I'm a monster, not a pretty little girl

I happen to adore both Rushdie and Dostoevsky. These affairs were slow burns initially; I actually didn't care too much for the first by each that I read (The Satanic Verses and The Brothers Karamazov, respectively), but after a few reads I fell hard. Which do I like better, you ask? I follow my general way of dealing with life: I love the one I'm with (I'm very fickle).

Let's start with Demons/Devils, since that's the one that I read first. Prior to reading this I had read The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Love Them, which ended up serving me rather well in reading this one. I think I was able to move a bit more quickly despite it being a bit confusing, since I was already familiar with its arc. It's mostly confusing because people's motivation in the novel just do not make too much sense to me. It's an extremely political novel, and it is in some ways more a mediation on politics and power than on the human condition per se. It also involves secret societies, so that's fun.

Shame is stylistically quite different from the previous work, but it is also a concept novel. Rushdie uses magical realisim, of course, to explore his topic, which you can probably guess from the title of the novel. Like most of Rushdie's works, it is a pretty unflinching, stark look at people and the world. He doesn't just explore the concept of shame, but more on the violence and destruction that stem from shame.

I likely would not choose to write about these two novels together, but given that I am, the main point of comparison would be exploring the ways they use narrative and characters to explore concepts. Specific characters are not really people so much as manifestations of ideas in both novels. That said, they are rather different works.

I'll conclude by saying that I truly, truly hope that you do not get the title reference. I'm not proud of it, but it is such a perfect quote for Shame (and sort of me?) that I decided to just go for it.