Reading Rushdie

Been away from blogging for a week, spending a week at a business development and golf sales conference in Koh Samui, Thailand. Beautiful location, fun time.

Flying back, Bangkok to London, I continued to read Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”. 75% through, it’s a great read. Whacky style, funny, serious period of childish biographical Indian history – loaded with the language of Hindu / Moslem / Christian mythology and morality – “strange fiction more credible than rational truth” – reminded me of Martel’s more recent “Life of Pi” with Joycean linguistic invention thrown in.

Caught in the act.

Anyway two points of note.

Flew right over Benares – Amritsar – Lahore – Faisalabad in clear darkness whilst reading the machinations of Partition and subsequent Sino-Indo-Pakistan wars. The cease-fire line / border between India and Pakistan continuously sodium illuminated with border posts in a long twisty thread just east of Lahore, stretching south from the line of dispute in Kashmir. Spooky.

Intriguing is the fact that one of Rushdie’s heroines is a sea captain’s wife called Lila, promiscuous lady, with a shady past involving a death or two. The book’s 1960’s / 70’s chronology refers to Kerouac and Heller amongst others, but no Pirsig or ZMM. Pirsig’s “Lila” was published in 1991. Rushdie’s Lila saw print ten years earlier in 1981, when “Midnight’s Children” won the Booker Prize. (It won the Booker of Bookers too in 1993, when Rushdie also became Honorary Professor at MIT.) Must read more Rushdie – I first made the Pirsig / Rushdie connection here.

[Thanks to Alice for this Reason On-Line link to an interview with Rushdie.

Loved this quote from Rushdie

This is the problem with the truth. Truth is never one-dimensional. It is contradictory sometimes. But politics wants clarity.

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