Midnight's Children

I was so excited to read Midnight's Children ... my first Salman Rushdie book, an intriguing plot mixing history and magical/mystical elements, set in a time/place I find fascinating. Yeah, not so much.

First, a bit about the book itself. The main character, Saleem, is born at the stroke of midnight at the same time that India declare it's independence from Britain. This lucky accident of birth endows Saleem with an unusual talent, as it does for the other 500+ children born on this special day. The real story here is the way that the history and development of India parallels that of Saleem (and the other Midnight's Children).

Alas ... You know what happens when you put a bunch of necklaces (or even strings) in a small place for a while, right? When you go to pull one out, all of them come along, tangled into a ball that seems impossible to separate. As you work at disentangling the one strand you want, you end up having to work on other strands as well ... you can't pull out the one you want without separating other strands to get there.

That's how I feel about this book. At the beginning of each chapter, I'd see several strands. By the middle of the chapter, the strands would be lost in a tangle of details and additional information. At the end of the chapter I (hopefully) pulled out the same strands that I began with, progressing further into the story.

The grammar drove me crazy as well. I know it's a style thing, and maybe you'd like it, but the lack of commas drove me nuts. Whenever there was a list of things/descriptions/whatever in a sentence, there would always be three things and they would not be separated by commas. When I'm reading I use commas (and other punctuation) to understand the story quickly and easily; here I had to reread sentences throughout the book because on my first reading the (lack of) punctuation altered my interpretation of what the author was actually trying to say.

Another thing that drove me nuts? Saleem begins the story of his life 31 years before he is born! He explains this by saying "to understand me you'll have to swallow a world," meaning that to truly understand one person's life you need to understand every person/place/thing that influenced that one person's development. That's all well and good, but it took literally half of the book to arrive at his birth. Of course, that balances nicely with the fact that the second half of the book contains Saleem's life up to age 31 (31 years before birth, 31 one years after birth). Since balance and parallels are big themes in the book, this is obviously a conscious choice by the author, but regardless of the reason, it drove me nuts.

And what's with all the name changing? Just about all the characters changed their names at some point in the story. It was hard enough keeping track of the large number of characters, but then they changed their names and created even more confusion for me. The characters who I really liked as children or young adults all changed their names and became (to me) unlikeable adults. There were NO characters in this book that I liked in the end. [Oh, sorry, there was one who I continued to like whenever she appeared ... but the author killed her off.]

This book requires concentration and effort to work through. In and of itself, that's not a bad thing. But as I told hubby about halfway through, "this book makes me feel stupid!" I feel like I should be more literary to understand it. I mean, it's gotten rave reviews and awards in the book world ... but I just don't get it. What exactly is so amazing about this book?!

I decided to read Midnight's Children for the Irresistible Review Challenge because of this review. I can't tell you how disappointed I am, or how leery to read another Rushdie book (which is sad, because I have his newest book, The Enchantress of Florence, on the shelf just waiting to be read).

I know that some of you out there love this one ... please tell me why! What am I missing here?

And if you've reviewed this one too, I'm happy to post the link here. I'd be interested to see if you agree or disagree with my opinions ...

Things Mean A Lot totally disagrees with me and has some excellent reasons for doing so