Salman Rushdie

Saleem Sinai is born at the very stroke of midnight on the first day of India’s Independence from British rule. But he is only one of 1,000 other children born in the first hour of India’s freedom. And all of the children are gifted with supernatural powers, Saleem with a telepathic power to connect with and channel each of his brothers and sisters of freedom. Saleem’s life, his family’s history, and the lives of [Midnight’s Children] mirror the turbulent story of India.

I would show more never have ever picked up a Salman Rushdie book if not for the 100 best lists that I have been reading through over the years. Rushdie is such a polarizing figure, with a jihadist bounty on his head for offending an Ayatollah, he grinds through wives and women and is always ready to comment on anything to anyone. For example, the top search result for him just this minute is the following quote:
The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don’t try and burn the planet down. There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn’t exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this.
Whether he offends you or not, and he’s offended many, Rushdie is a master and I’m glad I didn’t miss this book.

Told in a sort of rabbit-trail stream of consciousness, the narrative begins by telling Saleem’s family history first, beginning with his grandparents. Gazing at the past through a long lens in this way, Rushdie is able to ground his message of interconnectedness – who we are is a derivation of all our ancestral history and every event, no matter how insignificant, that plays a part in any life. Languid in its pace, the story never rushes to any conclusion or climax – our narrator, the hero of the story, is not even born until well after the first 100 pages of the book. Every detail of each character’s life and motivation is pondered on and explored. And the result is a rich, succulent epic that is never tiresome.

[Midnight’s Children] has been categorized as a magical realism story – one that blends the magical with the real. Whether that is an accurate characterization depends on your view of Saleem’s narrative, as he repeatedly admits to being an unreliable narrator. Is Saleem telling the truth about the powers of his compatriots and the mystical events that often plague him? Or is he processing the tragic and difficult history of his home with the fantastical to make it more palatable. Saleem would simply say, “It happened that way because that’s how it happened.”

Don’t be frightened by Rushdie’s polarizing personality. [Midnight’s Children] is a good old-fashioned story-telling. There are political and social implications to the story, but Rushdie doesn’t force an agenda, he just tells Saleem’s story. And don’t be put-off by the cultural milieu of this story. Unless you’re from India or are a scholar on Indian history, there will be much in the book that is strange and indecipherable. But the history and culture are not important; they are simply different colors or tastes in a familiar and common story.

Bottom Line: A rich epic of India, but also just a good-old fashioned well-told story, recognizable to anyone, anywhere.

5 bones!!!!!
A Favorite for the Year. show less

A revamp of the tired old formula of the professor-as-victim novel, a Herzog for the 21st century, but with a very Rushdie twist to it. Definitely not one of his major works, but an entertaining read, cleverly pitched just a tiny bit beyond the conventions of realism. There is some lively satire of the shallowness of early 21st century values and some splendidly overdone running jokes. Rushdie is well aware of the old rule that showing a man slipping on a banana-skin or stepping on a rake show more gets funnier the more often it is repeated. In this case, we have the absurdly beautiful woman who makes men trip over their feet or walk into street furniture whenever she goes out in public: Rushdie doesn't just use this as a throwaway observation of another character, but actually shows her doing it every time she appears, even in the big, serious confrontation scene in the penultimate chapter.

There are plenty of references to Bellow's classic (which struck me because I coincidentally read Herzog a few days ago), not least in the names — a Malik is a king and a Herzog is a duke, and it can't be coincidence that one is Moses and the other "Solly". Herzog and Fury are also the only novels in which I can recall coming across the Yiddish word "landsman". Whilst both Bellow and Rushdie start out with a professor who has run away from his wife and child, Rushdie inevitably takes the story — and the resulting balance of power between the sexes — in a completely different direction from Bellow's conventional 1960s approach. show less

Chutnification: the immortalization of a cucumber, or rather, a nose, into something indelibly Indian.

Just... wow.
This story of an inner-ear and nose follows through India's independence through the Emergency during Indra Ghandi, taking on mythological proportions. It is, first and foremost, a delightful, sensual, funny, detailed portrayal of a family saga that pretty much mirrors the trials and tribulations of India itself. Between the partition, Pakistan, the wars, the religions, the show more profundity of an India that cannot know itself.

To know one person in India, you must eat the world. You must eat it every time for every person.

But as if this wasn't enough to make a brilliant novel, and it certainly is deserving all the awards it ever got, it ALSO happens to be science fiction. Or is it? The thing is, all these Midnight Children born on the hour of India's rebirth (even if political), are all gifted with extraordinary powers.

Our main character, Saleem, when really young, had an ever-snotty nose, and while it was blocked, he could read minds. He was able to contact all the Midnight Children and connect them all. When he could breathe right, he had a preternaturally supreme sense of smell. Others could enter mirrors, change their sex at will, become werewolves. 512 children. All of them modern Hindu Gods. :)

But this book is full of tragedies as well as humor, full of profundity and silliness, anger and optimism, memory and forgetfulness. Just like India, the family is all things at all times and can never be pigeonholed.

I could easily write a few books on this book. It's just that rich. And delightful. I know enough of this part of the world that I didn't flounder that much, but more than that, I was struck by the smells this book evoked. :) I rather fell into the book and couldn't breathe until I finished.

Ah, it deserves all the praise. :) show less

"Now there was no demand for satires – the general fear of Mahound had destroyed the market for insults and wit." (pg. 362)

"Blasphemy, punishable by death." (pg. 102)

Given the context of The Satanic Verses – namely the savage and ignorant attempts to censor it, and the violent attempts to punish its creator, which have made headlines again this month in the latest semi-successful assault on Salman Rushdie's life – I dearly wanted, as a matter of principle, to love this book. show more Unfortunately, despite all my goodwill and my keen desire to wear its red butterfly cover as a badge of honour, I really struggled with this novel.

I'll try not to speak at length about the elephant in the room, about what's become known as "the Rushdie affair". Everyone should be of one mind in condemning the thoughtless, malicious mentality of those who have ruined this man's life over some obscure, minor criticism of a religion – and also in resisting the temptation to join the depressingly large number of their enablers and appeasers of every stripe. Even if The Satanic Verses was the disgusting cornucopia of apostasy that the killers want us to believe – it isn't, and I'd bet both bollocks that neither Ayatollah Khomeini or knifeman Hadi Matar have ever actually read it – it wouldn't mandate anything like the response it has received since its publication in 1988. A better man, one who lives right under God, would meet any offence taken here with only a shrug.

My own rather more moderate dislike of the novel came from something more mundane: I just didn't get it. I've always struggled with the genre of magical realism, which to me can be defined as banality made incomprehensible (and tangential), and the vast majority of The Satanic Verses confirmed me in this view. It's hard to hammer down a structure for the book, but it follows two modern-day characters, Gibreel and Saladin, who survive the explosion of a hijacked plane and tumble to earth. The story then dips in and out of a number of loosely connected dream sequences and metamorphoses, all delivered with the sort of verbosity and indulgence that, were it not for the Ayatollah, I'd be hellbent on avoiding. Somewhere in all this, I am informed, there is an acute exploration of the immigrant experience in Britain. Don't ask me where, though; my eyes too often became unfocused in the muddle.

And, of course, elsewhere in all this there is the dangerous stuff, the forbidden fruit that we really tramp through Eden for, the content the Ayatollah and his ilk wanted to nix, but which had the unintended effect of amplifying it. I had heard, not least in the current news commentary around Rushdie's attack, that the anti-Islamic content of the novel was such a small percentage that the fatwa was unfathomable, so it was something of a surprise when I read the book – having decided, as we all should, to determine the facts for myself – to find that Rushdie devotes significant ink from his pen to the matter.

The Satanic verses, for those who don't know the story, is when the Prophet Muhammad 'misheard' a divine revelation and decreed that the error had been caused by Satan. Muhammad supposedly received all his divine commands from God and his recitation of these was recorded in the Koran as immutable law. In the early days of Islam, when it was just one of many provincial religions and not the conquering monotheistic force it would soon become, Muhammad decreed, in one of his revelations, that three of the older (female) gods were to be accommodated alongside Allah. The cynic, of course, concludes that this was a nakedly political decision; the believer follows the tenuous logic which the Prophet himself later put forward: that Satan had put these words in his ear. It is one of the most sensitive aspects of Islamic theology, and for good reason. Not only does it hint at some cynical horse-trading with the local competition as the religion was established, but Muhammad's own explanation of it is out of sync with the theologically-essential assumption of the Prophet's perfection and infallibility.

Rushdie, in a decision which has had extreme ramifications for him ever since, is merciless on this point. At his most diplomatic, he describes the former businessman Muhammad as the "most pragmatic of prophets" (pg. 381). (Rushdie also makes the decision to use the name 'Mahound' rather than 'Muhammad' throughout the book, even though – or, more likely, because of – it is often seen as a slur.) Less diplomatically, he retells the whole story of Muhammad and the three female demi-gods as one where the prophet is calculating and self-serving. He is, as Rushdie tells it, a man making it up as he goes along, and claiming it was 'revealed' to him: "Salman the Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a businessman… Salman began to notice how useful and well timed the angel's revelations tended to be" (pg. 364). When Muhammad miscalculates – as in the case of accepting the three female demigods, which causes discontent among his followers – he takes it back and claims Satan misled him.

It's spicy stuff, and (to a non-believer, at least) a welcome change from all the middling magical realism that is so overpowering, like a bad scent, in the rest of the story. Rushdie, remarkably, doesn't even stop there. The above 'satanic verses' affair is relatively tame in the novel, relying on the way in which Rushdie tells the story, on insinuation and on the disquiet of the characters, to communicate his doubt about the Prophet. Where Rushdie really throws petrol on the fire he has lit is when he brings sex into it.

You see, the follow-up punch from Rushdie comes in a long sequence when Islam has now established itself in the region. It has all its restrictions in place ("rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation" (pg. 363)) and yet, in the picture Rushdie paints for us, the followers of this fledgling Islam are secretly covetous of their leader's multiple wives (or, as Rushdie brazenly phrases it, "God's own permission to fuck as many women as he liked" (pg. 386)). Consequently, when a whorehouse has each of its prostitutes imitate the wives of the Prophet, the place starts to do a roaring trade. I mean, a whore named after the Prophet's favourite wife – "if they heard you say that they'd boil your balls in butter" (pg. 380). As absurd and abominable as the fatwa is and what it represents, you do also have to wonder what Rushdie thought was going to happen. Because if he knew, and wrote it anyway, he's the bravest writer there's ever been. Swift, Nabokov, Voltaire, Bulgakov… none would hold a candle to picking this particular fight.

Certainly, Rushdie's initial response to the fatwa in 1989 was one of bravery: he said he wished he'd been more critical, not less. And though I found the book's criticisms tending towards the crude rather than the insightful, I wish he'd been more critical too, but for a rather different reason. You see, for me, these were the only parts of the novel which had any spice and which could retain my attention. When they ended and we returned to the wider frame story of Gibreel and Saladin in the present day, my struggles returned. Was there a connection, I tried to make myself think, between Mahound's regret about accepting the three demi-gods and the purported theme about immigration into Britain? Is it about trying to assimilate but recognising it as a mistake, too much of a compromise, once you are established? Is this why Rushdie made the fateful decision to colour his frame story with the episode of the Satanic verses? I don't know, and any time I tried to wrestle with the themes and purpose of the story it slipped away from me. In all the words spent on Salman Rushdie, there is a lot of sympathy for the writer's plight in the face of determined theocratic violence. But there is another facet which reveals itself to me, having struggled to find great value in The Satanic Verses. It's insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but alongside all the other trials, it must feel like a curse to be remembered only for your lesser work.

"Feelings of outrage… Baal was surrounded by angry men demanding to know the reasons for this oblique, this most byzantine of insults." (pg. 391) show less