Not for me. I hope that's cool with everybody. Thanks.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This won the Booker Prize in 1981. Then it won the prize for the best Booker Prizewinning book out of the first 25. So some people really like this book, and I just don't know why.

I swear, after I gave up on it for a few years, I came back and read the last 300 pages like an anthropologist, trying out a dozen theories as to how someone could enjoy it. (If you like this book, that's awesome. I don't understand, but I'm happy to let you do you.) Everything I look for in a book is subverted here. Like if you wanted to hear music and instead somebody was banging pots and pans instead. Like that.

Pretty language? There's an awful lot of poop and blood and pain and injury and incestuous thought and snot and hairy arms--too much to ever say the language was beautiful.

Story? There were a thousand stories, too many to count, and none of them leading anywhere. It was like a friend showing you a stack of a thousand polaroids, each of something ugly or inconsequential or too close to make out, and he tells you the complete significance of each, and you wonder and wonder why he's telling you these things. Nobody has goals, or if they do, they're so minor (his sister wants white bread) they can't carry a story. None that I cared about.

Love? Hope? Not really. He kinda beat the shit out of those things.

Creativity? Maybe. Like an ADHD fever dream. A jungle of ideas. Near the end, he introduces a character and immediately dismisses him:

Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black umbrella walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks, stops, squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of taking offense at my voyeurism, calls: "Watch this!" and proceeds to extrude the longest turd I have ever seen. "Fifteen inches!" he calls, "How long can you make yours?" Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that I'd have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times...

That character, I feel, informs most of the other characters. They are odd and weird and they enter the narrative, participate in the story for a period of time, do strange things, act in strange ways, and then disappear again. Their quirks are described and explained like they're clues to meaning, but in the end they're all red herrings. Or so it seemed to me.

As I read it, I was reminded of Tristram Shandy, a novel that does a lot of the same things. We start the story well before the main character is born; there is a lot of conversation about noses and names; there are body parts that get trimmed in accidents; there is a lot of action that leads nowhere. The joke in Tristram Shandy is the belaboring of the inconsequential. Here, it's different; here, it feels like many things of consequence are occurring, revealed to us in pieces, sort of Forrest Gump-like, but instead of paying attention to it we are concerning ourselves with oddities and billboards and neighbors and minutiae and nonsense.

The promise of the magical children born in the minute India became free was, for me, not met. Nothing happened with them, except to be tortured at the end. I gave up trying to understand them as allegory (which perhaps the author intended; perhaps not) because the action and details were so random that I couldn't connect anything together. Maybe with charts I could do it...

I wanted to like it because other people liked it and because I enjoy the author when he's interviewed. But I didn't like it. I really didn't. (I feel like I can say this about a novel by Salman Rushdie, like saying you don't like the Mona Lisa. Nobody feels bad for the Mona Lisa.) I also didn't solve the mystery of why other people do. I'll just have to go on without knowing.

That's cool. Let it be for them and not for me.

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