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The Midnight’s Children Meander, Week 8

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Friends, I have no one to blame but myself! I set us an ambitious goal and like a few fellow Meanderers, this is the week that tripped me up.

Perhaps both the book and real life had just a little more plot than my brain was ready to handle. 🙂

With your indulgence, I’ll go perhaps a little easy on us (aka me) with this week’s page target, and aim to rejoin you all at the next roadstop. Speaking of which….

The next roadstop: Let’s gather our ponies and/or kick up our sandals at the end of the section entitled “The Buddha” (aka page 413 in the Random House paperback), where something “swallows them up.”

And this? This is the post for comments on sections 2.15 through 3.1.

And also: Wikipedia tells us that “Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘hoist with his own petard,’ is an idiom that means ‘to be harmed by one’s own plan to harm someone else’ or ‘to fall into one’s own trap,’ implying that one could be lifted (blown) upward by one’s own bomb, or in other words, be foiled by one’s own plan.”

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20 responses to “The Midnight’s Children Meander, Week 8”

  1. Ute Avatar
    Ute

    “Soldiers entering women’s hostels without knocking; women, dragged into the street, were also entered, and again nobody troubled to knock.”

    I’m in awe of SR’s capacity to use an image and connect it to different situations and at the same time: this is one terrible sentence/image!

    Reply
  2. Computilo Avatar
    Computilo

    General Zulfikar (around page 327-8 Random House): “Even a damn hundred-year-old beagle bitch can earn her damn living,” he was heard to mutter, “but my house is full of people who can’t get organized into one damn thing.” Although I’m sure we have all expressed the organization sentiment on a personal level, I marvel at how “organized” SR makes this sentence. So many hundred-year plus entities roam through this novel (whether they be dogs, djinns, or prostitutes). And despite the fact that many of us often feel lost in the detail of this novel, I see now that every detail has been critical. Every detail is “organized into one damn thing.” (Still waiting to find out what that is, but I’ll wait with Padma as she instructs: “Begin. Begin all over again.”

    Reply
  3. Alyssa Avatar
    Alyssa

    I found this section a bit more palatable though I wouldn’t say I’m enjoying this book, exactly. It’s more like I hold great respect for it.

    Some ego on this guy Saleem, huh? Not sure how Padma can cope.

    Reply
  4. Noodle Avatar
    Noodle

    Felt, like Ute, that SR’s ability to describe scenes of violence is a marvel but the scenes themselves difficult to *watch.* And the annihilation of Saleem’s family left me shell-shocked. As he intended, I’m sure.

    Reply
  5. Peaseblossom Avatar
    Peaseblossom

    This week I fixated on dogs. SR has used bitch a few times now–and as Computilo pointed out, this week’s leg of our journey gives us beagle bitch. One lives like a dog. There are she dog badges sewn to lapels. Our narrator, Saleem, doggedly insists that he had begun again. And Shaheed Dar asks, ‘ “But what did he mean: man-dog?” ‘

    MC has not been an easy read. Nope. But to me, it’s been a welcome daily dip into something thought provoking at a time in my life when I work like a dog.

    Reply
  6. So-Called Bill Avatar
    So-Called Bill

    Behind again, naturally.

    Reply
  7. Jeff Avatar
    Jeff

    Thanks to Dan’s generous smaller-assignment this week, I actually managed to catch up. I definitely found my interest/ability-to-follow starting to flag around the 250-page mark, but I’m glad I persisted, as I found the climax of Book Two, describing the falling of the bombs, to be one of the most beautiful passages in the book so far, the page-long sentence and carefully chosen words kinda making me think he was paying homage to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy–or maybe that’s just my pretentious English major brain talking.

    I’m also wondering if the midnight’s children are well and truly gone now from Saleem’s mind for good? Seemed like a somewhat anticlimactic dismissal from what I thought was going to play a major part in the story later on. But who knows. I feel like I’m doing a lot of surface reading just to stay afloat. Maybe things will start to make more sense once we’re done and can fully process.

    And Rushdie still dazzles with each sentence, so it’s got that going for it..

    Reply
  8. Furiosa Avatar
    Furiosa

    I’m with everyone about SR’s masterfully crafted sentences, imagery and accretion of detail. The soldiers entering the women’s hostels and then the women is both evil incarnate and the banality of evil incarnate. Stunning. Also, I was struck (so to speak) by how Saleem’s fate at the end of Book 2 essentially transforms Book 1’s recurring game of hit-the-spittoon into hit by the spittoon.

    Finally, Saleem is the Leonard Zelig of the 20th century Indian subcontinent.

    Reply
  9. So-Called Bill Avatar
    So-Called Bill

    “Pomegranate Death” is a great band name.

    Reply
  10. So-Called Bill Avatar
    So-Called Bill

    And the next time somebody makes me really mad I’m going to call him a “numb and urchin-rubbing hosepipe.”

    So watch yourself.

    Reply
  11. Just KT Avatar
    Just KT

    Still here – caught up but running on to my next task – still enjoying the journey with you all

    Reply
  12. Susan C Avatar
    Susan C

    That deathmarch word keeps occurring to me, but I am soldiering on.

    Reply
  13. Computilo Avatar
    Computilo

    You hit the nail on the head, Susan C. Not quite the peaceful meander through grassy fields with blue skies, rainbows, and puppies nipping at our heels, is it?

    Reply
  14. Noodle Avatar
    Noodle

    Just wait, Computilo. (Evil bwah ha ha)

    Reply
  15. Clort Avatar
    Clort

    Well I for one must confess to a growing sense of impatience with the book. Or with Saleem, who in spite of his magnificent sentences can wax tiresome, and/or preposterous, a fact which seems to have seemed occurred to him and which he is sometimes at pains to address: “determined-to-find-a-historical-role” & “…my life has taken on, again, the tone of a Bombay talkie…” & “…so, apologizing for the melodrama….”. However, the pages do keep turning and I keep wondering what can possibly happen next, and how if when SR can mold all this into some giant spinning top that adds up to the story of India (which even if he does, I guess I won’t fully grasp). I have read a little ahead and (no spoiler, don’t worry) noticed that the book was published in 1980, and the dates of the events are getting pretty close to that, which turns the book into a very pointed political critique, which is another interesting facet of it. So I soldier on… definitely not a meander….

    Reply
  16. Susan C Avatar
    Susan C

    I love that spinning top metaphor–exactly!

    Reply
  17. Guzmán Avatar
    Guzmán

    I was happy that the Pakistan piece is/was over. It was hard for me to navigate the jungle piece. But I came out alive!

    Reply
  18. Amanda Avatar
    Amanda

    Finally here!

    When we were lost in the jungle with Saleem, I thought of a doc I watched recently which treats the disastrous 238 days Coppola spent filming Apocalypse Now – a period of constant anxiety, self-doubt, and near financial ruin for the director during which time he was doubted where he was going, if the film was any good, and how he would end it.

    After a series of calamities, including, but not limited too, a storm wiping out most of the film’s sets, the military helicopters that Coppola had on loan from Ferdinand Marcos flying away mid-scene to engage in actual warfare, Martin Sheen having a heart attack in the middle of the night and crawling out to a public road to stop a passing car to take him to the hospital, Marlon Brando arrived — without having read the book Heart of Darkness. For days, Coppola (still unsure what the ending of the movie would be) filmed improvisational scenes with Brando, who, in an incredible clip of the documentary, is seen holding a grape in a dark room waxing on about the nature of madness only to break character and say something along the lines of “wow, I can see through this grape.”

    Beyond the parallels of adolescents lost at war, violence, and psychic torment, I think the comparison came to mind between the doc and MC because of the explicit way that Saleem narrates his tale cinematically. A few weeks back, I got to thinking about how people live in a state of past present future constantly vacillating between their material reality and memory — telling and retelling stories that construct their identities. In a way, people are like books internally- full of words, fulls of stories, full of ideas, all somehow related to a larger narrative starring themselves. But, there’s something to be said for the way that people also perceive of themselves from the external vantage of starring in a film about…themselves! Like Saleem, we are the protagonists and the narrators, the actors and the directors.

    Or is it just me? 🙂

    Reply
  19. pete Avatar
    pete

    my meandering was accidentally a little too meandering so not quite done with the reading for the week. interested that he lost his mental powers and developed new sensory ones when he moved to pakistan. don’t really know what it’s supposed to mean, but that’s a running thread for me on this one.

    Reply
  20. Willem Avatar
    Willem

    Monkey! How could you abandon your brother so? Or I guess that was Jamila Singer.

    The last pages of book 2 were pretty amazing. Nice catch re the spittoon, Furiosa. When I read the “…the explosion flinging trunk contents into the air, and now something which was hidden unseen for many years is circling in the night like a whirligig piece of the moon…” bit (pg 392) I was sure for some reason it was going to be the original sheet with a hole.

    Reply

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