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Before you read the book:
Thank goodness for blogs! About a year ago I read Roth’s Everyman, and though I appreciated it, it didn’t make me want to read anything else by Roth. But there on the book shelves at the bookstore were lined up in a row many acclaimed books, but nothing convinced me I should spend my time with them. After reading how much John Self at The Asylum enjoyed Roth’s Zuckerman books in his review, though, I felt it was time.
What a pleasure! Roth’s writing alone is so precise and so simple that experiencing just the diction, let alone the pain and wry humor, of one sentence after another left me giddy. This is a master prose writer. Just look at how much he packs into a fairly straightforward introductory sentence:
It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago – I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman – when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man.
The whole book is like that. Each word does its job better than any other word in its place could. In the kind of simple prose that only the best writers accomplish, Roth lays out the story of Zuckerman’s overnight stay at the “hideaway” of the writer whom he worships, E. I. Lonoff, who not only has inspired Zuckerman’s writing, but has become a kind of surrogate father merely through the page:
In fact, my own first reading through Lonoff’s canon – as an orthodox college atheist and highbrow-in-training – had done more to make me realize how much I was still my family’s Jewish offspring than anything I had carried forward to the University of Chicago from childhood Hebrew lessons, or mother’s kitchen, or the discussions I used to hear among my parents and our relatives about hte perils of intermarriage, the problem of Santa Claus, and the injustice of medical-school quotas (quotas that, as I understood early on, accounted for my father’s career in chiropody and his ardent lifelong support of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League).
So in a sense, Zuckerman sees in Lonoff the definition of his own heritage. But all is not well at the Lonoff home. Also staying with Lonoff and his wife is Amy Bellette, one of Lonoff’s former students (and one of the funniest parts of the book is when Zuckerman sees her for the first time and wonders if Lonoff is her father). Amy’s presence has caused a bit of tension between Mr. and Mrs. Lonoff, that perculates during dinner after Amy has left. While eating dinner, Zuckerman explains to the Lonoffs how he has just seperated from his girlfriend, leaving out some of the more unflattering details:
Describing all her sterling qualities, I had, in fact, brought myself nearly to the point of grief, as though instead of wailing with pain and telling me to leave and never come back, the unhappy dancer had died in my arms on our wedding day.
Then, almost out of the blue, during the dinner Mrs. Lonoff demands that Lonoff throw her, Mrs. Lonoff, out of the house. She wants to leave him and Amy alone. She want release, breaking a glass for emphasis. All of this in front of Zuckerman, who is shaken:
My heart, of course, was pounding away, though not entirely because the sound of glass breaking and the sight of a disappointed woman, miserably weeping, was new to me. It was about a month old.
Of course, Mrs. Lonoff does not leave. Thus the book begins!
And I honestly would have been quite pleased with the book if the rest of it had been observations written in this wonderful style. As I said, Roth’s sentences are just fun to read! But that is far from all this book has to offer. This is not a puerile Bildungsroman, but the creation of an artist in the real sense, someone who consciously accepts a calling while recognizing what it costs - think Stephen Dedalus (because Roth wants you to). During the night’s stay, events conspire to bring Zuckerman face-to-face with his artistic calling. He’s already burned some bridges with his family, most heartbreakingly with his father who thinks he’s exploited and slandered his Jewish heritage and his family for artsake. Through the remainder of the novel, in a great bit of metafiction, Roth explores what sacrifices could/should/must be made in order to succeed in creating fiction that is true. The Ghost Writer is too rare a combination of perfect style and genuine substance.
After you read the book:
I was pleasantly, so very pleasantly, uncomfortable with Zuckerman’s exploitation of Amy Bellette (not to mention Anne Frank) to create his justification for why he must let his father go. Especially poignant considering it not only justified his sacrificing his family relations but also brought him back into the Jewish fold. How could they reject him if he is the husband of Anne Frank? I have shied away from The Plot Against America, believing that most alternative histories are hokey and should as a rule never be read. But after seeing how adept Roth is at making an alternative history not just interesting in the hypothetical sense but also important to an understanding of “the way things are,” I will be reading what Roth thinks would have happened if Lindbergh had won the 1940 presidential election.
Also, I admit with a bit of shame how much I enjoyed the final scene for its comedy and not just for its poignancy. Though I felt for Hope in her “higher calling,” and I flinched during her final scene (so pathetic), her falling on the ice, failing to start the car, and then finally walking away in her clunky snowboots (“when she turned into the road she immediately passed out of sight. But then, of course, she wasn’t very big to begin with.”) was really quite comic. Roth doesn’t let us fully pity her because all the while Zuckerman and Lonoff are commenting on the car battery. But this was one of those scenes that made me wonder if Roth meant them to be like Sidney:
Little children don’t realize that underneath the big blowhard who rolls on the floor and makes them laugh there can be somebody who makes other people cry.
With insights like that, that come around again in the end to show just what it costs to be an artist, it’s hard to blame Roth for the coldness in this final scene. What a rich book! I’m so glad I still have the rest of the Zuckerman books in front of me.
Before you read the book:
I was not expecting a lot from First Love (1860) because Turgenev has always been overshadowed by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy when this period of Russian literature comes up.
But this was a great read - short and packed! I was able to read it in one commute. Despite the train noises and the people coming and going, First Love really affected me with its powerful depiction of innocent love teamed up with overwhelming passion and a desire to be a martyr according to the whims of the one you love.
This book begins with a few older gentlemen sitting around a fireplace. The host asks them to share the story of their first love. Most are typical stories, a crush that dies with time or when someone new pops into the picture. but one says he has a great story but will have to write it down first – a great shout out to the power of writing! He does this, and when the gentlement reconvene, we get the story.
At first I wondered why this literary device was used. It only lasts a few pages, and it seemed to be superflous. However, as I put myself in the place of those gentlement listening that night, I was haunted. Furthermore, when we realize that this has stuck with the narrator and has influenced his perspective not only on love but also on life and death, the setting of where and when this is told takes on more importance.
The story is packed with powerful images and scenes that will stay with me. While sometimes brutal, they seem all too real, even in our own pedestrian lives. The sixteen year-old boy, Vladimir Petrovich, has fallen in love for the first time. The twenty-one year-old girl, Zinaida, is independent and powerful and somewhat cruel to all of her suitors, yet they cannot get away from her. Incidentally, was this just the way it was back then, all boyfriends coming at once to play “friendly” games? Anyway, some of the suitors are proud and think she will choose them, but the young boy and the doctor know they are ensnared. They realize that it is almost pathetic, but they have no other desire to stay away. The scenes with the suitors are enlightening and very interesting, but the story really picks up when we come to understand that the young girl too is involved in a love affair where she is being dominated by her passions and by her own secret lover.
After you read the book:
That last chapter’s glance at life and death and love’s role in it is one that sticks with me. Profound and haunting!
What has come of it all – of all that I had hoped for? And now when the shades of evening are beginning to close in upon my life, what have I left that is fresher, dearer to me, than the memories of that brief storm that came and went so swiftly one morning in the spring?
And those prayers for Zinaida, his father, and him? I am struck, but I can’t put words around it. How does this tie into the moment when Vladimir sees his father strike Zinaida?
Before you read the book:
One day I printed out a list of all Booker Prize winners and went hunting for them at the local bookstore. I love Amazon, but it’s not the same as seeing the books and holding their weight. Sacred Hunger (1996), a fairly massive co-winner, stood out. I was in the mood for an expansive book. And the cover’s anthropological theme also appealed. It just felt important.
In what should have been a more recognized year of anniversary: 200 years since the importation of slaves was prohibited in America in 1808 (201 years since the vote to abolish the slave trade in England in 1807, though last year England did have some significant events to commemorate, even a movie which my wife liked but I have yet to see: Amazing Grace). If only much of the horror had truly ended then – probably the reason the date slipped past with little fanfare. Nevertheless, I celebrated the anniversary by reading Sacred Hunger. Unsworth’s book offers some bitter insight into why the horrors didn’t stop. It’s definitely a moral indignation novel, though not quite like others. I didn’t feel indicted by its content, but many passages left me broken hearted.
Soon after midnight the first of the land breeze began making along the river and Thurso ordered sail to be got up and all to be made ready for purchasing anchor. At two they weighed an got out to sea, the wind by this time giving a good offing. In the cover of darkness, as quietly as possible, the Liverpool Merchant began to steer a course south-eastward. but when the ship met the deep sea well, the rhythm of her movement changed and the people in the cramped and fetid darkness of the hold, understanding that they had lost all hope of returning to their homes set up a great cry of desolation and despair that carried over the water to the other ships in the road and the slaves in the holds of the ships heard it and answered with wild shouts and screams, so that for people lying awake in villages along the shore and solitary fishermen up before dawn, there was a period when the night resounded with the echoes of lamentation.
Sacred Hunger is a difficult read–passages like this one are piercing, painful to really digest and admit. But this is an important book. Unsworth’s insight into the complex motives behind greed, dominion, mercy, and kindness make this much more than a simple story about a slave ship in the mid-1700s. In fact, in this book we see these emotions and attributes come up in almost all relationships: between man and woman, between captain and sailor, between English and Native-American, between one tribe and another, between parents and children. Its a complex world, but Unsworth makes it flow smoothly. Also, even though there are many relationships which all are used to further themes, this book is far from contrived. The characters and their relationships are real and familiar – that’s what’s scary.
In Sacred Hunger there is mutiny aboard a slave ship. After grounding the ship, the surviving whites and blacks begin their own community in south Florida. Meanwhile, the ship owner’s son single-mindedly seeks revenge against the crew, particularly against his cousin, the ship’s doctor. But it is not that simple. Even while the new community is attempting to grow into a free society, where there are no distinctions between blacks and whites, Unsworth shows just how difficult such a task is.
In the dialogue, Unsworth has the ability to show the feelings of the slave traders while instilling pure irony:
‘Tis a terrible trade, them not in it will never know the hardships, to see your profits dribblin’ in the sea an’ nothin’ you can do.
Such passages are amusing at the same time they evoke reprehension. But in a frightening way they made me think about how many awful things we do today without quite understanding how ridiculous our position is. Then there are the illuminating, yet discouraging passages:
Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others.
This book recognizes the difficulties inherent in trying to live in an equal society. In fact, some of its interesting passages deal with building a community through rhetorical strategy. While I didn’t feel like it was a fully-fleshed theme, story-telling and legend-making definitely are important, especially since Sacred Hunger itself, in a nice but potentially forgetful literary device, is set up to be based on the ramblings of an old mulatto many years after the story has ended:
But mainly he talked – of a Liverpool ship, of a white father who had been a doctor aboard her and had never died, a childhood of wonders in a place of eternal sunshine, jungle hummocks, great flocks of white birds rising from flooded savannahs, a settlement where white and black lived together in perfect accord.
The only real problem I had with this book was the tone. I guess when an author takes on a theme like this, I expect prose on the scale of Melville. Unsworth either couldn’t or chose not to tell this story that way. There are few moments of poetry. Mostly the tone is fairly familiar. Unsworth still had many insights, but the methods he chose to portray them were sometimes too simple. In my opinion.
Notwithstanding that drawback, I thought this was a contender for the Best of the Booker shortlist. I wish it had more attention.
After you read the book:
Thankfully this book did not dip down to where many moral indignation novels (MINs) sink. John Carrey wrote about the potential pitfall in his 2003 essay on chairing the Man Booker Prize that has a paragraph on MINs:
Floggings, brandings, rapes, massacres, and women giving birth far from medical aid are among the customary set pieces. The native victims are portrayed as eco-friendly and endowed with delicate modes of consciousness beyond the scope of depraved Europeans. The villains, on the other hand, are always white and usually English. From the viewpoint of origin, class and education they closely resemble the readers whom the author can most realistically expect to buy his or her wares.
While Sacred Hunger is a full-blown moral indignation novel, the ending made me indignant about the whole human race, not just the whites! I was kind of tossing and turning with this novel and felt it was nothing too original until the ship was lost and the survivors set up their colony. Then the way the factions started building again, even among the former slaves who suddenly felt they needed slaves . . . I was really drawn into the issues, which suddenly became a lot more powerful to me.
Before you read the book:
I always have a good time while I’m reading a Margaret Atwood novel, but up to now only The Handmaid’s Tale sticks with me as an incredible novel, one which should be read. But I had high hopes for Alias Grace as it is based on a true story and Atwood takes us back to the 1850s this time rather than into the ugly future. In fact, I had been holding off on reading Alias Grace (1996), almost as a treat.
Once again, while reading Atwood, I was pulled into the story. Her prose is smooth, with few stumbling blocks (more on the stumbling blocks later). The story contains an exciting premise, has conversational characters, and is incredibly clever. But in the end, I was disappointed. Doesn’t that always happen, though, when you expect a lot?
Alias Grace starts out with Grace already in prison. A decade and a half earlier she was involved in the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. James McDermott, a disgruntled employee, was hanged for the crime. While Grace was sentenced to the same fate as his accomplice, her lawyer cleverly pleaded her sentence down due to insanity. Cleverly? Well, maybe it was the simple truth. After all, Grace has exhibited some peculiar behavior, and she says she doesn’t remember anything. Or is she really innocent, just a victim of circumstances (which just happend to be controlled by single-minded men).
Onto the scene comes Simon Jordan, a doctor who wants to help Grace remember. His motives are not pure – he wants to get his place in the science books. Exonerating Grace is incidental, though he does begin to feel a strange attraction to Grace . . . but that and many more “improper” attractions are part of the subcurrent. Those men are all after one thing! Thankfully some of them have the capacity to exercise self-control in the presence of such a temptress. (Yes, sometimes it got a little heavy-handed – but it is important, and I’m glad Atwood is skilled enough to present this issue in her books without sounding bitter and pedantic).
Atwood builds suspense by inserting passages from newspaper articles and from the actual confessions, and these seem to contradict not only what Grace says but also the pleasant, innocent (though no longer naïve) ethos she builds while telling her story. Knowing that Atwood usually has a clever way of reconciling seeming contradictions, I was pulled along by more than the smooth prose.
Then again, sometimes the prose actually got in the way. Most of the time, Atwood is very insightful and sly, and she injects this into her prose frequently in pleasing ways:
Once you start feeling sorry for yourself they’ve got you where they want you. Then they send for the Chaplain.
Oh come to my arms, poor wandering soul. There is more joy in Heaven over the one lost lamb. Ease your troubled mind. Kneel at my feet. Wring your hands in anguish. Describe how conscience tortures you day and night, and how the eyes of your victims follow you around the room, burning like red-hot coals. Shed tears of remorese. Confess, confess. Let me forgive and pity. Let me get up a Petition for you. Tell me all
And then what did he do? Oh shocking. And then what?
The left hand or the right?
How far up, exactly?
Show me where.
But too often she draws attention to her wit by ending a paragraph with a short sentence that often begins with something like “And”. It’s not always bad to draw such attention to wit, but after so many snappy punches, I start to flinch.
So would I have liked Alias Grace if I hadn’t built it up in my mind? Who can say? I think I would have felt much the same as I do now. There were some parts where I got a bit tired of Grace’s story. Fifteen years in prison, and she still remembers everything but the murders. Sure, that makes her story all the more suspect, and there are interesting issues there, but at times it was anticlimactic.
After you read the book:
So was Grace really innocent? She did do it, after all, in Atwood’s account. And even though part of her was compelled by her fear of McDermot and her seeming powerlessness to stop it, that other side of her did it because of men and the women who play the game. I thought Atwood’s way of reconciling the contradictory accounts was really interesting, minus the parts where Grace herself alludes to the presence of Mary Whitney’s ghost possessing her. I guess that could have been her way of consciously recognizing her two personalities.
Before you read the book:
While perusing books, I came across The Sea, the Sea ( 1978 ) by Iris Murdoch. I heard of her, but I knew next to nothing about her except that she’d won the Booker Prize for this book.
I’m sad to say that this was not the edition I bought – if it were in my bookstore I wouldn’t have thought twice about buying it. It’s a lovely design by Jo Walker. My edition was a bit more mundane – it’s a good thing I knew it had won the Booker, or this never would have appealed to me.
This was my first time with Iris Murdoch, and I see why she was shortlisted for the Booker so many times. I was drawn to her straight-forward yet ellaborate prose, her fine rhythm, all bolstered by her expertise in psychology – psychology as a dark art, that is. (Which I hear she used against her husband frequently).
Here we have the memoirs of Charles Arrowby. At the beginning of the novel he intends to tell his life story, focusing on his tumultuous love affair with Clement Makin, a powerful woman who seems to have controled him. She’s dead now, and in his fashion Arrowby decides his story is important enough to record for everyone, that since it was profound for him it must be profound for everyone. So, after retiring from a famous life in the theater, Arrowby moves to a small home by the sea and begins to write his memoirs. The first part of the novel is very much a day to day recitation of events–though thanks to Murdoch’s insight and wit, even the food is interesting and important to developing Arrowby, who catalogs what he’s eating and how he prepared it as if we all should take note.
I left in store with that first love so much of my innocence and gentleness which I later destroyed and denied, and which is yet now perhaps at last available again. Can a woman’s ghost, after so many years, open the doors of the heart?
He’s not that innocent, and his love is not pure, though he consistently excuses himself, sometimes by admitting half of the truth.
What indeed was I planning to do? I was in a state which I well knew was close to a sort of madness, and yet I was not mad. Some kinds of obsessions, of which being in love is one, paralyse the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality. I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, cetain agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent. But I was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even to desire to do so.
Arrowby is not the kind of man I would like to know in my old age. Here he is telling a story that puts him and his life in such a high position that readers not looking will not read the guilt, the pain, and the emptiness of his life, though it’s there. Much is hidden. Probably he hides it so well by seeming to admit to being somewhat vulnerable at times, but such confessions are more to throw us off his trail. We also do not get a clear glimpse at the other characters because Charles himself does not fully comprehend those around him. While this may sound like a typical case of an unreliable narrator, Murdoch expertly uses this to explore the themes of egoism and jealousy, and even the unreliability of the whole narrative.
Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hids the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.
Even though I found the story implausible and the characters unlikeable, I found myself reading this book compulsively, often when I should have been doing something else. It says a lot for Murdoch that I’d gladly spend my time in this man’s head. I now don’t remember some of the more ambitious themes in the novel, though at the time I dipped my toes ino them. I was much more interested in Arrowby’s voice. I was also pulled in by Murdoch’s mastery of atmosphere: the bead curtain, the red room, the sea itself are all presences throughout the book. She uses them to great effect to create moods and to reflect the flow of the novel. There are some beautiful passages that I’d love to put into this blog, but since it’s already too long, I will resist the temptation.
This book is not a straight forward story with a clear plot. One of the great things about this book is that whenever the narrator lets his reader know his intentions, he never complies, he never gets around to doing anything he says he is going to do. It’s like a long list of failed plans. The symbolism and the psychology might not always be clear, but the book is worth exploring.
At the book store I was in the mood to try some Kertész, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Born in 1929, he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and he was old enough to know what was going on. I saw his latest book Liquidation (Felszámolás 2003; tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson 2004), written after he won the Prize.
With a title that connotes closing shops, selling assets, and cutting losses accompanied with abstract illustrations of people, none looking at each other, I was very interested. Add to that the fact that it is only a novella, something I could get through in one day, and it was a must read. After reading it, I have to ask, why don’t we, at least we in America, care much about those who win the Nobel Prize in Literature unless they’re from here? This book was well worth the short time I put into reading it — in fact, it will be paying off for years to come.
In a way, I hear, Liquidationis kind of a part of a tetralogy that also includes Fatelessness (1975), Fiasco (1988), and Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) (Fiasco is not available in English yet). I haven’t read the others (but will), and this work stood on its own as a tightly packed rumination on Auschwitz.
The book is set in Hungary in the 1990s. A decade or two earlier, “the hero of this story, Kingbitter” met B. or Bee, depending on the sentence. B.’s mother was four months pregnant when she was put into Auschwitz. Almost unaccountably, (“The blokova, possibly stirred by the thought of helping bring a child into the world in the death camp”) B. is, against the odds, born and survives, though he was immediately taken from his parents. Despite the miracle of B.’s birth, years later he commits suicide. That is where the book begins. But for what reasons did B. commit suicide? That is where the book goes.
B. prepares a deliberate, intricate suicide, even having the foresight to write a play (called Liquidation) that word-for-word foretells events and dialogues after his death. Kingbitter finds the play and then becomes obsessed with finding the novel, a master work that he knows B. would not have left the world without writing; after all, “[B.] felt that he had been born illegally, had remained alive for no reason, and nothing could justify his existence unless he were to ‘decipher the code name Auschwitz.’”
Thankfully, this very clever device is not the impetus of the story, as it would be for other writers. Some reviewers have said this is a flaw, that Kertész started with something interesting and then never really returns to it except as an afterthought. I disagree. I think it’s great that this device is almost incidental to the larger and (almost?) incomprehensible themes.
After reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus, I have been baffled by the lives of the “survivors of the survivors” (this children of those who lived through the death camps). How can they (how can any of us) get past all of this? Is it ethical? Isn’t it alarming that we are moving on? And in doing so, are we not ignoring reality? Aren’t we creating a fiction for ourselves by somehow living happily in the wake of such an event?
Some of the characters are bound to and trying to escape the heritage that is Auschwitz, especially B.’s ex-wife Judit. She was not a prisoner in Auschwitz, but it is part of her Jewish heritage, and her attempt to understand it was one reason, perhaps the reason, she married B. Later in life she visited the camp. It was not as it should have been: “I found myself unable to capture the right mood, despite having prepared for it for days. I was haunted by the sense of walking around an outdoor folk museum.” Her purse gets stolen. “The receptionist enlightened her that Auschwitz was teeming with pickpockets, who took advantage of the visitor’s deep emotional state and attendant inattentiveness.”
Judit’s current husband Adam, who is not a Jew, has spent a lot of time since he met Judit reading up on Auschwitz. Here is a telling scene from the play B. wrote where Judit interrogates Adam’s motives for reading:
Judit: And you understand now, perhaps?
Adam: I’ve read at least fifteen books about manic depression and paranoia.
(long silence.)
Adam: No one can revoke Auschwitz, Judit. No one, and by virtue of no authority. Auschwitz is irrevocable.
Judit (in growing distress): I was there. I saw. Auschwitz does not exist.
Adam (steps to Judit and grabs her roughly by the shoulders): I have two children, two half-Jewish children. They know nothing as yet. they are asleep. Who is going to tell them about Auschwitz? Which of us is going to tell them they are Jewish?
Really, it’s all incomprehensible to me. Recognizing that, I think, is part of the purpose of this book. There’s an interesting part where Kingbitter is trying to get B. to write his story. b. is indignant at the request and asks how would you discern a story like that?
“Look here, I submit to you a piece concerning how, with the cooperation of a bunch of thoroughly decent people, a child is born in Auschwitz. The Kapos lay down their clubs and whips, and, moved to the core, they lift the wailing infant on high. Tears rise to the eyes of the SS guard.”
Kingbitter admits it would sound kitsch but contends it could be written in different ways.
“It can’t. Kitsch is kitsch.”
“But it’s what happened,” I protested.
That’s precisely the problem, he explained. It happened yet it’s still not true.
B.’s suicide is somewhat mysterious. He seemed to have a lot going for him. He seemed happy. And after all, he survived Auschwitz, against the odds. Kingbitter is also baffled because years earlier B.’s insights prevented Kingbitter from furthering any plan he had at taking his own life, albeit a rather bleak though amusing insight.
“I could say, I said, that I felt it was superfluous for me to weary both myself and society with that.”
After you read the book:
But my thought is that B. committed suicide to complete his own story and desentimentalize it. The story wasn’t built on triumph. We hear stories like his and are amazed into thinking something great and moral took place. B. seems to repudiate this position with his own death.
There’s a lot more to this book. The relationships are complex. The title alone bears a lot of weight that I didn’t touch on in this post. It’s definitely one I will revisit again.
[This book was shortlisted for the Best of the Booker 2008. The other five are The Siege of Krishnapur, The Conservationist, Oscar and Lucinda, The Ghost Road, and Disgrace.]
Before you read the book:
After buying Midnight’s Children (1981) several years ago I often read the first three pages, excited for the day I would finally take the plunge and commit myself. I was really intimidated.
Then I actually started it four years ago for a class. The first 100 pages captivated me, right up until the point where Saleem is finally born. But then I didn’t make it more than two chapters into Part II. At the time, I was engaged to my wife to be, so my mind couldn’t concentrate on too much (I was not a productive reader during that time). Ever since I put the book down, though, I’ve felt guilty for not finishing it – not guilty because I got an A in the class but didn’t do the reading; guilty because I knew I had given up a good opportunity to study a modern classic with the benefit of a classroom discussion. Midnight’s Children has sat on my bookshelf all that time, still with its bookmark right before “Snakes and Ladders.”
When the Best of the Booker shortlist was announced I was excited to again have an excuse to read it. Why did I need an excuse? Well, some books are intimidating, especially the ones you’ve started and had reason to put back down. I’d seen what was on the other side of Saleem’s birth–Part II and on is a dense thicket of the political history (in abstractions) of a country I knew/know little about.
All the same, of the shortlist (which also includes The Ghost Road, The Siege at Krishnapur, Oscar and Lucinda, Disgrace, and The Conservationist) it was the last one I read. I think I did this because I knew I had to run out of excuses not to read the book. If there was another one to pick up which would also get me closer to the goal of reading the entire shortlist, I might have been tempted to put it down again. Fortunately, times have changes. Though I love my wife very much, I’m finding it easier to concentrate on other things now. I had no trouble staying focused on this amazing – if at times complicated and erudite and dense – book.
I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nurisng Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more . . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence.
Saleem Sinai is one of 1001 midnight’s children, the children born during the first hour after India’s independence, though as first born of the 1001, he has special privileges and is neither younger than nor older than his country.
Rushdie’s writing is also ingenious. He can make otherwise mundane events seem mythical and magical. The narrative devices are also clever and effective: Saleem is telling the story while he cracks all over, leading to the “not with a bang but a wimper” ending; many parts are told as if in real time, with Saleem going on tangents while waiting for a character to arrive at a door; one of the main characters is Padma, a proxy for the reader at Saleem’s side, who asks questions about the story and sometimes causes Saleem to contradict himself. And what really impressed me: the intricacies and rhythm of the story-telling make it seem like this story has been passed down through generations. As it should, being the story of a nation.
It’s not all magic, however, but I attribute many of my problems with the book to my own failings. I am somewhat ignorant of the history of India, though many of my favorite books are Indian “po-co.” More knowledge of the minor but historical characters or the minor but historical events would have made the longer, more tedious center chapters a bit more bearable, if not more interesting. That is really the only flaw I found in the book–some of the paragraphs feel like whole chapters because of all of the intricate traipsings through history, and it feels like Rushdie is just afraid to leave anything out. Read several parts of chapter constructed from these kinds of paragraphs and I started drifting. Another problem with those dense parts is that they lose some of the magic of Rushdie’s prose. It feels like he’s just got to get the events out there, so while in many parts of the book I could enjoy the images, these parts were more like reading a clever textbook.
After you read the book:
Interestingly, there’s a twist right at the end of Part I: he’s switched at birth with Shiva, another child born at the same time. Saleem grows up in a well-to-do Muslim home while Shiva lives in the slums raised as a Hindu. There is more than that: Saleem’s true father is not even the man who thinks he’s Shiva’s father; most likely William Methwold, an Englishman, is Saleem’s true father, splitting Saleem into even more heritages, none of which he becomes aware of until later in the book, none of which he accepts, choosing instead to adopt the history and heritage as he learned it growing up. I found these ties to India’s past ingenious and Rushdie’s feelings about India’s present very interesting.
Furthermore, despite the rough, slow patches, the ending does not disappoint. It is reminiscent of the tone and style of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” which is fitting since Midnight’s Children, with all of its history condensed into one person, has been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses:
Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all goods time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privelege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.
Thanks to Indira Ghandi (who was still alive when the book was published! talk about nerve making the Prime Minister “the Widow” villain of the nation’s story – and, yes, did have a hair style that made half of her hair look white and half black) the children have all been stripped of their powers. One thousand one possibilities pulverized to dust. It’s not a hopeful ending. Not explicitly at least, though perhaps Padma (me, the reader), who has proposed marriage, really can turn this around. Then again, Padma, like myself, is naive and basically powerless in the face of so much history.
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