There’s nothing more annoying than knowing the book you’re reading is a work of genius and that your antennae are simply not attuned; Rushdie’s magmun opus feeling like incoherent nonsense; sublime humour, magical realism and historical allegory notwithstanding. I was struggling to read a chapter a day by the end of chapter 3. Normally I’d bail out but this is allegedly the best Booker winner of the last 40 years – a must-read book is ever there was one.
Then there was the upcoming book group – how could I possibly contribute if I hadn’t a clue about what was contained between the covers. So I ploughed on through 647 excruciating pages. Three weeks later, as I turn the final page, the sense of achievement in having read the Booker of Bookers is small, minimised by the fact that a) my literary blindspot has not been healed and b) amidst all that verbosity, the author has cheated me by omitting the most satisfying phrase of all … an error, which I promptly rectified.
1/2
Imperium - Christian Kracht
My Name is Lucy Barton - Elizabeth Strout
Summerhouse, Later - Judith Hermann
When the Professor Who Got Stuck in the Snow - Dan Rhodes
Passenger 23
The Book of St Andrews
Pure - Andrew Miller
The Man in the High Castle - Philipp K Dick
A Doppelganger with Aquis Submersus - Theodor Storm
Confusion - Stefan Zweig
The Rain Maiden and Other Fairy Tales - Theodor Storm
The Last Bear - Mandy Haggith
Faust - A Tragedy in Two Parts - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Emperor of Ice-Cream - Dan Gunn
Whispering Shadows - Jan Philipp Sendker
The Vegetarian - Han Kang
The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin - Georges Simenon
On Glasgow and Edinburgh - Robert Crawford
Jellyfish - Janice Galloway
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Alice In Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh
Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh
The Dark Heart of the Night - Leonora Miano
The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark
Viper Wine - Hermione Eyre
The Girl on The Train - Paula Hawkins
Wallenstein - Friedrich Schiller
In the Beginning was the Sea -Thomas Gonzalez
Munich Airport - Greg Baxter
Rise - Karen Campbell
The Lie - Helen Dunmore
Crime Novel - Petri Tamminen
A Tabby Cat's Tale - Han Dong 
Family Heirlooms - Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares 
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
The Franchise Affair - Josephine Tey 
Hedda Gabler - Henrik Ibsen 
Glass - Alex Christoffi 
The Miniaturist - Jesse Burton 
The Temporary Gentleman - Sebastian Barry 
Under The Tripoli Sky - Kamal Ben Hamada
The Blue Room - Hanne Orstavik 
Greenbanks - Dorothy Whipple 
Losing It! - Helen Lederer (2015)
The Pierced Heart - Lynn Shepherd (2014)
I like your category of “Worthy, but not for me.” I wonder why you could not really get into this book….
Confession: exactly the same happened to me years ago. Reading this book was such a chore, I gave up after a couple of chapters. I am glad I am not the only one for whom this book felt like “incoherent nonsense”. Rushdie is simply not for me, apparently.
Love your sticky note! Sometimes I think it should say: “The End. You Made It!” Sorry you didn’t like this one. I liked it quite a lot years ago but have since had this same Rushdie experience you’ve written about with The Satanic Verses so I know what you mean in every. single. word. of this post. 😉
Only read one book of his – Fury – and had the same experience. I mean, it could have been a straightforward, accessible story, but he goes off on convoluted, showy tangents that remind the reader of self-indulgent rock concert drum solos. I don’t think I’ll bother reading another work of his, no matter how many raves it gets.
Oh, I love drum solos. Guitar solos, however, …..
Fury is widely agreed to be his worst book by some distance, Ian, so it might just be worth looking again at Rushdie. For me he blows hot and cold, and even when he blows hot (such as Shalimar the Clown, which I loved), there are still moments when I want to give up and/or toss the thing against the wall. But I think when he’s on form, the brilliance makes up for the frustration.
Having said that, I remember having almost exactly the same feelings about Midnight’s Children, and thinking through most of it that while I could understand on an intellectual level that this was quite brilliant, it didn’t half bore me to tears.
(Self-indulgent rock drum solos are possibly something Rushdie thinks are really cool, judging by his embarrassing dadrock tendencies as shown in The Ground Beneath Her Feet – probably his second worse book, and the source of an excruciatingly toe-curling collaboration with elder statesmen of dadrock, U2. Best avoided.)
I had the same experience with Midnight’s Children. There were some parts that I enjoyed, but most of it was either nonsensical or boring. I don’t really get all the hype surrounding this book.
But I agree with John Self about Shalimar the Clown. Had I not read Shalimar before reading Midnight’s Children, I would have written Rushdie off as pretentious and overly hyped, but Shalimar is accessible and well written and tells a compelling story. I also liked The Enchantress of Florence pretty well, although I was at times frustrated with the tangents the story took.
I had the same experience my first time around and gave up at “Snakes and Ladders.” But this past year, when it was up for the Best of the Booker, I gave it another whirl and managed to get caught up (for the most part 🙂 ). I was thrilled to be finished, but I enjoyed it. Perhaps there’s some mystical quality to it, and we get only a narrow window in which to read and enjoy it.
Trevor, did you vote for “Midnight’s Children” as The Booker of Bookers?
My vote was cast for Pat Barker’s “The Ghost Road” – a book as far away from magical realism as you can imagine. That in itself suggests that I never should have tried Rushdie in the first place
…. actually in the second place. I endured “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” about 10 years ago. Judging from John Self’s comment, it’s a miracle I even contemplated reading another Rushdie.
OH NO! I am starting this book next weekend as part of my Savidge Reads Big Weekenders… eek! Looks like am going to have to well and truly persevere with this one when I crack it open!
Start with something else. If you’re wanting a booker winner, may I recommend Barry Unsworth’s “Sacred Hunger” or even A S Byatt’s “Possession”.
I did vote for Midnight’s Children as my Booker of Bookers, although I wanted to vote for Barker for the whole Regeneration trilogy, but that wasn’t allowed (I think I like the first two books better, but it is hard to separate the three). Like John, I find Rushdie a mixed bag (his latest may give Fury a run for the money as his worst).
Congratulations for making it to the end! I force myself to read to the end of all the Booker winners, although there are a few I wished I hadn’t made the effort for! I’m planning to read this next week, so I hope I have a better experience than you – I’m worried I won’t though!
I too am currently reading one of the most acclaimed works of genius of the recent past. The book I’m reading is “Snow” by Turkish author and probably the youngest Nobel literary prizewinner ever, Orhan Pamuk. But I’m enjoying it so far and even though I’m only a quarter done now, see no obstacles to completing it. It is very interesting for me, because it is about Turkey struggling with right-wing religious fanatics. In Turkey the fanatics are Islam; in the United States the fanatics are Christian and Jewish. But both countries are victims of right-wing religious fanaticism.
Jackie – Good luck!
Tony S – Thanks for reminding me of Orhan Pamuk. I read “My Name is Red” a few years back and, while I found it difficult, I also found it exhilarating! I’ll dig “Snow” out of the TBR and give it a whirl some time soon.
An interesting post – this book has never appealed to me.
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exactly the same feeling! I’m glad I’m not the only one who struggled through those pages feeling no pleasure at all. but I’m going to give Rushdie a second chance one day in the future and try to read some of his other books.
This is amazing: at last others also of the opinion that Midnight’s Children is unreadable (I’ve been formally trained as a classical Indologist, so have some knowledge of the context). Tried three times, and never made past page 150.
Pip’s Squeak
Thank you! There I was thinking I was simply ignorant …..
I couldn’t get through The Ground Beneath Her Feet, or The Satanic Verses, but bizarrely enough, I really enjoyed this book. I thought the writing was convoluted, got quite difficult to read, but, the story-line was interesting.
Just finished it today, and am quite proud of myself. 🙂
All that glitters is not gold. Mindnight’s children is unreadable. It is verbal Diarrhea if not anything else. Salim Sinai sucks….
I’ll add myself to the list of readers who agree with you about Midnight’s Children – it took me about ten years to get back to finish it, and it destroyed the first book club I ever joined.
I stuck it out to the end, though, for the satisfaction of being able to review it!
Se ma ha perdido el libro y con el la oportunidad de recuperar un fragmento que habla sobre el jugo de las serpientes y las escaleras.Por fabor si alguien me le pudiera mandar,ese fragmento, a herrerasola@hotmail.com le estaria eternamente agradecido.
muchas gracias
Thank you for writing this! I’ve read several of Rushdie’s books telling myself that the next one will have me reeling. I honestly find his work pretentious, confused and easily distracted. I’ve never been able to understand why the world regards him a genius.
Perhaps i have lacked the literary state of mind when trying to understand his work, or maybe i am just an average person who does not understand garbled rambling. It used to frustrate me when people would quote him or swear by his work.
I’ve resolved to be calm and the next person who tells me they were blown away by him will be subject to a lengthy discussion. I want to know exactly what these people got out of his work. I want to find out if it isn’t just an elitist thing to pretend to understand him.
Because honestly, i could not connect with anything he’s written. He flies between narratives irrationally and has always tended to leave me behind as a reader. I have so far understood “magical realism” to be a bunch of nonsense used to fill up pages while tricking the reader into thinking something profound is on its way.
I have the same suspicions regarding “magical realism” – haven’t read anything in this vein to wow me. But then I have yet to read Angela Carter who I am hoping will open my eyes.
I agree completely about magical realism and wish you luck with Angela Carter. Her style is certainly better than Rushdie’s, but still… I think I’ll settle for George Meredith’s The Shaving of Shagpat instead.
[…] Building: Castle in the Clouds / Medical Condition: Dismissed Dead /Time of Day: Miss Pettigrew lives for a Day / Body Part: The Blind Side of the Heart / Profession: My Cleaner /Relative: Midnight’s Children […]
I had just the same experience as Lizzy. I’d been feeling guilty about not having read this “masterpiece”. But found it excruciating, and finally jumped ship about 150 pages short of the end. I hate not finishing books. The writng is obviously virtuosic. Perhaps part of the problem is that it’s too obvious. I enjoyed the experience of being immersed in the prose, and sometimes reading it aloud, but found that I just didn’t want to go back to it, after putting it down. After several weeks’ struggle, I eventually didn’t go back. so Lizzy’s response is nice to read.
But, I abandoned Tristram Shandy even earlier, and was never a fan of Ulysses, so I suspect that I might have a blank in this general literary area. I just don’t enjoy having the writer so constantly in my face.
Before Midnight’s Children, I had not long finished rereading Gilead/Home by Marilynne Robinson. Wonderful works, and also very much prized. I don’t think there are any novels more different from Midnight’s Children.
[…] 15, 2009 by lizzysiddal After the Rushdie experience, I was in need of a good palate cleansing. Usually I turn to crime! However, Daniel Kehlmann […]
I’m not sure why Rushdie is regarded as a genius to be honest. I forced myself through midnight’s children. And I mean forced. Reading that book is like dancing in quicksand. Except with quicksand, there’s a level of satisfaction of having overcome it. With midnight’s children, there are pages and pages of over the top ramblings, which add no merit to the overall story or the idea being conveyed. It could have been half as thick.
I am inclined to agree with the criticism levelled at authors like rushdie and roy who come from the old school of verbosity = intelligence and wit. Its sad that we put the ruler at this level.
Read a book called Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. This book is complex, but has substance and meaning to it, without having to emulate faux intellectualism.
I hope people will trust their heads and call out authors on unnecessary verbosity.