“Everything I want is in my words and all I need is words”. This phrase is uttered by Pampa Kampana, the hero of ‘Ciudad Victoria’, at a time when this “miracle-maker, seer and poet” lost his sight due to an act of revenge. Salman Rushdie, the author of the novel Random House put on sale in Spain this Thursday, is also the phrase that comes to mind.
And although the book was written before the novelist, essayist, and freedom of speech icon suffered last August an attack hate fanatic it was about to cost him his life and this exuberant fable, which left him completely blind, where fact and fiction merge in a meaningful embrace, where the events of the past year impose parallels that need to be pondered, and at the same time, to the cold.
The publication of the book, which reached American bookstores this Tuesday, was met with anticipation and joy. Critics surrender to Rushdie’s return After two studies in which satire is a tool to approach the culture and politics of the United States, his homeland of India and the land of magical realism that has determined a large part of his work. And as it is read in the novel, it is revealed in all its glory that “the miraculous and the everyday are two halves of the same whole”.
fact and fiction
‘Ciudad Victoria’ is a book of imagination, prose and symbolism that transcends the layers of historical, political and cultural context. Because vijayanagarthe kingdom in which the novel describes his birth and ups and downs baptize him as Bisnaga, actually existed in South India between the 14th and 16th centuries and its ruins, now known as Hampi, are part of the UNESCO World Heritage List. The first two regents, Hukka and Bukka, were also kings and mighty elephant armies and wars with northern sultanatesand the arrival of foreigners such as the Portuguese.
It actually happened women’s self-sacrifice this would forever mark the life of Kampana, the hero and vehicle of the divinity conceived by Rushdie’s mind. And he attributes to him not only the magical creation of the kingdom and the memories of its inhabitants, to whom he whispers the memory of a non-existent story, “fantasies that create reality”, but also the authorship of Jaraparajaya. (Victory and defeat) is told to the reader in a Sanskrit manuscript that he wrote before he died at the age of 247, translated into “simple language” by a narrator, who he assures was neither “scientist nor scholar”. a poet but a simple storyteller.
In the history of this kingdom that Rushdie built by playing with language, conflicts between multicultural, plural, egalitarian, pleasant and free against fundamentalism, against orthodoxy, chastity, extremism, fanaticism, sectarian hatred, ignorance and intolerance. The book is also a portrait of a utopia. The world of women who are not subject to patriarchypeace and integration, a state with aspirations.
It is also a defense against forgetting and erasing history; this is all the more necessary in India today and at a time when, under Narendra Mori, Hindu nationalism is trying to erase the Islamic legacy. And perhaps above all, a celebration of storytelling as a sacred profession. Kampana resorted to “fiction . . . to save the crowd from its unreality.” in haste
‘Ciudad Victoria’ is, as the ‘Financial Times’ writes, an ‘extremely entertaining’ and ‘extremely fascinating’ novel. It is also the “fairy tale with a contagious sense of fun” told by The Guardian and the “victory” of “The Atlantic”, which reads one of Rushdie’s “most compelling” works on its pages.
The joy of building a world
The author has agreed to talk about the attack in his only interview to date, after the attack that occurred in the New York office of his manager Andrew Wylie in December and was published in ‘The New Yorker’ this Monday. but he really wanted to meet again between books and talk about literature and his latest work. “The most important thing to me,” he said.
Rushdie explained It took 15 years for ‘Ciudad Victoria’ to find its history. and “the sound of the book was very difficult to find.” He also said that he didn’t know where Kampana came from (“It came to my mind all of a sudden”). But when he has a voice, a hero, and a reason to let go of the pleasure of being able to devote himself “to building a world, to the pleasure of creating a wonderful canvas.”
“I am more and more interested in the pleasure principle”Rushdie said in that interview that he also left pearls like pearls. “When you’re young you have to pretend to be wisdom, when you’re old you have to pretend to energy”. And now he believes that “the purpose of art is to give joy.” I used to think it wasn’t the crux of the matter.”
He succeeds with the epic of Kampana and Bisnaga. His friend and fellow writer, Hari Kunzru, recently told ‘The New York Times’ that this is an ‘exaggerated book’ that shows Rushdie ‘expressing all his talents and using all his creative power’. And that should remind us—Kunrzru added— He is more of a novelist and storyteller than a political symbol.”. He is not without reason. As in the last sentence of the book written by Pampa Kampana and Rushdie: “Words win.”