, innocent girl. By the end of the novel she takes on the role of the classical Greek furies. She leaves a venegeful sopping bloodbath on her way to President Raza Hyder's compound. But, as always with Rushdie, the expected doesn't occur.
Much like Rushdie's second novel, "Midnight's Children", "Shame" contains an obstrusive narrator. This character (Rushdie himself?) pokes in and out of the story to make salient points or to "clear up" matters of language and history. This nameless narrator intrudes far less than Saleem Sinai. And one wonders if he also feels the sting of shame and so meekly hides behind the paragraphs. Regardless, this narrator admits early on that "The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space." He also states that he's writing a "modern fairy tale", which arguably suggests a moral. Even so, a cursory glance into the history of Pakistan will reveal that many of the events related in this book reflect the actual history of that young country. The real General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq gets fictionalized as Raza Hyder; Zulkifar Ali Bhutto becomes the comic-tragic Iskander Harappa; and Benezir Bhutto receives the name Arjumand Harappa. But this knowledge only expands the book's possible intentions. It does not preclude enjoyment of the actual text. Enough universal themes and cliffhanger stories scatter the words as to make their potential source in reality almost irrelevant. Though it does admittedly increase the controvery of the book. And, as we all know more than twenty years later, Rushdie has a flaming penchant for political and religious controversy.
"Shame" has a very similar literary voice to "Midnight's Children": funny, sad, comic, and tragic all at once. It contains stories about the rise and fall of dictators. It ruminates on the oppression of women (the ayahs, the lonely wives of military men, the female children, the burden of creating sons, the heavy weight of child bearing - see the story of "Good News", and the shame of having illegitimate children). It exposes some hard to digest truths about human behavior via the concept of shame ("Did we really do that?"). In some ways it suggests that we reap what we sow, and if we reap shame, well...
The west figures much smaller here than in "Midnight's Children". Rushdie said in a 1983 interview that "...there is a tendency in Pakistan - and I do it myself - to blame the west for all the problems, and I thought it would be worth writing a book to say that there's no point in blaming other countries, because actually we're doing it to ourselves." Though "Shame" never comes off as didactic, politics evidently lies just beneath the surface. It quickly becomes difficult to conceive of "Shame" as mere fiction, mostly due to the anonymous narrator. So here, just as in "Midnight's Children", fiction and history dance, intertwine, and mingle. This fact makes Rushdie a thrillingly provocative read. And though his methods hadn't caused him any great personal trouble up to 1983, his next work of fiction would have him literally running for his life.
S. O SPEARS (Tokyo, Japan)
I was not sure what to expect, this being my first Rushdie novel, but I was not disappointed. The story from the start struck me as stepping a good ways away from the cut and dried storytelling method may narrators use today by conciously making the narrator a highly judgemental one, and not simply letting the story tell itself.
We start out with a mythical birth: a man destined to become a fat, decidant doctor whose intellect is matched only by is weight. He finds himself, eventually, positioned between political factions desperate to cover their own rears while taking what they can for themselves from the government and country. What we see throughout is a mix of straitforward illustration of greater events mixed with fable for the day to day lives of the characters, a mix which is very appealing in such a tale.
I would not recommend this book for everyone. Probably only a few, in reality. Many will get bored with it soon, where others will get drawn in. Try reading the first part (30 pages or so) at a local bookstore or on-line if possible to see if you can get into things. If so, you will not be disappointed with the rest.
Tim Lieder "Founder of Dybbuk Press" (New York, NY)
I have to say that I found this book much more comprehensible than The Satanic Verses. It's basically about Pakistan with all of its contradictions, faults and absurdity. It's eitehr a love letter or a hate letter to his home country and it's a history told in the magical realism style where every major political movement is started by a private incident and evey private exchange is fraught with dangers. He also calls Bhutto Virgin Ironpants - which I'm sure would have annoyed many feminists as much as the Ayatollah passages in The Satanic Verses annoyed the entire country of Iran. (oh, I'm sorry the official stance is that it was the Muhammed passages)
But for all its brilliance and nuance what I and my friends remember is the debate among the rebels over whether to have sex with teh docile sheep or the wild goats. Not even the people fighting the hostile regime are safe from scorn and ridicule.
The central metaphor is in two characters - one a man without shame and the other a woman who is embarrassed and overtly modest from birth. When she loses her modesty, she becomes a vicious animal destroying all in her path. I think that is the theme in that the country might be run by the shameless and the crass, but when the silent ones are pushed too far - watch out.
Even as a minor book this proves Rushdie's clarity of vision and his place as one of the greatest writers of teh 20th century.
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