Victory City by Salman Rushdie

Saturday, May 20, 2023--San Antonio

Victory City is the second novel I have read by Salman Rushdie.  Previously, I read Midnight's Children which is one of the best novels I have read with a particularly creative format and interesting characters.  This novel is also rather unique--written as if it is a translation of an ancient long poem about a great city that existed for about 250 years in India.  India is known for its poets who have written such long poems, and it has a long history of the comings and goings of great empires.  India is also known for its religious gods and goddesses.  This story is about a woman whose body was temporarily possessed by a goddess who gave her the assignment to take seeds she had given her and create a new city that would be an empire where women would be raised as equals to men and hold positions as the protectors of the city and in architecture, law, the arts, etc.  The woman meets two cowherds and takes them with her along with the seeds which are strewn overnight at the chosen location.  Then the women breathes the new city into existence over night--city walls, buildings, inhabitants, etc., and then spends days whispering personal histories into each inhabitant.  The two cowherds become the first two kings of the new empire (one after the other) and the woman is the queen during the reigns of both of them.  But the story isn't just about this.  It is the story of how there are ups and downs in the lives people and societies--how some leaders are good and others are evil, how some people think only of themselves while others show concern for their fellow citizens and society as a whole, how citizens can be swayed by stories or rumors, how whole societies can willingly give up their freedoms, how leaders of empires come and go both with and without heirs, how those leaders desire to increase their empires and/or ensure protection through conquest of others, etc.  It's a complex novel.  With each twist in the story of the woman's fate or of the empire's fate, it is easy for the reader to consider events in the story as relating to those of today, the past, or even possibly the future within our own society.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.