Shame: A Novel [Paperback]

Salman Rushdie (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 11, 2008

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is “not quite Pakistan.” In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men–one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure–Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation–“shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.” Shame is an astonishing story that grows more timely by the day.

Editorial Reviews

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

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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (March 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812976703
• ISBN-13: 978-0812976700
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #160,061 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sir Salman Rushdie is the author of many novels including Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence. He has also published works of non-fiction including, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Short Stories.

He has received many awards for his writing including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 1993 Midnight's Children was judged to be the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In June 2007 he received a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another inexorable dance between fiction and reality... January 29, 2006

By ewomack TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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. Read more ›

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A great allegorical novel March 18, 2001

By JLind555

Format:Paperback

"Shame" is an absolutely brilliant allegory about the political and social chaos that helped give birth to Pakistan and, later, to Bangladesh. If you're up on your modern history, some of the characters will be instantly recognizable. Benazir Bhutto is the Virgin Ironpants; and Zia ul-Haq, who wanted to throw Pakistan back into the middle ages, is General Raza Hyder, who ends up fleeing for his life, only to be destroyed, in an ending similar to a Greek tragedy, by the Three Furies, in the guise of the three "mothers" of the protagonist, Omar Khayyam, a lazy, indolent man without shame or much of a conscience either.

Neatly balancing Omar is the book's other protagonist, a little girl so engulfed in shame that her blushes burn everyone who touches her and almost set water to boil; when she grows up and loses her shame and thus her modesty, all hell breaks loose. Rushdie is also a terrific humorist, and some sections of the book will have you on the floor laughing. Above all,"Shame" is a tour-de force, a non-stop page-turner, a dizzying melange of allegory, parody, fantasy, mythology and modern history, told by a writer whose love/hate relationship with his country is reflected all over the book. It's Rushdie at his finest and helps to secure his place as one of the best writers of his generation.

Judy Lind

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully disturbing April 8, 1997

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Shame is, in my opinion, the finest novel Rushdie has written yet. It's much darker thanany of his other work, disturbingly so, and the violence is of a kind not found in his other novels.The book traverses the sub-continent, moving through Bangladesh, India and Pakistan as effortlessly as the consciousness of most of the people who call themselves Bangladeshi, Indian or Pakistani. The emotion of Shame is a hook on which the novel is built. It isn't the center, though Rushdie often focuses on instances where his characters flush with redness. Rushdie spent part of his childhood in Pakistan (and has gone back since), the novel is pieced together, like most of Rushdie from a remembering that is incomplete and where the gaps are filled by fantasy. Shame attains a balance between the imaginatively outrageous and the real as it moves through time in the "other" country on the sub-continent. The story of a man/child who grows up in and, perhaps, out of a house with three aunts, each of whom is his mother, Shame stands for the people of the north-western sub-continent as only a work infused with divinely sharp humour can. Before the Satanic Verses, there was Shame, and Shame engaged in the same mode of literate heresy that Rushdie employed later in Satanic Verses. Only in Shame it was the root of all middle-eastern religions, Zoroastrianism that Rushdie focused on. And his repetition of a similar ancient heresy, like SV questioning the sharp distinction made between darkness and light (in God and creation), in the context of a faith that acknowledges, even births the Manacheean heresy. In a similar manner, Shame explores the realm between the human and barely human, and the madness that is in all of us. Shame isn't an easy read, it may even be so disturbing as to irritate you.... But for me it is the supreme height of Rushdie's fiction to date, the strangest and most penetrating of all his work. -- Subir Grewal Read more ›

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Rushdie's most thematically driven novels... March 6, 2001

By Damion Pisacane

Format:Paperback

Let me start by saying that if you have never read a Salman Rushdie book before, I do not recommend that this be your first. My first encounter with Rushdie was Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a friend of mine began to appreciate his writing after reading Midnight's Children. Stick to those (or perhaps East, West) if you are a Rushdie neophyte. Shame is not necessarily the best introduction to one of the best writers of the 20th century.

Why, you might ask? The fact is that Shame homes in on a specific theme and doesn't let go. The book is essentially about the birth of Pakistan and its painful, turbulent early years. It is so focused on these themes that Rushdie goes so far as to include personal asides in the middle of the prose in order to further clarify the points he is making. Shame is a fun, clever and tremendously enjoyable novel but I can see people being put off by an almost educational, preachy tone in these little asides.

Don't get me wrong.... Shame is a GREAT book! For any of you who are familiar with Rushdie's style, you will find that he is up to form here. The plot is full of clever devices (much like in The Moor's Last Sigh) which will have you placing the book down, simply awestruck at the inventiveness and foresight.

What else can I say? I am enraptured with Rushdie. Anyone interested in reading simply astounding prose needs to do themselves a favor and read this author's work. Be forewarned though, this in not a light afternoon read, it requires a certain intellectual investment.