Saturday, April 30, 2011

Mercurochrome

This chapter jumps around so much but is clearly leading up to the Amritsar massacre. Again, I am not knowledgeable about Indian history, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Peaceful protesters gathering to contest the current regime? Sounds a lot like the middle east today. Once again, Aziz’s nose plays a prominent role, this time saving him from being killed with the others.

It also introduces us to Aziz and Naseem as a young married couple and the centrality of the bedsheet. I enjoyed getting to know Naseem the way Aziz did, one body part at a time. Her father and the lady wrestlers are hilarious. I loved Ghani’s support of their early get togethers in the name of the “doctor-patient relationship.” And the “move, I mean, like a woman” quote made me laugh.

And once again, I like how he jumps back and forth temporally. Page 28-29 takes us from the writer’s grandparents wedding, to his unfortunate encounter as a child with their consummation bedsheet, to the contemporary Dung discussion with Padma, to the April 1919 political events.

But what about nonlinearity on pages 24-27? This confused me, Grant, and I had to reread. Tais’ decision not to wash, Aziz’s parents’ deaths, back to the perforated sheet, the bus with Ilse Lubin’s picture, Ghani pushing Aziz and Naseem closer, talking with Ilse about Oskar’s death, Aziz’s job offer, admitting to Ilse he’s in love with Naseem, back to Aziz and Naseem, proposing to his father-in-law, to Ilse drowning. He’s making some connection between Naseem, Tai, and Ilse. But I’m not sure at this point what that connection might be.

I am a still appreciative of his excellent character descriptions: Padma. She’s a pig, no? Rushdie never says she is one, but he uses the P alliteratively in the first sentence and describes her as a plump jolly “bitch in the manger.” So illustrative. I love the “Dung” interlude on page 29: “the nether end of cattle” made me laugh. I wonder what role she will have as the book progresses.

I wonder why he used Mercurochrome as the chapter's title. It’s a topical antiseptic, and for sure, he makes a point of it being indistinguishable in color from blood. But what does it have to do with the larger narrative?

Just another comment about my writing insecurities, Grant. I am a scientific writer. And not even really – I’m a surgery junkie who likes to pretend like he can write scientifically. I write this blog and sense my pseudo-scientific dribble coming out on the page. If you’ll forgive me for this, I’ll continue blogging because I’m having fun.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Now a word from our sponsor...

Sorry to break the flow of our blog before it even gets started, but have you guys ever heard of wine flashes, sales on bottles/cases of good wine at like 40% markdown?  Here' a story in the NY Times about it. 

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

The Perforated Sheet

What I liked most about this opening chapter was the pace. What a great way to start a novel: present Dr. Aadam Aziz with a small mystery, the landowner's daughter's illness, and a vessel (a literal vessel!) to dictate the pace of him reaching that mystery. As Tai approaches, events move slowly and largely in remembrance as we are given historical descriptions of Aziz the ageless, talkative Tai, and their history together, intertwined with the lake.  But once Aadam is on Tai's boat, Rushdie's vacillations between anecdotes mirror the unsteadiness of Tai's rowing: the anger misdirected at the doctor's bag, the landowner delivering a not so subtle threat, Aziz trying to make small talk. I read and felt like I ws about to tip over!


And then it slows down again once the ferry reaches land. And we think we are on firm ground to approach the mystery - but wait! Even though Rushdie has spent the chapter leading us to the mystery's solution, he holds it out of our sight, and we are left to diagnose through a hole in a sheet. Brilliant! It makes me wonder if the title suggests how we are to read this book. I initially read it thought of a piece of paper with many holes. A book with incomplete images and us left to fill in the missing pieces.


But by the end of the chapter I realized there will be just one hole, and that the hole is not in the story, but in our ability to view it. I suspect we are going to read the rest of this book by viewing the overall story one element at a time, and that Rushdie is going to leave it up to us to sum up the individual parts into a whole narrative. I expect that just as Dr. Aziz is granted a first view of the poor girl's stomach, we will begin with the gut of the story. By the end of this book, we should have an idea what Rushdie beleives is India's stomach-ache.


Grant, if this is about India's polemic past, which I also know little about, then I predict the history of the characters are going to be central to telling of this story. I read this chapter and thought of Rushdie as a historian, although he speaks nothing of the nation's past. I can already tell he is a character writer. And Grant, you know I am always a sucker for colorful characters (and alliteration, too, which he uses sparingly, but wisely): Aadam with his curvaceous nose, Tai the boatman, Aadam's lizardly, spiteful mother with Tai's voice, female bodyguards with bodybuilding muscles, the blind art-loving landowner.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Starting with Midnight's Children

Some novels begin as laser beams--one narrative thread that hits you right between the eyes and carries you forward, compelling you to turn page after page.  Other novels begin like shotgun blast, scattering you in a thousand different directions at once, creating a spiderweb of thematic, symbolic, and plot threads like cracks in a shot car window.

Midnight's Children is a shotgun.

Rushdie begins by throwing all sorts of flashes at you, forward and back, while introducing multiple characters and themes.  Most importantly, it drags us into a historical context that will actually be the most important character in the novel, the lead-up to and aftermath of India's independence in 1947.  Unfortunately, I don't know much about that history, so I find this opening a bit confusing, but my guess is that part of the novel's purpose is to introduce Western readers (namely Americans) to that history and England's involvement in it.  Of course, there are minor players, like Gandhi and the Islamic minority in India, and, perhaps most crucially, the dispute over Kashmir.  The latter conflict will, no doubt, serve as a macrocosm for the novel's dramatic microcosm.

My last comment will be about Rushdie and what I already know about him.  As you can tell from my comment on Satanic Verses, which I read for my survey of British Literature, I have problems with Rushdie's generic style (not his use of language, which I find lush and at times poetic), which in that novel is described as "magical realism."  To my surprise, this novel is much less magical realism and more straight-forward epic family romance or bildungsroman.  (It could also be called a Künstlerroman, because it's about the artist himself, but I'll dispense with the literary terms for now).  Lots of novels start with previous generations in order to set the stage for the protagonist's development and importance.  Needless to say, the fact that the narrator/protagonist is literally "cracking up" is bothering me a bit, because of the magic shit implied behind it.  I'll be interested to see where Rushdie goes with it.

But for now, I'm enjoying the character development of the grandfather and have already looked up several of the figures and events in Indian history that Rushdie refers to.  Clearly, this guy is a formidable voice in world literature, and this novel in some sense started the entire postcolonial anglophone fiction craze that dominates my profession (and the Nobel prize) today.