Two minutes, $25-$30, one hardcover book and a thrilled heart overflowing with impatience and happiness. What’s the book about? Damned if I know; I don’t even know what the title is if I’m to be completely honest.
Some authors are just that good, and you’ll read anything they write.
I winnowed my own list of auto-buy authors to include living writers only lest it become merely another list of favorites (though I may have cheated a little with numbers 3 and 4).
Comedic and macabre, Salman Rushdie’s Shame lays bare the mouldering shreds of human pride.
Shame · Salman Rushdie · 1983
Random House, 2008 · 307 pages, paperback
♠
Dizzy, peripheral, inverted, infatuated, insomniac, stargazing, fat: what manner of hero is this?
The result of an orgy, Omar Khayyam is the illegitimate son to the three sisters Shakil who obscure his birth, profanely, under rumors of a divine conception. Leaving for school at age 12, Omar Khayyam receives his one constraint: never to allow his origins to be held against him – that is, never to lower his pride, never to feel shame.
But what of that “wrong miracle,” that strange, pitiful girl, Sufiya Zinobia? Opposites attract, a marriage is made: Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Shakil. Shame and Shamelessness.
