[Lyngbakr]

I've tried my damnedest, but simply cannot get into Rushdie. Given that Midnight's Children won the "Booker of Bookers", I thought that would be a great place to start. When I finished the book I turned it over in my hands wondering if I missed something or if I'm simply not smart enough to get Rushdie. I read a couple more of his books and the result was much the same, unfortunately.

[tirumaraiselvan]

Big Rushdie fan here. I used to think it could be because of a lack of cultural context especially for books like Midnights Children and Moors Last Sigh but now I also think that it could also be a matter of taste. Rushdie himself quotes Milan Kundera who said: "...that the novel descended from two parents, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy". The latter is a style of writing where all conventional rules of literature are broken, it's just wildly creative so to speak. Rushdie's Midnights Children and James Joyce's Ulysses fall into this category.

If you want to see the other style of writing in Rushdie, I can suggest Shalimar The Clown or The Ground Beneath Her Feet. But these are nowhere near as grand as Midnights Children.

In either category, a fair amount of interest in history helps to enjoy his books.

[atulatul]

After a few pages into Midnight's Children it made me a bit uncomfortable (not bored)- not for the story or characters like in other novels- where you identify with characters or feel for them, their plights, etc. It made me uncomfortable in reading the way the story was told. I wondered why was this book so loved, it does not seem like any good book I've read so far, in fact it somewhat destroys the ideas I have about how a good novel should be. And then a thought occurred that maybe it is because of those things- as tirumaraiselvan (sibling comment) put it 'all conventional rules of literature are broken, it's just wildly creative'- that this book was loved. With that understanding I 'decided' I was going to be ok with the discomfort I felt till I finished the book. And then creativity became visible and the discomfort sort of went away.

[tirumaraiselvan]

Exactly! Midnights Children and Moors Last Sigh are so non-linear that one cannot expect to get the hang of it till they are atleast 50 pages through. It's usually on the second reading that the amazingness of those initial pages is felt.