(Just finished this book and wanted to write a review for the Storygraph but it turned out less like a review and more like me trying to figure out how to feel about it, so here you go)
I started reading this book 4 months ago, without knowing anything about it. This was also my first encounter with Rushdie’s fiction, so I didn’t know what to expect. I started having much more fun once I stopped expecting things at all.
This book doesn’t subvert expectations so much as it frustrates them. But it does it in an enjoyable way, especially once you let go of expectation and allow yourself to go along for the ride without trying to look ahead.
It’s a slow read. It’s a long book, very leisurely paced, with rich prose and dense in meaning, but it’s also structured in a way that encourages you to slow down. The chapters are fairly self-contained, each one the narrative of a specific event in Saleem’s life (and India’s history), so you can take your time with each one and have a break in between, let yourself absorb what you read. I realize this is probably annoying if you’re in a hurry to “advance the plot” and reach the end but, like I said, expectations are nothing but frustration here.
This is a story that is enamored with potential, and with never letting it come to fruition. Saleem’s narration is not really about his life story (and his country’s history), it’s about all the stories (and histories) that could have been but never were. Which is interesting because the most impactful thing about these alternate narratives is their absence. You can see it in all the reviews here that are frustrated about the Midnight’s Children role in the story. It’s not what they expected. It’s not what the text promised. The promises, the expectations, what could have been is what nags at you, what you are interested in, but they are nowhere in the actual book.
I know that so far this review sounds like “everything that sucks about this book is what makes it good, actually”, but I enjoyed this! Once I stopped expecting it to be something else.
For me, this was a very aesthetically pleasing book. The prose is beautiful at times, surprising at others. There are many layers of meaning to explore, there are fun metaphors, playful language, interesting details. It was, intellectually, really fun.
On the other hand, it didn’t do much for me emotionally. It seems like Saleem himself is trying to keep an emotional distance from his audience (both Padma, the woman he’s telling the story to, and us, the readers). Every time it looks like he may be truly vulnerable, or when the story may dig into an emotional truth, the narration turns away at the last second. He’s interrupted by Padma, he is reminded of some other event, he goes into long, belabored metaphors, he is distracted by some other character or detail he must describe instead.
At times, it feels like Saleem is trying to intellectualize any hint of emotion. For example, he will point out the thematic connections between his life and the history of India. Many times, to an absurd degree. Overexplaining this particular theme of the narrative. He will bring up motifs often, while saying they are motifs (of the narrative, of his life, of history). He will point at the symbols and say they are symbols, explain their meaning. At one point it almost feels patronizing, like the narration does not trust you to be able to put two and two together. Why is this book doing literary analysis of itself? But then, I noticed that this tends to happen whenever something could have been emotionally impactful. But it isn’t… because the narration won’t let it be. Every emotion is explained away before it can be felt.
As a character, Saleem is obsessed with meaning. With discovering the meaning of his life, with finding the true meaning behind historical events. As a narrator, he seems to firmly believe meaning can only be achieved as an intellectual exercise, and he leaves no room for meaning to be found as emotional catharsis. Meaning, for him, is Purpose. Things can only be meaningful if they are the cause of important events. If they connect with a larger whole: history, politics, literature. The idea that something can be meaningful just because it gave you joy or it made you cry is not even entertained by the narrative.
He is destined for greatness, so he waits for greatness his whole life. And then, when it’s obvious he could not live up to the potential he had at birth, he gives himself a second chance by telling the story of his life. He retroactively assigns meaning to everything that happened to him: he connects being bullied in childhood to the Prime Minister’s death, for example, and he does it through increasingly convoluted chains of casualty (both literal and metaphorical).
All the agency Saleem sees himself as lacking as a character (he repeatedly says he has “no choice”), he reclaims it as a narrator. Everything Saleem experiences, everything he feels, everything that he does or is done to him in life is meaningless until he can explain, to himself and his audience, how it connects to a larger purpose.
He is constantly living in the past, but not because he wants to “go back to simpler times” or anything like that. He is living in the past because he is trapped by past expectations. And the only way to meet them after the fact is to rationalize and explain and intellectualize how he is more than himself. He is a vessel for his entire country, he is a conduit for everyone else’s broken dreams of the future.
In the end, this is his undoing. He attempts to contain all of India in himself, and the attempt leaves him fractured and adrift.
