#9: Shame by Salman Rushdie

Published five years before his infamous Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's third novel. It is written in his characteristic style of magical realism and explores the themes of shame, shamelessness, and violence in a fictitious country that is "not quite Pakistan." In this episode, Bird and Greg discuss the work, covering topics including the morality of body modification, religion in totalitarian regimes, the value of formal literary critique, the concepts of shame and shamelessness, pleasure and purity in the western world, and more.

Also referenced is Ayelet Ben-Yishai's essay The Dialectic of Shame: Representation in the MetaNarrative of Salman Rushdie's Shame (Modern Fiction Studies, 2002).

Before discussing the novel, Bird and Greg take a deep dive into season 4 episode 19 of Seinfeld, titled The Implant. If you are not interested in this segment, the book discussion begins at 0:34:05.

This conversation was recorded in February 2021.

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