“Victory City” by Salman Rushdie:
This is the enchanting tale, cleverly styled as the translation of an ancient epic, of Pampa Kampana who, as a nine-year-old girl in the India of the 15th Century, helplessly watches as her mother leaves her behind and walks into the flames. As a result of a war who killed all the men, the women all decided to end their lives. Young orphan Pampa Kampana then is miraculously inhabited by a goddess and decides that she “would laugh at death and turn her face toward light.”
She plants seeds in the ashes of the inferno and by magic a city, complete with inhabitants, imposing palaces and grandiose temples commences to sprout from the ashes. Pampa whispers life, complete with their individual histories into the people’s minds and when the creation ends, there stand “Victory City” and the Bisnaga Empire.
Pampa herself is, due to the goddesses powers, ageless and fated to outlive those around her for two hundred and fifty years. As time goes on, ever and ever more relentless, war and old age afflict her brothers and children and their children and then their children, but she sadly, cruelly is forced to live on. She watches political and religious powers rise and fall, intrigues being spun, succeed and then fail again, and in the end she herself gets caught up in the turmoils and becomes victim of her own creation.
Victory City is many things: a myth, an Indian historical epic, a polemic parable, a meditation on the self-ruinous nature of power and right-wing religious fanaticism, the tale of the creator who in the end is consumed by his creation. But above all it is a story about the immortality of stories, the way a tale told will always outlive deeds. What remains are not empires, who one day must crumble to pieces, but the words that will tell of them.
This is a delightful, fast-paced, enticing, humorous, beautiful saga of love, heartbreak, conceit, adventure and magic and a tremendously well crafted act of story-telling.
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