Victory City: A Novel by Salman Rushdie is an epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries from the transcendent imagination of Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie. It is well written and was a page-turner from page one to the end. I highly recommend this novel and encourage everyone to read it.
by Salman Rushdie
Victory City: A Novel by Salman Rushdie is an epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries from the transcendent imagination of Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie. It is well written and was a page-turner from page one to the end. I highly recommend this novel and encourage everyone to read it.
Brilliantly styled as a translation of an ancient epic, this is a saga of love, adventure, and myth that is a testament to storytelling’s power. After witnessing her mother’s death, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl’s mouth. I was hooked when Pampa Kampana provided the seeds that created Victory City out of thin air.
David Remnick’s interview with Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker provided background I would have missed.
“The first kings of Vijayanagara announced, quite seriously, that they were descended from the moon,” Rushdie said. “So when these kings, Harihara and Bukka, announce that they’re members of the lunar dynasty, they’re associating themselves with those great heroes. It’s like saying, ‘I’ve descended from the same family as Achilles.’ Or Agamemnon. And so I thought, Well, if you could say that, I can say anything.”
Above all, the book is buoyed by the character of Pampa Kampana, who, Rushdie says, “just showed up in my head” and gave him his story, his sense of direction. Rushdie’s pleasure in writing the novel was in “world building” and, at the same time, writing about a character building that world: “It’s me doing it, but it’s also her doing it.” The pleasure is infectious. “Victory City” is an immensely enjoyable novel. It is also an affirmation. At the end, with the great city in ruins, what is left is not the storyteller but her words:
The Goodreads summary provides a brief overview,
In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing her mother’s death, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl’s mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana’s comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga–literally victory city–the wonder of the world.
Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana’s life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga’s, from its literal sowing out of a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways: the hubris of those in power. Whispering Bisnaga and its citizens into existence, Pampa Kampana attempts to make good on Parvati’s task: giving women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception. As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry–with Pampa Kampana at its center.
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by Daniel Kehlmann
“The Director” by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin, is a thought-provoking novel inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst. Pabst fled to Hollywood to escape the Nazis but later returned to Germany to produce propaganda films for the German Reich. The novel is a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year, an NYPL Best Book of the Year, and a notable book by the Washington Post.
An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.
When he learns that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975. His novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Tyll, shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World have been translated into more than forty languages and are among the biggest successes in post-war German literature. He currently lives in Berlin and New York.
Ross Benjamin is the translator of numerous works of German-language literature, including Franz Kafka’s Diaries, Clemens J. Setz’s Indigo, Joseph Roth’s Job, Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, and Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll and You Should Have Left. The recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, Benjamin was also awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov. His translation of Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize.
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by Nathaniel Rich
Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich reminds us how close we were to halting the climate emergency, and our failure has resulted in our passing the tilting point. The book “reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil-fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence.”
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change – including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story and ours.
The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon – the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the significant existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.
Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil-fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The audiobook carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves.
Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here and how we must go forward.
Losing Earth is a must-read book!
by Elena Gorokhova
A Train to Moscow by Elena Gorokhova is set in post–World War II Russia; a girl, must reconcile a tragic past with her hope for the future in this powerful and poignant novel about family secrets, passion, loss, perseverance, and ambition. In a small, provincial town behind the Iron Curtain, Sasha lives in a house full of secrets, one of which is her dream of becoming an actress.
When she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, she defies her mother and grandparents and abandons her first love, Andrei.
Before she leaves, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya, an artist still missing in action years after the war has ended. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin’s brutality. Kolya’s revelations and tragic love story guide Sasha through drama school and cement her determination to live a thousand lives onstage.
After graduation, she begins acting in Leningrad, where Andrei, now a Communist Party apparatchik, becomes a censor of her work. As a past secret comes to light, Sasha’s ambitions converge with Andrei’s duties, and Sasha must decide if her dreams are genuinely worth the necessary sacrifice and if, as her grandmother likes to say, all will indeed be well.
This was a page-turner, as I held my breath to find out the next steps that Sasha would take. Her ambition combined with the secrets she learns keeps the reader focused on the next page.
I recommend this book.
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by Hannah Stowe
I recently started reading a book called “Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea” by Hannah Stowe. It’s a captivating book that immerses you in a world of water, whales, storms, and starlight, allowing you to experience what it’s like to sail for weeks and live life to a new rhythm.
Hannah Stowe, a marine biologist and sailor in her mid-twenties, grew up on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, where she fell asleep to the sound of the lighthouse beam. Drawing upon her experiences sailing tens of thousands of miles in various seas, including the North Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Celtic Sea, and the Caribbean, she explores the human connection to the wild waters. Stowe ponders why she and others are drawn to life at sea and what we can learn from the water around us.
Stowe intertwines her narrative and illustrations with stories of six keystone marine creatures: the fire crow, sperm whale, wandering albatross, humpback whale, shearwater, and barnacle. Through these stories, she invites readers to fall in love with the sea and its inhabitants and to discover the majesty, wonder, and fragility of the underwater world.
If you enjoy the works of Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard, then “Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea” is a must-read. It’s an inspiring and heartfelt tribute to the sea, a testimony to pursuing and achieving a dream, and an unforgettable introduction to a talented new nature writer.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Jennifer Croft
I began reading “The Extinction of Irena Rey” by Jennifer Croft today. The novel is about eight translators searching for a world-famous author, Irena Rey, who has gone missing in a primeval Polish forest. The translators have come from eight different countries and share a deep admiration for Irena Rey. Their mission is to translate her masterpiece, “Gray Eminence,” but their task takes an unexpected turn when Irena disappears within days of their arrival.
The translators begin to investigate where Irena may have gone while continuing to work on her book. They explore the ancient wooded refuge, with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and study Irena’s exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. However, their search reveals secrets and deceptions that they are unprepared for. As they grow increasingly paranoid in this isolated and obsessive fever dream, the translators are forced to confront their differences, and their rivalries and desires threaten not only their work but also the fate of Irena Rey herself.
This debut novel is a brilliant exploration of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is a thought-provoking narrative blends humor and adventure, taking readers on an unforgettable journey with a small yet diverse cast of characters. These characters, shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation, find themselves in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses, where the fate of their beloved author hangs in the balance.
by Jeremi Suri
Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri is the perfect book to help us understand our failures at creating a multi-racial democracy in the nineteenth century and how this has weakened and divided our nation. Jeremi Suri chronicles the events after the civil war, from Lincoln’s assassination to Garfield’s, and how they were a continuation of the war by other means.
I purchased a signed copy and watched a video presentation by Dr. Suri due to my membership at One Day University. Civil War by Other Means is a vivid and unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets.
I highly recommend Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri.
In addition, the documentary, on Apple TV+, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power is a companion piece that illustrates the continued failure to create a multi-racial democracy. Jeremi Suri makes a convincing case that the eternal struggle for democracy continues in our time.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
In 1865, the Confederacy was comprehensively defeated, its economy shattered, its leaders in exile or in jail. Yet in the years that followed, Lincoln’s vision of a genuinely united country never took root. Apart from a few brief months, when the presence of the Union army in the South proved liberating for newly freed Black Americans, the military victory was squandered. Old white supremacist efforts returned, more ferocious than before.
In Civil War by Other Means, Jeremi Suri shows how resistance to a more equal Union began immediately. From the first postwar riots to the return of Confederate exiles, to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, to the highly contested and consequential election of 1876, Suri explores the conflicts and questions Americans wrestled with as competing visions of democracy, race, and freedom came to a vicious breaking point.
What emerges is a vivid and, at times, unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. What should have been a moment of national renewal was ultimately wasted, with reverberations still felt today. The recent shocks to American democracy are rooted in this forgotten, urgent history.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
