300 Pages into Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Photo from Vanity Fair

1st Diary Entry – Midnight’s Children

Despite the inclusion of characters who live in slums and wander the streets to make money, Salman Rushdie is chiefly chronicling the lives of the affluent Indians in Midnight’s Children. This is an important thing to note because while Saleem constantly proclaims that his story is the story of India, he is telling it from his position on top of the country’s socioeconomic pyramid. His own home–a compound that used to belong to an eccentric British man named Methwold–cloisters him and his family from most of the turmoil that occurs in Bombay after India’s independence from British rule. Not that the members of his household are protected from the political and social changes around them; no one is untouched by that.

The circumstances of Saleem’s birth has shades of soap opera-style scandal and mystery but the most important aspect is the time when it occurred. He is born exactly at midnight of August 15, 1947, the day of India’s independence. This ties him closely to the 1000 other newborn babies that entered the world on the same hour but only Saleem earns himself a letter from Jawaharlal Nehru.

The First 100 Pages – Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

I have tried reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children three years ago and stopped within the first 200 pages of it. Although I have read The Moor’s Last Sigh beforehand, I still found myself confounded by this noisy, brash, and difficult book. This is exactly the reason why I chose to limit my reading resolution to one doorstopper book a month for 2012, so I can finally find the time to finish this Rushdie.

First let’s establish the baseline for why I find this such a challenging work. It is told entirely in First-Person POV by Saleem Sinai, a man scrambling to commit his life’s narrative to paper as his body starts to deteriorate and come apart. “Life’s narrative” is a difficult thing to qualify here, however, since Saleem himself is so cosmically entwined with India that his recollection spans three generations’ worth of familial and national histories. Saleem constantly intrudes upon the narration, offering glimpses into the future and editorializing the events for both the audience and his lover(?) Padma (she also intrudes into the storytelling). Midnight’s Children is practically the definition of postmodern literature: fractured, subjective, and confusing. It upends the conceit of the bildungsroman, which focuses on the life of a single individual as he grapples with history. Here, the individual IS history, and he shapes it as much as it shapes him.

The Nymph of MTV by Angelo Suarez

Angelo Suarez was 19 when The Nymph of MTV first came out, the product of a young poet already comfortable with wordplay and surreality and the enviable assurance that what he has to say will be heard. His debut certainly made a splash, garnering praises from the likes of Ophelia Dimalanta (who wrote the foreword for Nymph) and Cirilo Bautista, giants of Filipino poetry–this collection inevitably won a Palanca Award. More than technical brilliance, however, Suarez’s poems exhibit a deep accessibility of feeling and a sensuality that belies any assumption of inexperience.

Finishing Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

1st Diary Entry – Wolf Hall
2nd Diary Entry – Wolf Hall

There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

The storytelling structure becomes more or less conventional once Thomas Cromwell becomes the top dog in the eyes of both Henry VIII and the Boleyns. In the early parts of the novel, Henry was a sort of misguided yet not entirely unlikeable character, but by the end he has become a right bastard. Is it weird that I still root for Thomas Cromwell despite the fact that he is largely responsible for Henry’s descent into assholery? That’s what a masterful command of point-of-view can do, I guess.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

My personal assessment of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad changes each time I think back on it. Sometimes I think it’s a trifling thing, made up of airy stories that don’t really have any staying power beyond the act of reading them. Other times certain passages simply haunt me. I change my mind even further whenever I read other people’s reviews of it, especially since time and winning the Pulitzer seems to have turned some people into dismissing Goon Squad and its importance. But after hearing Slate’s Audio Book Club Podcast discussing the book I think that I can comfortably put a stake in the ground: I love this book.

The buzz surrounding this novel originally came from its stylistic inventiveness and subject matter. It is series of loosely interconnected short stories that track the lives of several individuals across space and time. Many of them, like Benny and Sasha, are heavily involved in the music industry while others are more tenuously so. People pop up and disappear all throughout, turning the entire novel into a a treasure hunt of sorts as you try to discover what happens to characters that you care about. Time is the goon that the title refers to, a shadowy figure that roughs you up and beats you down when you least expect it.