Shame, Salman Rushdie’s third novel, was published in 1983 to very good reception: short-listed for the Booker Prize, it won the Prize for best foreign book in France. Nevertheless it has remained somewhat in the shadows, positioned as it is between the phenomenal success of Midnight’s Children (1981), and the scandal of the “Rushdie affair” that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988).
Generically speaking, Shame is a brilliant political satire, depicting a country that is “not Pakistan, or not quite”, a “fictional country” existing “at a slight angle to reality” (Rushdie 1984, 29). In fact, the novel’s setting is clearly that of modern Pakistan, with its …
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Citation: Pesso-Miquel, Catherine. "Shame". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 March 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2096, accessed 25 November 2024.]
