What killed Salman Rushdie?

Fellow blogger J.A.P., in a comment on a previous post, rekindled an old debate that’s very close to my heart. He said he could not wade through Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Neither could I.

It would be wrong to state that I was a Rushdie fan. Actually, I used to be a Rushdie fanatic. But then, he fell by the way, and so did my love for him.

What beggars belief is the slovenly denouement in the genius’ literary career. It somewhat reflects the climax of his magnum opus, Midnight’s Children, which shows the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, disintegrate – alluding to the fractious state of the Indian republic.

Rushdie, too, disintegrates after completing the novel -- the death of the artist as a philanderer, a controversy-mongerer…

Shame was so similar to Midnight’s Children that I didn’t bother to flip beyond page 5. The Moor’s Last Sigh was somewhat palatable. And the less said about The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the better. Fury was too convoluted, couldn’t finish even this one. In fact, apart from MC, I liked only Haroun and the Sea of Stories. His non-fiction though was not all that bad.

The scorecard? Read 2, discarded most. But I still put Midnight’s Children in my top-5 list (a very philistine exercise). I felt it was not just a book. It was a nation. It was the voice/conscience of a nation emerging from birth pangs.

The novel was a massive experiment. But that’s where the problem began. An experiment happens only once. After that it loses its novelty. You experiment when you want to achieve/ascertain a certain end. It follows that once you have experimented, you know the end. So, the best thing about an experiment is its unpredictability. That was Midnight Children’s hallmark. The novel was like an unpredictable mountain stream growing into a rivulet, absorbing everything in its wake, and then morphing into a mighty river, gushing, unstoppable. It was like a chain reaction, and could be stopped only when it exhausted itself.

In the end, the novel exhausted its author.

The first few lines itself sets the restless tone of the narrative. A raconteur who has to tell his story his story fast because he has so much to say in so little time:

I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no turning away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too…On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clockhands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival….

Amazing.