OptionalBooks

A victorious book

After all the male warriors of the Indian principality Kampili are slaughtered in battle the left over women decide the best course of action to be suicide by fire. Only the nine year old Pampa Kampana decides not to follow the rest of her people into death.

This is how Victory City opens. It should be terribly tragic and shocking, but when reading Salman Rushdie's descriptions of these events I was laughing out loud a couple of times. He writes with such a levity and a good command of humour that the horror of these events only sets in when thinking about it long after closing the book.

I don't mean to imply that only bad things happen in Victory City. Pampa Kampana gets blessed by a goddess to raise a city from the ground and she and the city experience a wide breadth of positive and wonderous things next to some terrible ones. But all of it reads seductively fun and easy.

Victory City is written like stories from mythology, with magic, a grand scale, and full of meaning. Themes of motherhood, fate and power naturally present themselves and inspire thought. A smart and entertaining book.

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