Shame:
Chaudhuri, Una
SHANE Salman Rushdie Knopf, $13.95, 318 pp. Una Chaudhuri SALMAN RUSHDIE'S last book, Midnight's Children, was a triumph of novelistic inclusiveness. Mixing history and fantasy, memory and...
...For the rest there is the veil, costume of modest women, of escaping ousted dictators-and of shame...
...Into this image Rushdie has packed a wealth of psychological insight, for Sufiya Zinobia is the utterly convincing and terrifying product of a culture lost in falsehood and corruption...
...With Shame, Rushkie vindicates the claim staked in Midnight's Children to a place in the company of such writers as Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, and V.S...
...Pirate...
...Rushdie is intensely aware of such claims, and begins his journey into these evils with a refusal to submit to that which causes them-peripherality and shame:' 'Outsider...
...But he is victim as well as perpetrator: in his right ear he hears the ceaseless voice of Allah, reduced to the senile babblings of an old mullah, whereas his left ear is filled at all times with the sibilant, whispered Machiavellianisms of the murdered Harappa...
...In that novel, Rushdie evoked India not only through what it is and what it imagines, but also through what it is no longer: the lost bits of its past that remain to haunt it, like hazy reflections of itself...
...Others, like Bilquis Hyder, develop manias for shutting windows...
...Nor are they ever likely to...
...We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies...
...As self-proclaimed CMLA (the initials, people begin to say, no longer stand for Chief Martial Law Administrator but for Cancel My Last Announcement), Hyder transforms what had begun as a godly dream into a shameful nightmare...
...In Midnight's Children, Pakistan was the Other Place, a potential haven, retreat or exile for the protagonist, a plan of marginal existence and self-forgetting...
...In his new novel, Shame, Rushdie returns to this borderline world, giving a voice to one of modern history's saddest accidents: "the famous moth-eaten partition that chopped up the old country and handed Al-Lah a few insect-nibbled slices of it, some dusty western acres and jungly eastern swamps that the ungodly were happy to do without...
...Most appalling of these is the novel's heroine, Hyder's daughter-who-should-have-been-a-son...
...Shame is a profoundly disturbing book...
...The country of Shame, we are told, is "not Pakistan, or not quite," and indeed the condition of not-quite-existing defines everything about it: it is a place marked by marginality, its inhabitants certain of nothing except their radical peripherality...
...Peripherality, too, is the essence of this land's deepest psychology and the novel's true hero: Shame...
...Not least of these insistent ghosts is the country-now countries -that India spawned at Independence...
...Shame has as vast and exotic a cast of characters as Midnight's Children, and it is as rich in incident, yet it is a wholly different sort of book...
...Still others withdraw from life more conventionally-they disappear, or die...
...History here is a collective fantasy clinging to the dusty deserts and dilapidated cities of reality...
...Omar's three mothers, incarcerating themselves for life in their decaying family mansion, are only the most vividly self-effacing...
...I reply with more questions: Is history to be considered the property of the participants solely...
...Instead, he has created a concentrated and dark masterpiece, an answer to those who may claim that certain evils of modern history are beyond either representation or translation...
...Thus Omar Khayyam Shakil, the novel's not-quite-hero, suffers from an unusual vertigo: convinced that he lives on the edge of the world, he is forever terrified of slipping off the brink...
...It is the doom of those who cannot exist except as reflections of others' perceptions, of those who are unable to credit the notion of individual moral autonomy, and Rushdie finds it everywhere: "You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed.'' Unable or unwilling to play the lead in his own story, Omar cedes that place of honor (and shame-honor's second name) to others: to Iskander Harappa, the debonair and debauched playboy who turns himself into the archetypal ' 'great man" and is elected prime minister, and to General Raza Hyder, once Harappa's protege, later his executioner...
...Brainless, bestial, immeasurably violent, she is the embodiment of shame itself, and though she prowls around the edges of the story for most of the time, she is the monstrous referent and ultimate ground of all its dark visions...
...We reject your authority...
...Poacher...
...Trespasser...
...In anguish Raza covers his head and vainly screams for silence...
...not emanating from the wild imagination of a single, terribly self-conscious narrator...
...Can only the dead speak...
...Silence and invisibility become, inevitably, the pursuit and desire of all the inhabitants of this shame-ridden country...
...You have no right to this subject...
...Naipaul, who are giving modern history a forceful voice...
...Mixing history and fantasy, memory and desire, it ranged over a whole subcontinent's peoples, places, and dreams, its extraordinary scope matched by an astonishing repertory of moods and styles...
...The laughter it provokes is consequently edged with a familiar pain and the marvels it contains are never free of palpable horror...
...I know: nobody ever arrested me...
...Courageously, Rushdie has resisted the temptation to write another exuberant epic...
Vol. 110 • November 1983 • No. 19
