Whatcha readin'?

Worst book ever. If this is literature, then I don’t want it. I just could not read it. I had no clue as to why the author was telling us the things he chose to tell us. I had no idea where the story was going, because the plot just made no sense. No tension, no twists, no outrage, no intrigue. Nothing, just the meandering rambling of Rushdie’s sibilant voice. The voice of a weasle. Of a snake. Of an utter loser. Oh yes, it is personal. Even if I had been intimately acquainted with the inner workings of the far east, even I had known every single nuance of political manoeuvring that went on back then, nearly twenty years ago, I still find it hard to believe that I, or that anyone else, could possibly have enjoyed the awful, awful, terrible book.

Why was it so bad? I just didn’t want to read it. I cared not one spit about Saleem and his nose. Nor about his mother, nor his other mother, nor any of it. The narrative is so twisted and winding and digressive and tangential that it makes it impossible to become lost in the novel. The book reads like riddle.

I decided to read the book on the premise that there were magical children with powers in it. And they appear briefly. There powers mentioned perhaps in one page. One page out of 600 painful pages. He pisses and moans on for an inexplicable amount of time about things I didn’t care about, about things that held no meaning to me. The silver spittoon? Why? What is the relevance of the silver spittoon, and by the gods why should I care when the writing is this terrible.

It seems to me that rushdie went to great efforts to create a book that would appeal to literary scholars. A book packed to the gills with hidden meanings and metaphor. A book to be dissected and considered while chewing on a pipe and adjusting ones monocle by the fire place. A book that one could smile quietly, an expression of inward humour carefully constructed and aimed outward at some poor dinner guest. Ah yes, midnights children, puff puff, not for everyone that book. No you see rushdie's genius is so subtle, so delicate that to perceive one must first be in possession of said subtlety. Not something you can really learn. Puff puff.

Rusdie’s midnight children is a book to be studied, to be dissected, but not to be read. God’s no. This is not a book for reading.