Rushdie, Salman. Shame. New York: Random House, 1983.
3/22/20 – 4/1/20, 7:33
Transcribed (4/11/20): I’m continuously amazed at the ornamentation of his prose, things I would never have thought of in a thousand yeaers, a kind of inventiveness that I think I have been trying to prune out of my own writing…
So fringed patterned arabesqued rich
4/1/20 i never learned the shape of this story
- (18) dizzy, peripheral, infatuated, insomniac, stargazing, fat: what manner of hero is this?
- (19) a necklace of shoes
- (30) “We renounced the greatest of pleasures, and after that nothing was the same, we began to forget the point of things.”
- (45) (birthdeathetc.)
- (46) At the frontier: clouds, fainting fit, water sprinkled on face, reawakening, whereamI.”
- (104) takallouf
- (123) “I did it to her, I think, to make her pure. Couldn’t think of another way of creating purity in what is supposed to be the Land of the Pure… and idiots are, by definition, innocent.”
- (127) “History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise, and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive…. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.”
- (137) “A father is both a warning and a lure.”
- (224) Sufiya’s mother tells her oceans and fishes; she wonders how it gets try.
- Begum Talvar Ulhaq births a linear number of children each year. The rope snaps on the first attempt.
- (243) “If it is a dream, and sometimes in the fever of his days he thinks it is, then (he also knows) the dreamer is someone else. He is inside the dream, or he would not be able ot touch dream-insects; dream-water would not burn him… someone is dreaming him. God, then? No, no not God. He struggles to remember Raza Hyder’s face.”
- (248) “The edges of Sufiya Zinobia were beginning to become uncertain, as if there were two beings occupying that air-space, competing for it, two entities of identical shape but of tragically opposed natures.”
- (278) Bilquis Hyder makes shrouds. “The living wear shrouds as well as the dead.”
- (277): 4/1/20 7PM cheering
- (292) “in that sunlight, without walls”
- “i am a peripheral man.”
- The “i” in this story, the writer, is so interesting.
- specificity of characters
- sex in this story