VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Two former cowherds sprinkle magic beans in ancient India, and what pops up?  Not a beanstalk but an entire city called Bisnaga.  Pampa Kampana, a woman who ages so slowly that she lives almost 250 years, provides the magic, and her narrative poem, discovered over four centuries later, supplies the story.  This fantasy novel comes across as a sort of parable or fable, but I’m not sure what the moral of the story is.  Great empires are fragile?  Bisnaga starts out as a melting pot for all types of people of various religions, and its military force is all women.  However, rulers come and go here, and most of them are not so enlightened.  The problem with this book is that it fails to fulfill my expectations of good fiction—suspense, complicated characters, and perhaps a cataclysmic event.  None of these components are present, and I was never invested in this tale.  The fact that it is based on a real city, minus the supernatural stuff, makes this book marginally more appealing.