By the following day, the adults are acting like adults and the children are running around as children should. Pampa whispers words that reach their ears and fill their minds with fictional ancestors, made-up memories, and notions of how to behave. The day Bisnaga is created, its newly minted inhabitants are found asleep in the street, or wandering like sleepwalkers, or rolling on the ground in a state of confusion, beshitting themselves. Its myths of origin are recounted with glee.
Victory City is a cheerful little vessel, despite its ultimate destination. If this somber backstory makes you think that the novel is a slog, I’ve misled you. Words are the only victors.įrom the September 1981 issue: “The Prophet’s Hair,” a short story by Salman Rushdie What’s important is that Victory City is a triumph-not because it exists, but because it is utterly enchanting. We don’t know whether he added those afterward or life imitated fiction, as it sometimes does.
Readers will easily spot general parallels between our hero and her creator-both are prolific world-builders both must elude political assassination-but a few of them seem to reproduce with eerie specificity the events of the summer. He may have still been working on this novel he may have finished it already. Rushdie lost the use of an eye and a hand. For one thing, it comes out a mere six months after a self-avowed admirer of Khomeini finally got to Rushdie, assaulting him on a stage and stabbing him repeatedly in the neck and torso. His books could so easily not have been written. In a sense, that’s true of everything Rushdie has published since 1989, when he went into hiding after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, in this case condemning Rushdie to death. Just by dint of ending up in our hands, Victory City vindicates Pampa’s bittersweet faith in literature. While they lived, they were victors, or vanquished, or both.
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