Shame by Taslima Nasrin

As Suranjan came up the road, a group of boys standing nearby shouted, "There goes a Hindu, catch him and kill him." The boys belonged to this locality. Many faces had become familiar to him during his seven-year stay here. There was a boy called Alam, who would turn up every now and then and ask for a donation. they had a club here. Suranjan used to sing at their cultural functions. He thought of teaching some of the boys the songs of D. L. Roy and Hemanga Biswas. Off and on, they would father at his house asking for some favor or another. Sudhamay had given them medical assistance free of charge for their being residents of the locality. And it was the same chaps who were now mockingly threatening to kill him. Suranjan walked rapidly in the opposite direction, not driven by fear, but by shame. He felt shame not for himself but for his supposed attackers. Shame gained a new dimension not for the tortured people, but for those rogues inflicting the torture.

In 1992, a group of Hindu nationalists destroyed the Babri Mosque in India, igniting violence throughout India and the Indian subcontinent. In neighboring Bangladesh, the Muslim majority took their revenge for the destruction of the mosque from the Hindu minority, destroying temples, killing and torturing, and raping women. Taslima Nasrin's Shame tells the story of this reprisal from the perspective of Suranjan, a young socialist who has fought for years against the tide of what he calls "communalism," the factionalism of separate Hindu and Muslim communities at the expense of a larger Bengal or Bangladeshi identity. Suranjan reacts to the violence with apathy and despair, and only later, as the violence increases and his own sister Maya is kidnapped by Muslim gangs--does he feel himself getting swept up in the bitterness of the very "communalism" he has abhorred.

As I understand it, Shame caused a great deal of controversy within Bangladesh, and resulted in a Rushdie-style fatwa against Nasrin that drove her first to India, and then to the United States, where she lives in exile. Forgive me for saying so, but it's amazing to think that such profound consequences could emerge from a book that is so astonishingly bad. Shame is a baffling book, a novel whose small capacity for imagination is overwhelmed by a obsessiveness with recording the violence of 1992 in the most extensive detail. Everywhere Suranjan goes, he meets people who have an encyclopedic knowledge of what's happening throughout Bangladesh, from the names of the temples that have been attacked and destroyed...

...to the specific percentages of fluctuating Hindu and Muslim populations in the country:

I can't emphasize enough that most of the book is like this; statistics and names take up more than half of the novel's page count. It gives the effect, you might say, of Suranjan wandering in blindness while everyone else knows exactly what the stakes of the violence are. But mostly it just seems comically inept, an obsession with recounting every injustice that even a historian would know to avoid, much less a novelist.

When the novel returns to the story of Suranjan, there are flashes of interest: the stroke suffered by Suranjan's father who can't leave the house for medical attention for fear of being attacked; the disappearance of Maya; and most of all Suranjan's descent into anger and bitterness over the course of a week's violence. In one shocking scene, he engages a Muslim prostitute, whom he essentially rapes, biting and beating her during the sexual act. There's a powerful statement here about how difficult it is to escape cycles of violence and factionalism--but it's totally undercut by this insane mode of hyper-scrutiny. I never abandon books, but I nearly abandoned this one. The only reason I didn't is because I've never read an author from Bangladesh before, so my "Countries Read" list is up to 92!