In this so-called “Age of Anything-Can-Happen”, Ismail Smile, also known as Quichotte, an ageing salesman for a Big Pharma company addled by too much TV, decides to track down an Indian-American superstar, Salma R, and persuade her that she is his soulmate.
Or as a minor mouthpiece character puts it, the “surreal, and even the absurd, now potentially offer the most accurate descriptors of real life”. Rushdie has turned to Cervantes’s novel for inspiration at a time when public life has itself become “quixotic” – in love with crazy schemes, out of touch with reason. Now we have the draining Quichotte, which has been granted a place – for reasons the judges may yet be required to explain – on this year’s Booker longlist. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (after the Arabian Nights), from 2015, was followed by The Golden House (Apuleius’s The Golden Ass). But the new direction soon revealed its vices, in Fury (2001) and Shalimar the Clown (2005), and has since culminated, or so one hopes, in a trio of crass, overstuffed, would-be satirical portraits of curdled plenty, drawing on ancient and early-modern texts, and published every other summer. That book, for all its jittery riffs, was recognisably the work of the author of Midnight’s Children and Shame.
Critical reception Īccording to literary review aggregator Book Marks, the novel received mostly reviews characterized by the site as "Rave" or "Positive".Salman Rushdie’s new novel is the latest instalment of what might be called his American sequence, inaugurated 20 years ago, with The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Eventually, Bisnaga is brought down by political intrigue, competing neighbours, and religious bigotry. Covering multiple generations, her reign includes having affairs with Portuguese adventurers and turning people into animals with her spells. Through her magical powers, she wills into existence the empire Bisnaga, and its capital city of the same name, inspired largely by the historical fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Empire of Vijayanagara, and rules it as what one review calls "a sort of feminist utopia", variously as a minister, regent, and queen consort, for over two hundred years. The narrator and protagonist is Pampa Kampana, partly inspired by the historical, fourteenth-century princess-poet Gangadevi, who is given (or cursed with) a 247-year lifespan. Victory City is framed as a fictional translation of an epic originally written in Sanskrit. The novel was finished before Rushdie was attacked.
It is Rushdie's fifteenth novel.Īhead of publication, it was announced that due to the attack on Rushdie in 2022, he would not be promoting the novel in public, though he did publish several tweets and speak to The New Yorker and WNYC Studios about it. Victory City is a novel by Salman Rushdie published in February 2023.
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