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I Couldn’t Finish Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children. I Just Couldn’t. It’s That Bad

June 28, 2009

I Couldn’t Finish Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children. I Just Couldn’t. It’s That Bad Adam lovejoy writes: several months ago we posted a review of Salman Rusdie’s book, Midnight Children, on our site. It was not a complimentary review. And yesterday we learnt that our editor, Alexander, got so wound up about the book that he left it in the lpark on a bench with the words on its cover saying something to the effect that it was so bad that he was throwing it away. that is why we decided to post the review of Midnight Children once again becasue it was a really funny piece.

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I tried, I really tried to read Salman Rushdie’s book, Midnight Children, to the end, but I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t.

I put it aside several times, for a day or two, and then started reading it again. I even tried reading it in the toilet where it always works because you don’t really have anything else to do while nature cleanses you system. But it failed the toilet test. I just couldn’t do it. Read it I mean.

I even started feeling suicidal. What was the point of living, I thought, if I had to continue reading this book. Because it’s not a short book, by the way. It has three volumes in it and more than 600 pages. 647 pages to be exact, if you have the latest edition like I had.

This was the first fiction book in many, many years that I haven’t been able to finish reading. Even by skipping some of the pages to get to the end. I couldn’t even do that. I simply crashed on page 122 and that was it. The end. For me, that is.

Now, you may wonder: why did I put myself through such torment? The reason was that the book Midnight’s Children has been voted Booker of Bookers novel, meaning that it was considered to be the best winner of all the Booker awards in the last 27 years. The best of the best, as they say. A modern day classic. And I simply had to find out what was special about this book and why some people were praising it as an outstanding novel.

Let me give you some examples of the praise that were included on the back cover of the latest edition of Midnight’s Children, published by Vintage Books. ‘India has produced a great novelist… a master of perpetual storytelling,’ wrote V.S.Pritchet in the New Yorker. ‘One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation,’ wrote the New York Review of Books. ‘Huge, vital, engrossing… in all senses a fantastic book,’ wrote the Sunday Times. ‘A magnificent book and Salman Rushdie is a major novelist,’ wrote the Observer. ‘The literary map of India has to be redrawn… Midnight’s Children sounds like a continent finding its voice,’ wrote the New York Times.

I have a question to all the people who had written those things: have you actually read the book itself or were you high on something? Because the book is so badly written, it is so unconvincing and primitive that you sometimes want to pinch yourself and check whether you are not hallucinating and whether the volume you are holding really exists.

I find it very strange that the Booker Prize committee, or whatever they are called, has decided to select Midnight’s Children as the best winner for more than a quarter of a century. I actually find it even more absurd that the novel has won the Booker Prize in the first place. It doesn’t deserve any literary awards. It should not have been published at all, to be honest.

And now let me explain why I find Midnight Children to be so bad. It is written by a man who considers himself to be a great writer. You can see from the narrative that he actually believes that he is a living classic, a colossus of literature, a giant of story-telling.

But this is not even the worst thing about it. The worst thing is that this man, Salman Rushdie, thinks of himself as a philosopher. He would not just say (and here I’m just giving my own example for the sake of illustrating my point), ‘I walked into the room.’ Oh no, he would say something like, ‘I felt an urge in my finely shaped lower body to progress in the direction of an opening in the wall in front of me.’

He is like that, you see. He is too grand and sophisticated to describe things as they are. He feels the need to sound like a great philosopher who expresses himself in ways that sound mysterious and original. Pretentious would be a better description, of course.

In a way Rushdie tries to write like Gabriel García Márkez, who was always famous for complicating simple things and coming up with strange and slightly confusing sentences. But Márkez has talent and wit, whereas Rushdie is just a pompous and unintelligent man. He actually reminds me of people, who, once they’ve learnt to read and write, get it into their heads that they should become writers. And why not, they figure. What’s so difficult in writing a book?

What is indeed?

But there is also a nasty side to Midnight’s Children. In the name of originality Rushdie is actually describing intimate moments taking place between his own parents and grandparents. Not in vivid detail, but giving us enough information to get the overall picture. And here I really object very strongly. Because you do not – I stress – do not do those things. Even though you pretend that these are all fictional characters and are only loosely based on your ancestors.

This is disgusting. It smacks of incest.

I think that people who sit on all those award panels and give awards to bad books should be named and shamed. And I also think that celebrities, like supermodels or film and TV actors and actresses, should not be invited to be on these panels. Celebs aren’t generally intelligent enough to decide which books are good and which are not. Reading is not what they do best, you see.

And also, I strongly suggest to everyone to ignore advice from people like Richard and Judy, the daytime TV presenters, who are promoting trash-lit through their so-called ‘book club’. You might as well listen to some celebrity chef telling you what books to buy. Or to a sports commentator. You woldn’t get sound advice is what I am trying to say here.

Read the classics! The real classics, that is. Classics got it right all the time. And so should you.

– End –

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One Response to “I Couldn’t Finish Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children. I Just Couldn’t. It’s That Bad”

  1. jvh morris on October 4th, 2008 8:45 pm

    Salman Rushdie Seems To Be Unpopular With Some People

    We have recieved a number of comments about our article on Salman Rushdie. We present one of them.

    Thank God, someone with a bit of clout to call this man Rushdie what he is. A pretentious, hollow, snotty, arrogant coward who has cost the UK so much. Our efforts in protecting him, an unhealable loss of national reputation in defending this snidy, pinched, oversexed, celebrity have probably been as costly as throwing our reserves at our crippled, corrupt, unregulated financial sector.

    Aren’t we all sick of the loss of lives, police hours, and face in pretending that this cretinous oik has ever been worth protecting, when all he has ever wanted was to preen and radiate his nasty ‘philosophers’ ugly face in our cheap glossy magazines?

    And to cheapen ourselves even further,we give this waste of a life – a KNIGHTHOOD. My God!
    JVH Morris

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