Salman Rushdie has been one of my favorite authors since I first discovered him my freshman year of college. I was assigned to read a short story of his for a class and I promptly read as many of his books as I could find.
Oddly enough, I don’t really remember much of the ones I read because I read one right after the other and they all kind of blur together after a while. For example, I can tell you I read The Enchantress of Florence, but I can’t tell you what it’s about.
Despite loving Rushdie’s writing, I haven’t read anything of his since his memoir, Joseph Anton, came out several years ago. I still have a copy of The Golden House sitting, unread, on my bookshelf. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just that his writing is so dense that I’ve opted for the easier stuff since starting my own business and getting bogged down in that work.
In any case, I was excited when someone from my book club nominated this book for our June discussion, and I definitely voted for it. I don’t have any complaints about the book, but I didn’t love it as much as I’ve loved Rushdie’s other work. It was fine.
The device Rushdie uses for this novel is kind of odd. The story is about a fictional city (which is apparently based on a real city) named Bisnaga that was the heart of an empire for a little over 200 years before it was conquered and torn down. At that point, the 200+-year-old founder of the city, Pampa Kampana, sealed the poem she had been writing about the history of the city in a clay pot and buried the pot underneath the remains of the city.
The conceit of the book is that her poem was dug up hundreds of years later and the author of the book is giving us a kind of Cliff’s Notes version of the poem. He claims not to be any good at writing verses, which is his excuse for not writing his own epic poem, but then he inserts things in italics like, “Here there is an unexplained break in continuity in the manuscript.” Since Rushdie is the author, why did he choose to act confounded about some of his own narrative choices? Did he just get lazy and try to cover up his laziness?
At first, the book seems to be a kind of feminist manifesto because the city (at least at some points in its existence) is described as a kind of utopia in which women are equal to men. That made me immediately suspicious of the book because, like I said, I read Rushdie’s memoir — and the memoir Padma Lakshmi wrote that included her marriage to Rushdie. I know he doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to how he treats the women in his life.
Padma Kampana is traumatized at a young age when most of the men in her village are killed in a battle and most of the women respond by throwing themselves on the funeral pyre and burning alive. Despite the fact that Padma’s own father died long before the battle, her mother decides to join the other women on the pyre, which is so messed up. BTW, apparently the mass suicide of women by funeral pyre is also based on a real historical event.
What is probably not included in the historical event is a goddess entering Padma, embuing her with some of her powers — but not telling her which powers she has, because that would be too easy. She tells Padma she will live to see the birth and death of a great empire and write all about it for a little over two centuries, and once she is finished, she will die.
Padma wanders for a while and ends up living in a cave with a guy who claims to be religious and she suffers abuse from him for years until a couple of brothers come along. They used to be goat herders, then soldiers, and now they’re on the run for having deserted their army. Padma gives the brothers a bag of seeds and tells them to plant the city. Of course they don’t believe her, but what do they have to lose by trying? Sure enough, buildings and temples and city walls and even people spring up where they hadn’t existed a few hours ago.
Padma spends a week or so in meditation, which apparently involves making up stories about each of the new inhabitants of the new city and “whispering” these stories to the inhabitants to make them think the city has been here for ages.
The first thing the two brothers decide is who gets to be king and who gets to be crown prince. I was like, “Wait, Padma built this whole thing with her magic, invented histories for all the inhabitants and convinced them of the truth of those stories, and she doesn’t get to rule?”
I also wondered why a supposedly utopian society would have the caste system, but I guess it wasn’t as much of a utopia as Padma had wanted it to be. That, and you can probably only do so much with a Hindu population.
That being said, something that is important to Padma is religious tolerance. The city doesn’t always live up to that ideal, but I think it mostly lives up to it throughout the majority of its lifespan.
That said, it’s hard to say what the city did or did not do for most of its lifespan. The book is supposed to cover about 240 years, but it’s only 331 pages, so it skips over a lot. Padma and her three daughters are banished from the city at one point. They live in the forest for years until Padma has to use a bunch of her magic to help fight off an invasion of “pink, hairless, monkeys.” It takes so much out of her that she falls into a coma for six generations and is awoken by her great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, who somehow looks exactly like her. I find it hard to believe much family resemblance would remain after 7 generations, but then again, this is a story about a magical city.
Once her descendent wakes her up, they head back to Bisnaga together because by this point most people have forgotten who Padma even is, and even more claim she was never a real person, but a myth.
So she and her daughter arrive just after the death of the latest king and apparently they choose the next king by flying over him in bird form, landing in front of him, turning back to human form, and bowing to him. This is taken as a divine sign that he is meant to be ruler, when really, two people showed up at an opportune moment and happened to land in front of someone they knew literally nothing about. Always a great system of choosing your ruler.
Both Padma and her descendent fall in love with the new king, and because Padma has been aging slowly due to the fact that she’s going to live a super long time, she’s actually in the running. She doesn’t look to be that much older than her great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Zerelda.
But the king chooses Zerelda, and even she only gets to be his second wife. His first wife must be the daughter of a powerful southern neighbor so they can form a political alliance. Then there’s a lot of sexist BS about two women competing for the love of a man and the position of power that comes with it.
Zerelda loses by dying in childbirth, especially when her son dies with her. Wife #1 doesn’t do too well, either, because, although she lives, her child also is also stillborn.
The king decides this is a punishment from the gods because he hasn’t conquered enough land, so he sets out on a quest to conquer some nearby kingdoms. He takes his wife with him so they can continue the business of trying to make an heir when he’s not fighting.
He appoints Padma as his regent while he’s gone, and she gets one decade to make the city into the prosperous utopia she had always wanted it to be.
Of course that all goes to shit as soon as the king comes home with his wife and two sons, and things quickly go downhill from there, eventually resulting in the foretold fall of the city.
Padma writes it all down and finally dies. Yay?