This intricately composed work, packed with stories and unexpected twists, represents one of the highlights of 20th century world prose
Rushdie's Shame has a convoluted plot: In a lavish mansion connected to the world only by a freight elevator, three disgraced sisters give birth to a son, Omar Khayyam Shakil. When he finally breaks away from their influence, he leaves home on a journey as a kind of eager voyeur of all the metamorphoses of shame his three mothers wanted to protect him from. The outside world is Pakistan and for the people there, shame is synonymous with death.
The novel, then, is a complex and fictional family saga of two national heroes, Raza Haidar and Iskandar Harappa, characters who both have real antecedents in Pakistani history. Most of the historical figures are grotesquely degraded and parodied by the author. The demonic rage of Sofi e Zenobia, one of the main characters, symbolizes the manifestations of totalitarian regimes: Shame and violence are the flip and the face of the same coin. The book is at the same time a kind of modern oriental fairy tale, an ornamental phantasmagoria, a political pamphlet and a personal account of a post-English Indian whose exile allows him to come to terms with his own roots. Styles and narrative positions alternate, history becomes a fairy tale and the fairy tale becomes history, reality is wrapped in a legend that grows through it.
