Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

You’d be hard-pressed to make a case against Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie as a modern classic. It has all the makings of it: sprawling scope, historical significance, distinct characters, and a unique voice. Whether something is a classic and whether I felt personally enriched by it, though, are two different matters. Midnight’s Children had some great highlights, but at 533 pages, it felt a little bloated—justifiably so, but bloated nonetheless.

Before summarizing the story, I first want to address two literary precedents that serve as foundational to Rushdie’s project—one brilliant, one irritating, and both brilliantly relevant to the concept of Midnight’s Children. To begin with the irritating precedent, I refer to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, in which its memoirist makes a lot of nose/penis innuendos and doesn’t recount his own birth until hundreds of pages in. Rushdie keeps the nose/penis innuendos and other crude jokes and also spends at least a hundred pages recounting the lives of grandparents and parents of the book’s main character. From a personal standpoint, that kind of technique completely breaks my immersion. I fail to care about characters that feel like they’ll be discarded and when the narrative basically starts over partway through the book, I feel more aggravated than anything. The other literary precedent that Rushdie draws from is The Arabian Nights (or The 1001 Nights). For instance, there are initially 1001 Children of Midnight and Rushdie explicitly mentions The 1001 Nights as a parallel. However, the fragmentary and elliptical storytelling structure of Midnight’s Children also draws from its mediaeval precursor. Both of these storytelling conventions are crucial to Rushdie’s novel—but more on that later.

Here’s the essential premise of the book: Saleem Sinai is writing down his life story, which is being read by his wife Padma, who offers interjections and objections—much like your humble reviewer. The story begins before his birth, recounting romances and false-start fathers. Then, Saleem is born at midnight on the first day of Indian independence. He is swapped at birth into a wealthy family. As he grows, he discovers that he has special powers—and so do all of the 1001 children born on the day of Indian independence. While only half survive to any length worth documenting, the remaining children can do things like enter mirrors, change sex at will, smell feelings, time travel, and so on. For Saleem, his main function is telepathy and he serves as a hub for the midnight children to gather and have a telepathic conference. Anecdotes from his life involve his unknowingly-adoptive father’s dissolving business, his mother’s affair, his sister’s magical singing voice, and other vignettes. At one point, he loses his memory and ends up fighting for Pakistan against India. When he recovers his memory, he runs away with some communist magicians and then discovers a whole plot revolving around his life in which history and his own life have developed in tandem, with the implication being that India’s history revolves around him.

The book is a challenge. There are a plethora of characters who are often unmemorable and Rushdie primes you to preemptively forget about them where you only find that 50 pages later you’re still focused on a bit-part. The timeline of the book also jumps around, especially early on, which leads to a disorienting experience right as you’re trying to get immersed. As much as I disliked the experience, it was necessary for the story and is finely wrought.

The novel is told episodically, much like The 1001 Nights, and when Rushdie hits the key moments in the story, they land beautifully. In one narrative, a character is a doctor and is asked to care for a woman, but her father will not allow him to look at her. So, there is a perforated sheet and the doctor has to look through holes, stick his finger through holes, ask questions through the holes, and so on. Eventually this process takes on an erotic charge and becomes a courtship that is entirely within the spirit of The 1001 Nights, especially because the courtship takes years. That early story is exactly right for Rushdie’s narrative project: we see glimpses of stories, little divine moments—and the fabric that keeps them together is basically forgettable. 

Part of this is Saleem’s excessive attention to detail, which is also explained by a few factors. When you have telepathic power to read everyone’s thoughts, of course you’re able to include a breadth of detail. Moreover, as a baby, Saleem never blinks and for someone who observes all, the sprawling nature of the text is a perfect fit. There’s also a great moment where Saleem recounts a film where a couple is not able to kiss (it would be an affront to religious norms), so instead the couple kisses a glass, rotates it to the other person, who kisses it in the same place. They have not kissed, but have skirted the norms to achieve the same effect. There’s a kind of distance and displacement that also serves the text in an interesting way. 

It’s hard to express exactly why certain moments resonate, but there’s a mythic quality to the writing that is thoroughly evocative. At the risk of writing a boring review, I still feel like writing a summary of some key moments that I found enjoyable:

1. The story of characters falling in love through a perforated sheet.

2. The way that when the Saleem’s family moves to a British colonist Methold’s house after Independence, there’s a sneaky lease where they are not allowed to change anything inside the house. The characters slowly undergo a Europeanization. It’s as though the old colonizer left the framework for them to grow into on purpose.

3. The storyline of Saleem telepathically infiltrating his mom to spy on her while she has an affair. It’s such a clever device for narrating characters’ experiences when your narrator describes events from the first person. 

4. The revelation of Saleem not being the biological child of his parents. There’s a scene where he loses part of his finger and at the hospital it is revealed that he does not have the same blood type as his parents. It’s such a masterful use of details. I also love when authors double-down on dramatic events: there is something crushing only to be followed up with something more dramatic. 

5. The motif that emerges throughout the book of Saleem inventing his fathers. It’s an interesting reversal of standard discussions about birth—and if we consider the anxiety of influence discussed by Harold Bloom, there’s a cool way in which Saleem becomes more free by creating his own lineage.

6. Speaking of inversion, there’s a section where Saleem is lost in the Sundarbans jungle. It’s described as a mythical kind of place infused with dreams and ghosts. I normally dislike war narratives and find them bland, but this expedition through the Sundabans was pretty compelling, especially because it’s sort of like an inverted Garden of Eden. Rather than the snake tempting you to eat the apple which gets you expelled, Rushdie flips it around to be a siren-like invitation to stay.

7. The introduction of Saleem’s telepathic rival, Shiva, is fantastic. There’s a great power play at hand between them when they’re trying to decide the purpose of their telepathic meetings. The maliciousness of Shiva plays well and the tension is excellent.

        That being said, Rushdie really underplays the actual role of Midnight’s Children. The fact that there are 500 kids out there with special powers and we only get to see about 4 of them in action throughout the book feels like a missed opportunity. Granted, it would be a completely different book, but the possibilities were endless. In Rushdie’s defence, the Children of Midnight are the MacGuffin that are crucial for the plot to happen. The culmination of the book hinges on their existence, and in order for the ending to have the same impact it’s required that they are relegated to the background—but still!

At one point in the text, Saleem provides a classification of different types of stories. I neglected to write down the passage, but he essentially categorizes layers of meaning ranging from historical to metaphorical. Rushdie’s novel goes through all kinds of layers, and it’s hard not to appreciate how masterful he is at the craft. History inscribes itself on Saleem’s body and the history of India runs parallel to his experiences. When he cuts off part of his finger and the narrative is becomes about exposing the truth of his blood, he offers the following observation: “There were bloody murders, and perhaps it is not appropriate to end this sanguinary catalogue by mentioning once again, the rushes of blood to my mother’s cheeks. Twelve million votes were colored red that year, and red is the color of blood. More blood will flow soon: the types of blood, A and O, Alpha and Omega—and another a third possibility—must be kept in mind. Also other factors: zygosity and kill antibodies, and that most mysterious of sanguinary attributes, known as rhesus, which is also a type of monkey” (259). You can see the level of flourish in Rushdie’s style and the mythic, nearly religious level of the writing.

His writing style demonstrates masterful craft, if sometimes inaccessible. Rushdie’s sentences are often extended, clause after clause, euphemism after euphemism. Some passages are particularly evocative and imagistic. For instance, watch how Rushdie sets the scene here:

“Lifafa Das [...] leads her through a room in which the bone-setter is fastening twigs and leaves to shattered limbs, wrapping cracked heads in palm-fronds, until his patients begin to resemble artificial trees sprouting vegetation from their injuries … then out on to a flat expanse of cemented roof. Amina, blinking in the dark at the brightness of lanterns, makes out insane shapes on the roof: monkeys dancing; mongoose leaping; snakes swaying in baskets; and on the parapet, the silhouettes of large birds, whose bodies are as hooked and cruel as their beaks: vultures” (92)

The gruesomeness and awkwardness of the imagery here is just superb in painting a scene: we look through the hole in the perforated sheet to see this intensely flourished scene.

Ultimately, Midnight’s Children is a good, even great, novel. It has some real highlights and is structured masterfully to illustrate key themes. It’s a book of form—chaotically organized form, but form nonetheless. One aphoristic statement from the novel reflects a key idea in the text: “Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form” (259). Form governs this text and dictates the narrative possibilities for Saleem and the other Children of Midnight. There’s a logic that governs the novel, that governs the development of history, that governs Saleem’s existence.

As I mentioned, even a masterpiece might not be as personally resonant as we might want. So, while it’s a thoughtful craftsman’s kind of book and I appreciate all of the intricacies, as a casual reader of the text I felt more like an academic than an appreciator of the arts—I wasn’t as immersed as I would have liked.

Nonetheless, it’s an important book to read. A classic. A statement. I wish I could go back to high school when I got to see Salman Rushdie in conversation with Thomas King. It’s incredible to think that I witnessed that before I was old enough to appreciate the depth of the conversation. I think I might feel the same way about this book someday when I’m a little smarter.

Happy reading!

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

        Instead of Andrew Tate or Roosh V. or Sneako or whoever the manosphere is currently worshipping, vulnerable young men need to read this book instead.

Devotees of the blog will know that bell hooks never misses. She’s thoughtful and she’s revolutionary. With this book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks brings together themes from a few other projects, including All About Love and we real cool. The project explores the ways in which patriarchy limits men’s capacities for fulfilment, especially within relationships. Since hooks is consistently intersectional, you’ll also see that she addresses issues of class, race, and orientation to varying degrees.

The central thesis of the book is essentially that patriarchy destroys men’s capacities for love and each chapter explores ways in which that happens. There’s somewhat of a narrative framing the theoretical components of the text, supplemented by details from hooks’ life. Of particular note is hooks trying to grapple with the idea of desiring a life without her father, free of constraint and liberation from a troubled man, while still trying to build a capacity for love. The work is deeply human in that respect.

While the entire book is valuable and worth reading, I would point to two sections in particular as necessary for combatting the toxic messages in the manosphere.

It’s of surprise to nobody that the manosphere is deeply misogynist, simultaneously degrading women for their sexual behaviours and bragging about their “kills” (yes, that is horrific slang). There is no sense of introspection or empathy in their conversations around women’s bodies. As hard as it may be, there needs to be some sympathy for these lost boys—hooks explains how patriarchy crushes intimacy. Forms of intimacy and connection for men are eroded and so sex comes to serve as a replacement. It’s the only form of intimacy available to men in a society that refuses to let men be vulnerable.

To me, it’s incredible to see that hooks and so-called “men’s rights activists” voice the same kinds of concerns (poorer mental health for men, unfulfilling relationships, etc.) and yet come at it from such different directions. For the manosphere, the guilt lies on women—they are the ones that are simultaneously oversexed and withholding, they are the ones that go for toxic guys (and therefore we must become toxic), they are the ones that offer no support to men. hooks, though, clearly and persuasively points her finger at the systems which create the context for these issues to arise. Patriarchy has created a context and reinforces the barriers to clear expression, connection, and intimacy. Again, young men need to read this book.

The other section that I find so compelling is how hooks discusses the excessive connection men have with their work, to which I readily confess I am a culprit. She notes how men are so connected to their work that they neglect other relationships and meaningful connections in their lives (guilty!). On the one hand, men are rarely valued for themselves and instead for what they contribute to the capitalist machine. The other supposed benefit is that overworking within a capitalist misogynist White supremacist patriarchy is that it prevents introspection—a challenging and often painful process. If men are continually working and unable to introspect on their condition, they are more likely to continue working and align their complete value with their work rather than their intrinsic work as people. Is it any wonder that men buy into hustle culture and crypto and rank themselves as Alphas, Betas, Chads, Sigmas, and so on? All of these are quantifiable forms of value for men who can’t receive and accept love like love. 

The central issue I suspect many people will have with hooks’ work, and one from which I’m not immune, is the lack of actionable items. The Will to Change is more practical than most of her works, but still is less direct than one might hope. There are no easy “12 rules for life,” as it were. All of the actions require your own thoughtfulness and agency to enact in practicable terms. hooks offers more of what some might call guidelines, or a general map. The actual route is your own.

This review may come across as short, but don’t misunderstand: it is not because the book does not have enough weight to offer more substantial commentary. Instead, it’s just such a poignant reflection on the state of masculinity today—and yesterday—that it’s hard to find fault or offer thoughtful commentary. hooks is simply right, particularly because her work liberates men from harmful mindsets and encourages sympathy for those struggling while still holding them to account for their behaviours.

In short, if you or a man you know is struggling with issues related to loving relationships (not necessarily romantic), or if you have a young man in your life who is in the process of growing up, help guide them with this book. Give them a copy. Talk to them. Help fight the real enemy (patriarchy) with kindness and care rather than letting men point their fingers at their classmates, their sisters, their moms, their girlfriends, their spouses, their daughters. Patriarchy is the problem and always has been.

Happy liberatory reading, folks!

Symptômes by Catherine Ocelot

    The opening of Catherine Ocelot’s graphic novel Symptômes is fantastic. Ocelot begins by celebrating a new episode of Grey’s Anatomy airing. She then confesses, though, to hypochondriac tendencies and illustrates all kinds of amusingly terrible maladies, to which the doctors, without fail, respond, “ok! We’re going to operate!” The scan reveals a spontaneous decomposition of his organs: we operate; a parasite is turning a person’s skin into tree bark: we operate; my eye fell out and my mom put it in a ziplock bag: we operate. The tone and style of the book is communicated so wonderfully in just a few pages it’s hard to resist its allure.

While the main character is undeniably Ocelot, a number of different vignettes comprise the whole of the novel. There are six women united by being part of, essentially, “Lonely People Anonymous.” Each tells their story and there’s a great deal of tenderness and humour in the approach, culminating with Ocelot getting surgery while the other women watch on and debate whether to smile at the surgeons, eating muffins, and then saying “hey the surgeon is looking, smile now!” and then being presented in a very funny panel with no text.

In fact, Ocelot’s visual storytelling is impeccable. First, her art style is free and easy, casual even—and yet, it looks like it was done, colour and all, with pen, which probably took far more hours than first appears. The art style also ranges from sparse to explosively surreal, but it consistently has a softness to it that elevates the storytelling. In case it’s unclear from the title, Symptômes is in French and French is not my first language, so the visuals were a great addition (or even replacement) for text, and some of the chapters were completely text-free. One short chapter shows two women standing ankle-deep in water; one woman is crying and the other woman is holding onto her. As the woman continues to cry, the water becomes more forceful and the woman hanging onto her is pulled away. The woman continues to cry and the other woman disappears under the water and is pulled away. It feels like a tragic allegory. In another wordless chapter, there are two women sitting by water while beautiful, multi-coloured ducks and birds drift by. One woman seems to be speaking about peacocks and crying and the other woman consoles her and goes through a transformative process, becoming a multicoloured bird herself until two gigantic peacocks appear before them on the horizon. In another nearly wordless chapter, a woman takes care of a house plant for a man who says nobody had ever devoted so much attention to his plant. The two sleep together and he asks her to stay the night; there’s a tenderness between them before she gets up in the middle of the night, puts on her winterwear, and leaves his house, leaving the plant she cared for framed in the window. Ocelot matches the visual style of the chapters to the stories they’re telling and, even without words, she creates such beautiful, tragic stories of loneliness, regret, and isolation.

The text and images can often pair to create the humour of the book, as well. I already mentioned the funny scene at the side of the operating table, but there’s also a scene where Ocelot is at the doctor listing things that are wrong with her. He essentially says that she’s a hypochondriac and needs to stop thinking about her body. The perspective then changes to Ocelot’s point of view. As the doctor says she needs to stop thinking about her body, you see his face and then all kinds of medical charts on the wall documenting the parts of the tongue, the foot, the upper body organs, and so on. Ocelot’s acerbic wit is just perfect comedic timing.

One of the scenes I think might resonate with a lot of people is when Ocelot voices a theory about everyone being connected by threads, reminiscent of Jane Eyre. Ocelot says that there are threads running between everyone and that’s why we have feelings of being watched or that we’re going to run into someone. The chapter follows colourful threads and builds towards a beautiful scene of her laying in a hammock made of the threads connected to others. The message is that when you have connections to many people, you’re able to rest easy in a hammock of their support. Then, you turn the page and see people wrapped in thread, being squeezed as people have trouble connecting. It’s a lovely chapter that could stand alone, but thematically works in this collection.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Between the art style, the clever writing, the loving care towards the characters, the humour, and the touching themes, the graphic novel has a lot to offer—not to mention that I was able to read it in an afternoon. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Happy reading!