Shame : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: read this book or you are seriously blowing it
Review: Salman Rushdie's offbeat sense of humor and incredible ability to mix folklore with realistic storytelling take centerstage in this dead-on satire of Pakistani history. Rushdie himself narrates the story with frequent asides to the reader that take on a talky style similar to the narration of Graham Swift's equally great novel Waterland. At the center of the novel are Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa, based on former Pakistani leaders General Zia Ul-Haq and Ali Bhutto, respectively. As in "Midnight's Children", Rushdie deftly handles a large supporting cast of eccentric characters who each fit into the story perfectly. My personal favorite is Hyder's wife who wanders around her home all day long locking doors and speaking only in metaphors.
This is highly reccomended for anyone interested in history, but even if you aren't, it is to Rushdie's great credit that he manages to spark an interest in histoy in even the most apathetic of readers. Researhing the historical context of Shame was almost as much of a joy for me as reading it. Do not blow it, read Shame immediately and while you are at it be sure to pick up the rest of Rushdie's catalogue along with Waterland by Graham Swift. You won't regret it.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully disturbing
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: one of the modern books I ever read
Review: When I read this book, I knew very little of Pakistan's history. And that doesn't matter one bit.
Even without knowledge of the allegories that can be made, Shame is a beatiful book, describing human emotions, conflicts, well basically everything you expect from a gripping story, and more than that.

If anything, you have to admire the masterful way in which the plot(s) slowly but inevitably unravel(s). Slow doesn't mean that the story has no pace, on the contrary. Seldom have I read a story that was so well structured as this one. I do not like to call books masterpieces, but I'll make an exception for this one.