Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Dear reader, here is what I choose to share by way of 'summary' for this book:
Saleem Sinai, Narrator. Born in Bombay; 1947. Nasal telepath. Child of midnight. See family tree below.
India. Pakistan. Bangladesh. Kashmir.
Muslim. Hindu. Sikh. Jain. Buddhist.
Dr. Aadam Aziz || Naseem Ghani
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Alia Mumtaz [Later, Amina] Hanif Mustapha Emerald
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Unmarried Nadir Khan, then Ahmed Sinai
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Jamila Saleem
[Actually, Shiva]
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Parvati the Witch
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Aadam
If you're good and confused by that, then you're pretty much right on track! I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs of each plot particular, because there are far too many to detail, and I simply don't feel like it.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
Dear blobbists,
It has been some time since I have lost blobbed! In truth, I finished this book a while ago, and I drafted the notes for the blog a while ago as well, but it has been a busy couple of weeks, and what with the world being mostly a dumpster fire and all, I just wasn't inclined to race back.
This was my third Rushdie novel (Satanic Verses was on my list, and I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories on my good friend Danielay's recommendation) and I would say that this is my ranking of these books by personal preference:
1) Haroun and the Sea of Stories
2) Midnight's Children
3) Satanic Verses
This was the kind of novel where I fell in and out of love with the lyrical and complex prose that Rushdie used, and the ongoing (sometimes neverending) metaphors between characters and nations/nation states in and around India. I loved the concept (Saleem is one of many children born exactly at midnight on the night India becomes independent and they have abilities, more below) but ultimately, it took me forever to get through the book because the prose was so circuitous and the plot kind of spiralled into chaos, à la Joyce, which, if you've read any of my other blobs, you know is not my jam.
That being said, this book won tons of awards and was widely acclaimed, and then won awards for being the best of the best of those awards, so please feel free to make your own reading relationship with it! There are certainly many ways in which it is simply stunning and magnificent, and I don't want to downplay those aspects.
Here are the rest of my thoughts, as usual in no particular order.
The boatman, Tai
I really enjoyed this character, and the trips that Tai takes with Aadam Aziz in the beginning reminded me a great deal of the things I love about Haroun and the Sea of Stories. By the way, if you haven't read Haroun and the Sea of Stories, drop everything and go read it now. Seriously. It's an all-time favorite.
Meanwhile, the boatman, Tai, had taken his unexplained decision to give up washing. In a valley drenched in freshwater lakes, where even the very poorest people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, Tai chose to stink. I love the idea of choosing to stink. It cracks me up.
Keeping family history halal
There's so much brilliant playfulness with concepts and religion and ethnicities and sub-ethnicities, and I loved this idea of keeping dietary laws for historical references.
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. Like I said, lots of superb parts!
Who can rely on the police?
The police, in 1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims. This line felt really à propos, considering the events of the last few years (and really, since the origins of the police). With Walter Wallace and the insane things that have been happening (by which I mean the inappropriate response, to be clear, not the protests, which I support) I've been sitting with some heavy pain and sadness, and its proximity to me and my family and where they lay their heads at night makes it all the more searing.
Zeugma
On a lighter note, y'all know how I feel about zeugma. I LOVE IT. It's my favorite. Apparently Rushdie likes it, too. ;)
He wears thick dark glasses and his famous poisonous smile, and discusses art.
And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings - by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks. God, what a fantastic line.
Switched at birth
In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts. Because I didn't get into the deets in the plot summary, you don't know that Saleem is actually not Saleem. In a very 'it was and it was not so' moment, Saleem was actually switched at birth and should have had the life of this other boy, Shiva, who basically becomes his arch-nemesis. But I thought it was interesting that ultimately his family couldn't reconceptualize him as not being their son. It made sense, too, in a way.
Midnight's Children
Understand what I'm saying: during the first hour of August 15th, 1947 - between midnight and one a.m. - no less than one thousand and one children were born within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India. In itself, that is not an unusual fact (although the resonances of the number are strangely literary) - at the time, births in our part of the world exceeded deaths by approximately six hundred and eighty-seven an hour. What made the event noteworthy...was the nature of these children, every one of whom was, through some freak of biology, or perhaps owing to some preternatural power of the moment, or just conceivably by sheer coincidence (although synchronicity on such a scale would stagger even C. G. Jung), endowed with features, talents, or faculties which can only be described as miraculous. It was as though - if you will permit me one moment of fancy in what will otherwise be, I promise, the most sober account I can manage - as though history, arriving at a point of the highest significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time.
But it is Kali-Yuga; the children of the hour of darkness were born, I'm afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good. Again, I LOVE this line.
More Great Lines
- Keeping out of my voice the natural envy of the ugly man for the strikingly impressive, I record that Doctor Aziz was a tall man. lololololz.
- Is it possible to be jealous of written words?
- Does one error invalidate the entire fabric?
- There can be no retreat from the truth.
- Without passport or permit, I returned, cloaked in invisibility, to the land of my birth.
Lines In the Running for Title of this Blob:
- I have been a swallower of lives.
- He had come for stories - and with one question had silenced the storyteller.
- Follow your nose and you'll go far.
- Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.
- We all owe death a life.
- Please believe that I am falling apart.
- The baby in my stomach stopped the clocks.
- I communed with them every midnight, and only at midnight, during that hour which is reserved for miracles.
