Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. After that I'll be working through a big stack of books that I accumulated as birthday presents recently.
What did you think? I'm a big Rushdie fan but that wasn't one of my favourites.
Loved it. It was my first of his books though, so I imagine that a lot of what I liked so much about it - the prose, the imaginativeness of the magic realism and how that integrated with the politics of the region - are general Rushdie, so maybe it would have been more disappointing had I come to it after reading his other works. What didn't you like about it?
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't dislike it. But I didn't find the characters as emotionally engaging as in some of his other books. And the political theme was also a little more abstract to me, not as focused as I might have liked. Both Shame and Satanic Verses are in many ways similar but I enjoyed them more. And if you want to feel like a child and cry Haroun and the Sea of Stories is hard to beat!
With more hindsight, I see where you're coming from. I really engaged with the characters in Saleem's family, but I found the Midnight's Children - particularly Shiva (and to a lesser extent Parvati-the-Witch, though I guess she doesn't play as significant a role in the story) to be a bit underdeveloped. I felt for all the build up about Shiva as Saleem's double/antithesis, his character wasn't as vivid as some of the more peripheral characters so I found that a bit of a let down. It also meant that the political symbolism didn't quite come together as much as I expected it to. I still thought it was great, though.
I did like a lot of Rushdie's characterisation though, so if it's better in
Shame and the
Satanic Verses I'm really eager to read them!
Haroun and the Sea of Stories looks really sweet. I haven't read a kid's book in so long, so I feel like it'd be a nice change.
