Book Review: Victory City by Salman Rushdie
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Translator and former professor Himansu S. Mohapatra reviews Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (Penguin Random House, 2023) observing how it is history, romance, allegory, feminist manifesto, and poetry —in its prose form rolled into one.
- ISBN: 9780593243398
- Publisher: Penguin Random House
- Date of Publication: 7 February 2023
- Language: English
- Number of Pages: 342
Victory City is a good place to resume contact with Salman Rushdie if, like me, you have left your Rushdie by the wayside on account of he felt repetitive and formulaic.
Midnight’s Children was an eye-opener, bursting sensationally onto the world literary scene in 1981. With its rambunctious narration, its flagrant mixture of realism and fantasy, its flamboyant wordplay, and its irreverent takedown of Babu English, it quickly got installed as the postcolonial and postmodernist classic par excellence.
After that—and I missed out on Satanic Verses because of the ban—Rushdie became predictable. One had a feeling of déjà vu with every new novel that he churned out, starting with The Moor’s Last Sigh. The impression grew that Rushdie was making plain his move to put old wine in a new bottle. Quichotte, published in 2018, all but confirmed it.
