Scan barcode
A review by savaging
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
4.0
"Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on."
This book is six hundred pages of an almost-unbearable narrator, which all the same ferments into something . . . meaningful? Saleem the narrator says near the beginning "I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning -- yes meaning -- something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity." This is the big joke: to approach meaning backward, looking for the most trivial, insignificant, ridiculous, impossible. Sometimes he sounds like Henry James with a fixation on an object as an all-encompassing metaphor (with a silver spittoon instead of a golden bowl). Except Saleem is cracked, is a clown, and when your brain isn't trying to follow all the narrative turns you realize it's telling you that the very process of finding meaning in life is mostly insane.
Then suddenly: the shriek of torture, colonization, war. Wait, weren't we just having fun here?
It has the casual misogynist voice so beloved by authors in the 70s, spiced with more overt, violently misogynist events. Hordes of female characters, but thinking back, I'm not certain it could have passed the Bechdel test (maybe Reverend Mother talking to Pia about the petrol pump . . .)
It contains the best extended metaphor for literature, as a process of pickling. In fact, the book is probably best thought of as one of those chutneys that have every flavor, that make your eyes water, that you regret a little bit, that you return to.
This book is six hundred pages of an almost-unbearable narrator, which all the same ferments into something . . . meaningful? Saleem the narrator says near the beginning "I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning -- yes meaning -- something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity." This is the big joke: to approach meaning backward, looking for the most trivial, insignificant, ridiculous, impossible. Sometimes he sounds like Henry James with a fixation on an object as an all-encompassing metaphor (with a silver spittoon instead of a golden bowl). Except Saleem is cracked, is a clown, and when your brain isn't trying to follow all the narrative turns you realize it's telling you that the very process of finding meaning in life is mostly insane.
Then suddenly: the shriek of torture, colonization, war. Wait, weren't we just having fun here?
It has the casual misogynist voice so beloved by authors in the 70s, spiced with more overt, violently misogynist events. Hordes of female characters, but thinking back, I'm not certain it could have passed the Bechdel test (maybe Reverend Mother talking to Pia about the petrol pump . . .)
It contains the best extended metaphor for literature, as a process of pickling. In fact, the book is probably best thought of as one of those chutneys that have every flavor, that make your eyes water, that you regret a little bit, that you return to.