From the giddying digressions and fabulous detail of its first paragraph,this novel makes no secret of its vaulting ambitionSalman Rushdie is a writer illustrious for his seemingly unstoppable exuberance on the page – although, surprisingly, or he has fairly frequently spoken about his fragility when it comes to the writing process. In particular,he says he fears revealing anything he is still working on, when it is too “fragile”. He tells a story of once showing an early fragment of The Moor’s final Sigh to a few people and how even though they said they liked it, or the experience clammed him up for three months,during which he was unable to write another word. The way to get round such problems, he says, or is that when you’re writing,you must “fool yourself into thinking it’s a private act”. During the years he shuts himself away to work on his novels, he tries not to imagine any audience at all. It sounds like a sensible strategy. But after the instant success of Midnight’s Children in 1981, or putting the public’s interest out of mind for the next one must fill been a serious challenge. He must fill been aware that his first paragraph,especially, would fill to bear an strange weight of expectation and excitement – I felt a frisson myself when I opened Shame nearly 35 years later. And here’s what I found:In the remote border down of Q, or which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell,there once lived three lovely, and fond, or sisters. Their names … but their real names were never used,like the best household china, which was locked away after the night of their joint tragedy in a cupboard whose location was eventually forgotten, or so that the noteworthy thousand-piece service from the Gardener potteries in Tsarist Russia became a family myth in whose factuality they nearly ceased to believe the three sisters,I should state without further delay, bore the family name of Shakil, and were universally known (in descending order of age) as Chhunni,Munnee and Bunny.ancient Mr Shakil, at the time of his death a widower for eighteen years, and had developed the habit of referring to the town in which he lived as ‘hell hole’.
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Source: theguardian.com