I am heading down the homestretch of Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. I’m curious if any of you have read it and what you thought.
Twenty years ago, I read The Satanic Verses and was bowled over by Rushdie’s fluent way with dialects. It reminded me of Twain and Huck Finn.
I then went through a period where I failed to make time to read novels. Midnight’s Children won a Booker Prize and is on pretty much every list of the most important novels of the 20th Century. A magical realist novel that gets a public official sufficiently irritated that they sue the author for libel has to be doing something right. It was on my list. I told myself, “Someday I’m going to start reading novels again, and when I do, I’m going to read Midnight’s Children.”
Well, someday has arrived. I’m reading Midnight’s Children and I could use some help. I suspect that my ignorance of India and its post-colonial history is one problem. There’s an awful lot of metaphorical allusion that just isn’t going to land for a corn-fed midwesterner.
There’s also narrative complications that seem to get in the way. The frame of the novel is an unreliable narrator Saleem Sinai, recounting tales to Padma, his housekeeper. I don’t really get it. I have no opinion on whether narrators should or should not be reliable, but if you choose to make narrator unreliable, it’s nice for that choice to have a payoff and I’m not seeing it here. Wikipedia sees a parallel to 1001 Arabian Nights. I do not.
I’m trying to squint at the novel to see if that brings things into focus, but so far it’s not very satisfying. If you accept a lot the novel’s surreal qualities as metaphors about public events in India and Pakistan (and many of them clearly are), then maybe the narrator’s unreliability gives the story a sort of gossipy unhinged quality which reflects how public events and decisions are perceived and discussed in a nation with more than a billion people and 31 official languages. Now that I think about it, our own American political discussions have a pretty gossipy unhinged quality (See Facebook, 2016) and we have zero official languages. Is that what it’s about?
Honestly though. I’m at sea here. For my money, Midnight’s Children is not nearly the novel that The Satanic Verses was. I suppose it’s possible that a book which provokes a death sentence is just a better book than one that merely provokes a law suit.
What do you think?
miltotto.com 
I listen to books. When I ordered the audio version of this book years ago, I couldn’t get past the first ten minutes. Thank you for providing an outlet to confess that. Keep writing, Milt.
_____
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I liked it. Not loved it, though it’s one of my wife’s favorites. I know a few people that really don’t like it, but do like a few of his other novels (I’ve heard good things about “The Moor’s Last Sigh”.) It does help to know some of India’s 20th century history, but I don’t think you need to know a whole lot beyond the basics of the partitioning of India / Pakistan. Though it’s possible there are some layers of allegory that passed me by.
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Thanks, Ted. I finally waded to the end tonight. Judging from the blurbs on the cover, folks who are much better read than me had/have high praise for it. Have you read Shalimar the Clown? I might give it a go sometime, but probably not anytime soon. I’d enjoy hearing what you and your wife liked about MC. Sometimes, when someone else explains why they like something it helps me to see it too. Which of Rushdie’s novels do you like?
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I’m not the one to ask, I read Midnight’s Children b/c I knew how much Margaret liked it. Other than that I’d only read Haroun & The Sea Of Stories, which is a sort children-oriented. But as I mentioned, I’ve heard lots of praise for The Moor’s Last Sigh.
I think it was a powerful imagining of a tumultuous period in Indian/Pakistani history as a family tragedy. Just reading a history would not get to the personal dimensions of these earthshaking events the way this does, and the use of a sort of magical realism is also used to get to something deeper about the cultural history and make it something felt. I felt it actually had a kind of a light touch, considering where it was going. It does stay with me, and gives context to what I knew before. I did live in Pakistan for a year as a kid, and have followed political events there all my life, so it adds something to my reading as well.
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That makes sense. You were probably catching a lot more of the allusions that I did.
To me, the whole thing seemed kind of silly and farcical. It just didn’t land, but I appreciate your thoughts.
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Well, it didn’t affect my reading too much, I don’t know that I caught any special historical or literary allusions. Margaret knew very little about the history at all but she just loved the style and his imaginative flights of fancy. I think it may just be more a matter of taste, it’s not a style I’m that into generally.
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I read Shalimar the Clown about 10 years ago and enjoyed it. Made me want to visit the Kashmir village that Rushdi created for the novel. The primary image that stuck with me was the village of Pachigam that specialized in catering banquets. Their standard was the feast of 36 dishes. Elaborate dinners consisted of the feast of 54 dishes. Such a dinner has been part of my food fantasies ever since.
To my great surprise, three days ago we received an invitation to a wedding in Bangalore, India. Bangalore is not Kashmir, but the information that the feasting will begin at 7:30 a.m, continue throughout the day, interspersed with various rituals such as the ceremonial “tying of a thread around the brides neck by the groom”, and culminating with the grand feast beginning at 6:30 in the evening,, leads me to believe we might enjoy 36 dishes, maybe even 54.
I think I will reread Shalimar the Clown just to prepare me to feast. It is worth a read for the food descriptions.
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Take good notes on the all day banquet. I have a 50th birthday coming up in a couple of years when you get back from Japan. Beth may want to surprise me.
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