Rebecca Schinsky (3:22)

Yes.

Jeff O'Neill (3:23)

Why are we doing this book right now? And the book, of course we're doing today is Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. As Rebecca just said. Why? Why now? Rebecca? We didn't have a why now for this, but I feel like it's sort of a Rushdie moment in a couple of different ways. Do you have a sense of that too?

Rebecca Schinsky (3:37)

A little bit of a Rushdie moment right now? Last year's memoir, Knife was both a reflection on his being attacked a few years ago while giving a speech. And he has long been a freedom of speech activist for reasons that we'll talk about later in the show. Also this year there's a new Rushdie collection of short stories that just came out called the Eleventh Hour. But really, when we sat down to plan this first season, one of the things that we're trying to do here is not just hit like the big name classics that everybody read in school, but also to hit those sort of big, well known, maybe award winning like Rushdie is authors that folks might think are really difficult or are intimidated by or if like me, maybe you had an experience reading them earlier in your reading life and you want to have, you know, some more hooks to approach the show. So there's a little bit of a Rushdie moment. There's always kind of a little bit of a Rushdie moment. He's a perpetual name on the list of should this person, will this person get the Nobel Prize someday? But it didn't feel like we could do the first season of this podcast and be doing it properly without a Rushdie book. And we even went back and forth about which book it would be. But ultimately I think this is the right one.

Jeff O'Neill (4:45)

Yeah, I think he of contemporary writers, of living writers, has a lot of name recognition. One of the few that has name recognition maybe in excess of any of the particular works. There is no signal adaptation. For example, some people have tried some stuff, but there's not a one battle after another or a Godfather, whatever else you want to Mike want to go. And he's a personality. And I think the other thing is that he has championed and represent something that is always current and sort of comes to and out of the foreground or background of feeling. It's always important, but it's urgency and certainly around freedom of expression. Like that's an urgent moment and we continue to be in one of those. And I'm gonna have some more to say about Rushdie as an advocate for freedom of speech, even when it makes some people, including this guy right here, maybe to the point of discomfort, pretty radical on it.

Rebecca Schinsky (5:43)

We can drop a link into the show. Notes. We talked pretty in depth about his memoir Knife when it came out last year on the Book Riot podcast and shared the experience of finding it to be affirming but also really challenging. Roshi is as close to, I think, a good faith free speech absolutist as you'll find in that discourse. And that means that he is in favor of allowing kinds of speech that sort of like middle of the road liberals like you and I might find to be really harmful or objectionable. But he says trying to liberals, oh no, we are. But in his argument that means, you know, allowing that kind of speech is less dangerous to him than the results of trying to tamp down certain kinds of speech. And the longer that we live in this version of America, the more and more I agree with him.

Jeff O'Neill (6:39)

And no one has more bona fides to Say, I know what the consequence of freedom of speech is, and because I lost an eye to it and I've been the subject of a fatwa, like, don't come at me about, like, well, some speech is actually hurtful. Like, yeah, I know I've been attacked multiple times, live decades under a death, basically a death mark, like the Han Solo of free speech over here. Very difficult to discount out of hand. And I think it. It's worth at least taking seriously. And I think I am not just sympathetic, but actively working towards a place where there can be writers and thinkers I admire and want to learn from. But I don't need to agree with him on everything all the time. And there are limits to that, of course, and some are brighter lines than others. But I think Rushdie is one through long experience. His political and artistic, intellectual and moral project is something I am so aligned with. And he's been on the front lines of it, not in a war way, but in a room with people with knives who want to kill him way that is difficult to discount and shouldn't be discounted.

Rebecca Schinsky (7:44)

I don't think there is something about that perspective that he brings and about the experiences that he's had that make his writing electric and alive. There is this freedom of imagination in Midnight's Children and in some of his other books that I've read where he allows himself to go to kind of wild or taboo places and he does the kinds of things that we say fiction is meant to do, that it's meant to help us explore difficult, scary ideas, that that fiction should be a safe place for doing dangerous things. And that he has, like, got real, not, as you said, bonafides, but lived experience from the other side of that, from being told that the words that he's. That he has said or that he has written are dangerous and that he should be killed because of them, really does put him in a position unlike anybody else who's writing today.

Jeff O'Neill (8:32)

So we come to Rushdie now at a moment where Rushdie is always in the water. But he has a new book out. It's Booker Week, and, you know, he is so aligned with the Booker. This book won the Booker of bookers for the 40th anniversary. Midnight's Children, when it won in 1981, was a signal event, a crowning achievement, even for just a second book. But he also has entered a different stage of his writing life in which he is an elder statesman. And sometimes elder statesmen feel elder and sometimes they feel like statesmen. And I think now he's in a statesman mode, right? Like he's doing states. And I find myself looking to him and people like him for moral clarity, concision, force. And, you know, his badge of honor is right there on his face in the form of an eye. He lost in the waging of a long, real, but also artistic cultural battle for the idea of. Of artists and writers and thinkers being able to say things that aren't comfortable, especially to those in power. And that feels urgent yet again.

Rebecca Schinsky (9:35)

Rebecca it does. And it feels radical in a way that comes across in his fiction, that there is this, like, real freedom of imagination that we see in this book, in many of his other books, where he allows himself to go to places that are taboo, that are scary, to say things and explore ideas that a lot of writers just might not be willing to go to. He's been an advocate for the idea that fiction should be a safe place to do dangerous things. And he practices what he preaches, which is really refreshing as well. But especially and as, as long as we live under the kind of administration and the book banning attempts that we're seeing where, like, it's pretty common in today's political discourse for leading figures to express the idea that people should be legally punished or maybe even killed for the words that they say. And no one knows that better than a person who lived under a fatwa, which is as serious as it gets. And Rushdie just really has more ground to stand on here than almost anybody in our contemporary society in this freedom of speech conversation.

Jeff O'Neill (10:45)

We'll circle back to talk about Rushdie McEF a little bit later. But before we get to that, let's talk about Midnight's Children, what the book is about. Rebecca this was an easy one. I'm sure you just plugged this in and sort of in three sentences, you had it and you were ready to rock and roll, right?

Rebecca Schinsky (10:58)

This is an almost impossible book to sum up. Like, do not ask a chatbot. Just I can't imagine I should have, as an exercise, asked chatgpt to summarize.

Jeff O'Neill (11:09)

We could do that as a segment, like A Grade ChatGPT's overview of why this matters.

Rebecca Schinsky (11:14)

And if you try to explain it to a person, you will like, like just in person, you will likely ramble on and sound a little bit crazy. Like, I tried to describe this book to my husband and eventually was like, you know what? It's just a vibe. So I think I've got something of a summ for us here. It's narrated by a man named Salim Sinai. He was born at the stroke of midnight, on the day that India gained independence. And from day one of his life he understands that his life is inextricably bound up with the fate of his country. It's also apparently bound up with all 1001 of the other children who were born at that exact moment. And he ultimately discovers that he has a telepathic connection, a kind of like psychic radio channel with all of them. Those are some of the Midnight's children that we come across in the book. Salim is telling this story to us as readers and also to his faithful companion and wannabe lover, Padma. It opens with a story like the first hundred and some odd pages are 50ish, I think. Yeah, yeah. The first 32 years not of his life, the 32 years of his parents and grandparents lives leading up to his birth. So there's a whole lot of setting the stage. Then we get when Selim is born, India is born at the same moment. And Rushdie lays out a map of India's political and historical landscape. Or I should say modern India is born. This is when they gain independence from colonization. So like that is what happens. But the book is the furthest thing from linear that a novel can be. Salim like, tells Padma repeatedly, like I'm going to tell you this story, but first I have to do this other thing. And he just wanders around and away from the main point into the of all of these people from his family, from his communities, from the greater Indian historical and social context. There's surrealism, a whole lot of it. Mythology, miracles, magic, family, curses. Salim finds himself connected to and maybe even responsible for shrugging major events in the life of India. It's a loose and like loose is a really important operative word here. Allegory for an era in India's history. Just postmodern epic, way more about the journey than the destination. And I have here the vibes are wild, the characters are multitudinous and they contain multitudes and really almost nothing is off limits. Like this is just a hell of a book.

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Jeff O'Neill (17:13)

Yeah, it's, it's about what it is trying to do as much as anything, right. It is a historical document. And I have this. Salim, the narrator, keeps wanting to move ahead in the story but not mention the specific date, but he keeps saying the date is important. And as wild as the book is, and it certainly is wild, Rushdie does throw us a lifeline every now and again with a date with a place, some real names, some real events, and even quotations that tell us how to understand and read the book that, you know, we pull out some of the same things. Even in this sprawling kaleidoscopic mess of a book, there are some themes that do emerge. And Salim and Rushdie are overtly talking about the themes of what the project is. And it's trying to represent the unruliness of this 60 ish year stretch of time in this particular particular air quotes you can't see because you can't see on podcasts unless you're on Video Place, which is the Indian subcontinent in the years sort of leading up to Indian independence through Indira Gandha and the emergency that happens in the 70s and the 80s, the fight over Kashmir and separation, like that whole sprawling thing. And then Rushdie also having an affection for and skepticism of the political projects, the artistic project, the religious and cultural projects, but wanting to, I keep wanting to sort of do it, get your hands around, but that's not what he's doing. He's more like dancing through the hall and like trying to grab things off the shelf and, and show you things. Like there's a bit of a carnival barkers element to this of wanting to draw your attention and being a showman, putting things behind you, but then bringing things to the fore. And the reading experience itself is as important as what it's quote unquote about. And those two things are as inextricably linked as any book we've really talked about to this point.

Rebecca Schinsky (19:10)

Yes, he says a couple of times through the book that to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. And that's what reading the book feels like. It's really postmodern in this way that Rushdie is expressing to us. It's impossible to get your arms around this story of India and this place that has so many people. And so Salim gives us a book that is also impossible to fully get your arms around, but in a way that feels like exciting and innovating like, it's not frustrating. It's not, oh, my gosh, this doesn't make sense to me. I suppose it could be that way for readers, but my experience of this is that this is a huge undertaking and Rushdie pulls it off. Like, I just felt like I was in good hands the whole time. He seems so confident about what he is doing. Salim tells us, like, I know that I'm wandering away from this, but I'm gonna come back. I'm gonna tell you the thing, Padma, don't worry, we're gonna get there. And you do ultimately get there. But by the time that we get there, you really know that this is not just about the place we have landed. It's about the whole process that it took and about how Salim tells the story, how Rushdie has chosen this story in a way that is like just noisy and crowded and chaotic and makes us feel the way that I think he's telling us it felt to be in India at that time.

Jeff O'Neill (20:32)

I think that's right. And then Salim's own position is similar to Rushdie's. He was a mus. He comes from a Muslim family of an upper middle class, educated class. And then we're subject to history in the way that everyone was and everyone always is in time, no matter whether they think so or not. But one of the central revelations, I think, of a post. Post modernist moment, which I think this is, we're striving towards multiculturalism. A moment I think we're still living in many ways, is to distinguish between making sense and making meaning. Like this book doesn't make sense, but it tries to make meaning out of senselessness. Right. It's difficult to understand the reasons all of these things happen. It's beyond. There's also a. A chaos theory of culture seems to be Rushdie's operating principle. But then he doesn't just throw up his hand, say, well, what are you gonna do? Like he is. This is an artistic intervention to try to get. To do something with something that feels impossible to. To do something with. And I think, you know, one of my hot takes or intrusive thoughts is what would an American version of this, like what time period do you pick? And you could do worse than sort of the IRAN or like 1980, Jimmy Carter losing an election because of hostages to now. Right. That's a 40 year period which written in a Rushdie way, would feel as carnivalesque and bizarre and ungovernable in a similar kind of way, because it is. It says in the. It would be fascinating to see if.

Rebecca Schinsky (22:15)

You sort of did Vineland by Pynchon, which we talked about earlier this year and is the inspiration for one battle after another, but through a little bit more of a Rushdie lens that carried it forward. Like that book takes place over a couple of years in the early 80s, but if you started it in the late 70s, early 80s and carried it through to even like right now would be fascinating and wild and just unruly is the term that I keep coming back to about Rushdie. But unruly but so masterfully managed by him.

Jeff O'Neill (22:48)

Yeah, yeah, he doesn't want to try and Salim talks about this overtly in the text and clearly Rushdie doesn't want to simplify water down, boil down, simplify the situation, but also doesn't want to be just completely subject to it. So this Salim and Rushdie's project have parallel tracks in which. All right, let's. What are we going to do with this? Like how do we locate ourselves? How do we just. How do we not become flotsam of history or have a narcissistic point of view where it's all about me? And Salim sort of tries to do both. Like as you said before, it's like well this battle, this emergency, all of this was just to get my family out of this one particular location. Which was it? Which was. It feels like to an individual, you know, as we've lived long enough lives to have gone through some history and when you have a moment that feels like oh this is history, it is both unique and specific but also you're just one amongst many and it's not about you and that is to live in a modern world where you have so much information and knowledge about the world. I think that is maybe one of the central things of post modernity or even post post modernity and are hyper aware you can get all of the world's experience beamed to your pocket in any particular moment. So now what do you going to do? McCoy I think is a real situation that because of the compressed time that Russia is dealing with and the nature of Indian culture and Indian governments is always polyglot already and always a teeming mass of contradictions and push me pole use. I think that was a early look at what globalization might look like in multicultural might look like especially when there was this one moment when the political realities changed and you had to make a political being out of this whatever. You know, this non governable doesn't really neatly align with the idea of the nation state at all frankly. What are you going to do with that stuff. And I think that's a lot of what Midnight's Children as an idea, a metaphor within the book and the book itself are trying to do.

Rebecca Schinsky (24:52)

Yeah. One thing that I thought about a lot was what would it have been like to read this when the book was new? Like to be a person who was politically conscious in a moment of time where the world was becoming increasingly global. And understanding this, like, I think we both want to make the point that it's fine if you are not an expert on Indian history.

Jeff O'Neill (25:12)

Absolutely. Yes.

Rebecca Schinsky (25:13)

There are a ton of references here that I just don't get. You pick up a little bit about the history of India and colonialism throughout the text and you could go googling, but you would be googling 17 things on each page if you wanted to try to nail down all of the references. I think Rushdie knows that most average readers, almost no one is going to pick it up and be able to fully recognize what each of the events is. But you're able to have, I think, a still very complete and meaningful reading experience out of it, precisely because he's working on so many levels. One of the levels is the allegory of what. What is happening in this time in India that Salim is living in and telling us about. But another one is on a broader level. This is just what it feels like to be a person. To be, as you were saying, living through. We're all always living through history of one sort or another. And that is, I think, just timeless.

Jeff O'Neill (26:09)

Yeah. And it's the kind of book that could bear to be the subject of a semester long college course. Like you could read this like Ulysses or War and Peace or whatever, and it bears that. It could bear that kind of weight. But also, as you say, you can have a meaningful, alive and incomplete experience with it. I'll say. I think that's fair to say as well. That feels like you touch the live wire that runs through it. And this is one of those books that feels as a live wire running through it. And the orgy of imagination and storytelling that Rushdie embarks in here, I think, is what. What is most transportable to a reader who maybe doesn't know anything about anything that's going on here. Sort of a general reader who's willing to go along for a literary ride. The stories within stories. There's wonderful moments and super interesting little anecdotes or part stories that were within a. That are in a parentheses within a digression within a subplot from the quote, unquote. Main story. And I think once you, if you can give yourself over to that of like what's this about? Like what's going to happen, what the plot is, who done it, where are we going? Like pinchin in this regard. You can also then go two pages like I don't understand what's going on and that is okay. And also I think maybe one of the tools Rushdie is deploying is because he wants you to feel, I think he wants you to feel as overwhelmed as these moments felt overwhelming. It's one thing you do with that is to present it and not narrativize it. Not break it down, not make it as a nice little clean Chris Hemingway sentence with beautiful memorable quotable dialogue. There are moments that. Of that, right. And we'll talk about some of them, but they're also moments of surreal, almost trauma induced incomprehensibility. And you get these long sentences and long paragraphs and long sections were like, boy, I don't really know. And I, I think I would give yourself, I certainly give myself permission in those moments. Like, like, let me regroup. I'm going to maybe look for something for my eye to hold onto and I'll. Maybe someday I'll come back, but also I'll recognize that feeling, really any reading feeling. Give yourself permission and also the latitude and then benefit of the doubt to the writer that maybe that thing you're feeling is a feature, not a book. And that can be very liberating.

Rebecca Schinsky (28:33)

If you get 100 pages into Midnight's Children and you start to have that overwhelmed feeling or the, like, maybe I can't hack this. I think you're having the right experience.

Jeff O'Neill (28:43)

A median reading experience of me.

Rebecca Schinsky (28:46)

A right experience. That. Rushdie, you sit down to write a book like this and you know that people are going to be bamboozled by it. Like he's trying to bamboozle us in a lot of ways that if you can be okay with that with a. Like I'm feeling. As you were saying, I'm feeling this maybe because I'm supposed to be feeling this way. Or what is the function of making me feel this way? Why did the author want to make us feel this way? Like there's a moment where one of the characters is recalling like a ransom kind of a ransom letter that they constructed where they've cut out letters from a magazine. And instead of just saying I cut out letters from a magazine to spell these words, it's like I cut out the C O M from the headline Commander blah blah blah, blah, Blah. And then I cut out the, like this letter from these other things and it goes on for two pages and.

Jeff O'Neill (29:31)

You get like snippets of the articles. Like it's all a mishmash of wildness.

Rebecca Schinsky (29:35)

Yeah, yeah, it's wild. But just one of the examples of like, he's giving us these headlines that would have been, you know, popular, common at the time, relevant to the history of India at the moment. Those are some clues to things, but also just the chaos of being like, this is how I'm going to tell my readers about this ransom note. I'm not just going to tell them what it said. You have to piece it together three letters at a time in between all of the headlines. The whole thing is presented like all as one at the end of that chunk of pages. And then like a paragraph later there's this moment of clarity where there's a couple of sentences that are just so crisp and pure and obvious that that's a thing you're supposed to pay attention to and that happens repeatedly. And I do think that that's one of the things Rushdie does is he up, upsets us, like shakes everything up into these moments where you don't know which way is up. What you're supposed to be holding on to.

Jeff O'Neill (30:35)

Is he saying what to whom about what and why. I mean, just to put it.

Rebecca Schinsky (30:38)

Then like once it settles, Salim zooms out into his narration of the thing again and makes some remark either to us or to Padma as the listener that just sums the whole thing up or tells us the thing that we actually need to know right then. And it just feels like such a relief after the chaos that you're like, thank you for giving me that. And I just do think that's part of it. If he just wanted to tell this story as a straight ahead story, the book would be like 200 pages long. It's not really about what happens.

Jeff O'Neill (31:15)

If you look at. I'm just trying to think of these, you know, another more book club friendly. And I'm not using that derogatory. It's a different work, it's a different artistic project of something like the Kite Runner, which is about a difficult moment in history. It's dealing with subjects that are foreign to a lot of the readers that are reading it right, especially in America. And it focuses a lot more characters and plot and relationship and dialogue and what happens. And this thing, this is operating on a different kind of register and I'm trying very hard not to prioritize, hierarchicize them this is art writing. And I guess this is a good way to transition to. When it came out though, it was hugely popular. Kind of hard to believe. Now, not everything that wins a booker sells a million copies like this one did. Like this was a genuine cultural phenomenon. And I'm having a hard ass time thinking of an American. It's probably Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest did not sell a million copies when it came out in 1960. I really don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd love to be. Well, I should have looked that up. I really don't think it did. But quickly after that book was published, like, David Foster Wallace is a writer and he's an important one and he's a generational one. And this book and all the lit bros can tell you and I have a lot of affection for Infinite Jest, but it is not this book. I have much more affection for Rushdie himself and this book. And I think there's a reason the rip lit bros don't pick up Midnight's Children, even though it's doing a lot of the same things, better, more complicatedly, with much broader import. And we, you know, that's a subject for a different podcast. But like this is the thing. This is the, this is the real McCoy, Rebecca. Like this is the real McCoy of when you have have a book that comes out and challenges, expands and then also envelops what came before. Rushdie is not putting at arm's length Indian cultural tradition or religious texts or West. He's like, this is a great he. He loves it all. He loves stories, he loves reading, he loves the idea of storytelling, he loves the perform. He. I'm sure he loves a good joke. And he is so. He is so invested in the idea of story and narrative as power that he will not eschew anything that adds another club to his storytelling golf bag.

Rebecca Schinsky (33:36)

Yeah. And this book must have felt like it came out of nowhere. Like this is his second novel. His first novel, Grimace was universally panned and really lit a fire under him to he had begun rewriting or he begun writing this book before. But the bad reviews of the first book really motivated him to start this one over to try to do something big. So this comes out. He to wants wins the Booker Prize. As you said, it sold more than a million copies in the uk. Just huge. And then it goes on to win the Booker of Bookers in 1994, which was the Booker Prize's 25th anniversary that was selected by a jury and then it won the best of the Booker in 2008 for the Booker Prize's 40th anniversary. That was a jury and public voting in the early days of people being able to vote for things on the Internet. Then in 2018, when the Booker Prize turned 50, it was unseated to the English Patient, which won the Golden Booker, for which I blame the voting public. I went back like, we love the English Patient. We both have a lot of affection for it. It's a great book. But I went back and looked at other Booker Prize winners, especially since Rushdie, and nothing has the profile that Midnight's Children has.

Jeff O'Neill (34:51)

Yeah, it's. It sits up. I mean, he. Rushdie, when asked who his favorite authors are, he mentions Dickens and Tolstoy and some poets from India that I don't really know the work of that well. But he says, and it varies by day, as for most of us who like books and reading will vary. But he's like, when it comes down to, it's probably Joyce and that's all. I mean, that's. That's an easy comp. Right? Like Ulysses, probably. You know, I've done, you know, we've done annotated about Ulysses and what a phenomena was and banned and sensors, and it had this sort of underground into explosive awareness that announced it really, from day one as being a foundational work of modernity. And, like, we think this is going to join. The Greats at Midnight's Children had the same thing. And I think I. I would like to know how many of those million copies were read all the way through the data that we're never going to get. And that's no knock on Midnight Children or Rushdie. But I know readers, and I know when you read to that level, there are people that are picking it up because they hear people talking about it. And this would have been a cold splash of water on the face to someone picking it up because they think they're going to get. I mean, even something like the English Patient, which is more subversive and strange than the movie. And the movie is quite beautiful. Again, we love that. But this is a step or two beyond that in terms of the effortfulness of the reading experience you need to put into it.

Rebecca Schinsky (36:13)

Yeah. And I mean, I see Salman Rushdie books on the Barnes and Noble, like paperback favorites tables, and it's next to the Kite Runner and the Life of PI and the Lovely Bones and.

Jeff O'Neill (36:23)

Yeah, those guys.

Rebecca Schinsky (36:24)

Four Ann Patchett novels. And those are all wonderful.

Jeff O'Neill (36:27)

Yes.

Rebecca Schinsky (36:28)

And then if you read Salman Rushdie, it's like, not what you were expecting, based on the other books on the. Those tables. I think a lot of folks were probably really surprised when they opened this up and this is the experience they had. I'm glad you mentioned Dickens, because Midnight's Children feels to me like Dickens on acid and one of the other. More.

Jeff O'Neill (36:49)

Well, it's Dickens on India. I mean, that's. I mean. I mean, the way that he portrays India is for those of us who grew up in the Midwest eating mayonnaise on white bread, like, the reality of everyday life in, like, Mumbai feels like acid to us because just the intensity and variety of the experience. I think that's what we mean when we say that. Right. I want to put words in your mouth, but.

Rebecca Schinsky (37:08)

Yes, but also that there is, like, there are so many surreal moments and stuff about mythology and like, you do. It just has kind of a wild, heady feeling. Like the, The. The on the ground experience of being in India is certainly very different from being an American, especially in the 80s, but that he's. He is incorporating, like, religion and mythology and magic and curses and all of this stuff that. That exists outside of our reality. But like, as you were making the comparison to the Kite Runner, I was thinking also about the Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, which. Another big popular book club novel that roams over decades of people's lives, where you are pulling threads together over the course of time and there are secrets and secrets get revealed and then secrets on secrets and all that sort of stuff. Rushdie is doing that and then like 17 other things.

Jeff O'Neill (38:00)

Yeah. The idea that anything could happen is not really at stake in Dickens, except for maybe Christmas Carol. We have one interesting. We're going to talk about the, I think the one speculative element in the entire work of Dickens. It's been a while since I've looked over the whole work of Dickens, so forgive me, Internet, if I'm not quite right on that. But you're. You're absolutely right in that regard, which is this reality, the fabulism, the not quite magical realism, because that's its own literary tradition, but certainly in that vein of. Of things that wouldn't happen in real life can happen here, and they matter. And they're not just there to be strange. They're there to give a different perspective on what we've experienced and what we've.

Rebecca Schinsky (38:38)

Rusty wrote the introduction to the paperback version that I have, and he says in the introduction that he was inspired by the capaciousness of the immense epics of India. So if you've read some of The Indian mythology. Like I had to read a chunk of the Mahabharata in my yoga teacher training and I was, was like, oh, I kind of get that. There is so much going on and these stories are working on so many levels and Rushdie certainly doesn't expect his readers to be scholars of any of that. But he's giving you a sense of what it feels like to be in that place. That India is cacophonous and crowded and the story feels like you're wandering around and it's absurd, but it's also really self assured. Just a huge undertaking. But I never felt like he was out over his skis.

Jeff O'Neill (39:28)

No, I mean it's even hard to. What would even that look like? Right. It's so even beyond what we think of normal skiing that I don't even know what Alberto skis would have felt like. But. But I agree with you. And it has, you know, it's, it's a little bit of a U note when we see it and we've talked about this and again discussions we've had about other books that as not a part of this show, but it has that, that zing in it. Like when we read White Noise. I know that was your. When we read White Noise, it's sort of. That was your first reading experience and you can sort of feel like there's a. There's juice to it. Right. And that is electrifyingly different. And you don't get it all the time. And even the books we've talked about here, you always don't get it to this degree. At the same time it's dizzying and incomprehensible and can be quite frustrating. It's extraordinarily long and that's part of the journey as well. So why does this matter? Like what is. Is the world different? Different before or after? Like how different is it? And the answer is yes. I mean there was a lot of writing that came quickly after this, especially amongst Indian Anglo Indian writers, to the point that there was sort of a post Rushdie cabal. Like people would get late, they get slapped with the post Rushdie or they're trying to be Rushdie label, which is a great compliment to the originator or something like this. If you get a post hyphen U. That's very interesting. We're going to talk about in my. That's what literature's metaphor Chutney as the central or one of these central metaphors here years Rushdie invented this idea of chutney fication as a model of cultural experience. Right. And we can talk about that means. But for this book to win and then win multiple times into the future and sell so well is represents a kind of reckoning and awareness of especially the English colonial project. Right. Like as it's, it's, it's surprising to read this again and see how little time and interest Rushy seems to be had for taking shots at English rule of India sort of up until 1947. Clearly not, you know, clearly not a fan of it. It's not like, like we should have stayed under there. But it's also not. The book is not just like screw the British and look what they've done to us. That's not what the book is about. And that is an interesting idea of thinking about a post colonial project. Is then what's left in its wake? Because the thing that's left by the British, but it's left by this, this artificial multicensory rule. There's an implicit critique of that forced making and there's actually inside of that a forced critique of really politics writ large. I don't think there's any, no figure here. Even the great ones that have, you know, had Oscar winning roles done in their stead escape his satire, his skepticism and out and out deflation. So this capaciousness is very interesting too. We move out of postmodernism to multiculturalism I think is the quickest word and we've sort of lost that grain. I don't know what they're doing in academia now, if the academics out there can tell me, but to re. Engage with the specificity of culture and the blendingness of cultures like we talked about postmodernism with pensionist or the jester dancing through the grave. You know, the, the ruined castle, the multicultural movement and the post postmodernist movement is much. It's even more disjointed and less of a coherent whole. But you can see in Rushdie interest in the specificity in culture and that people's lives are actually at stake here. Like, all right, the project of liberal history as we know it maybe fell apart during modernism, but there's still bodies out there, man. There are still people being born and dying and wars being fought. And I'm not going to you I the writer here going to abdicate any sort of political awareness because of the impossibility of whatever or the end of whatever. History's not over. People are still being born and dying. And that has import. And what are we going to do about that? And your culture is different than Mine. And they're not all available. Not all the same, but they're all available. They're all interesting. They're all worthy of inclusion and introspection and commingling. So I think that's. That's what we really get here. And then this is VS Naipold won the Booker and it was the first of the Commonwealth quote unquote writers to really, you know, he wins the Nobel Prize. Derek Walcott does a little bit later. But Rushdie is a cultural moment. No, none of them were as read as wildly. If you're listening to this show and you've heard of Rushdie, you may not have heard of Vs. Naipaul and Derek Walcott. And that's fine, but it's indicative of something. And so I think that's where you can sort of see how. How, you know. So there's so many books that are still living in. I don't know if it's a shadow because I don't know if it would have happened anyway. But follow Midnight's Children and follow Rushdie and that are interested. I guess that's the best way of putting interested in so many of the same things Rushdie is still interested in. Does that sound about right to you, Rebecca? What did I miss there?

Rebecca Schinsky (44:16)

Oh, yeah, I think. I think that's right there. You have a great sentence in here in our notes that I just don't want us to miss about the profane and the profound playing tiddlywinks while the angels raise rain fire. Yeah, and just that mixing of popular low culture with high culture, with mythology, with, like, what the largest, possible, most capacious understanding of multiculturalism is. And I think Rushdie is a very, like, okay, everybody in the pool kind of writer. Like, everybody. Every culture, every kind of food, every smell. Like, he's so concerned with bodies in this book, with the actual stuff of bodies. There's Salim, we are given to understand, is ugly and has a huge weird nose. And so much is made about Salim's nose. Then there's a character who is defined by his knees. Salim's mother has a huge butt that Salim refers to as his.

Jeff O'Neill (45:14)

Salim's son has giant ears.

Rebecca Schinsky (45:17)

Yeah. And the senses are such a part of it. Like, it is sensual in that. That definition of the words that Salim understands things through scent. His son understands things through, like, an extra power of hearing. The ways that we experience the world directly are so on the page. And Rushdie is just so, I think, interested in and comfortable with human bodies in a way that we just don't encounter in fiction very often. There are so many bodily functions. There's so many like there's poop and there's so much snot.

Jeff O'Neill (45:50)

Is this the great snot novel? Is this the greatest snot novel of all time?

Rebecca Schinsky (45:54)

I think it might be Apex Mountain for snot that also feels of a particular moment and it feels electrifying and it goes to that. Yes, this is what it is to be a person. This is what it is to be in a body for a writer to be so heady but also like for the characters to be so fully embodied and in a really gross. And not just in like disgusting gross, but you know, big gross way I found to be really exciting and so unusual.

Jeff O'Neill (46:26)

Yeah. And I think you can see even to my Midwestern like pure puritan descended upbringing feels transgressive even to talk about. It's. It's not as. It's not like erotic. I mean there's sex in the book, but it's not erotic. It's not exploitative. There's. There's very few like titillating sort of situations. But just to talk about butts and talk about noses and snots and all that stuff, it gives me like my shoulders go up because I was told not to talk about that sort of thing. And you could certainly understand how the, I don't know the, the. The arrival of a book that will talk about bodies like this, especially in England, which is, you know, improper and there's like a whole tradition of propriety there would have felt transgraph in its own way. Let's. So let's. We're going to talk more about what the book means and about here in a second. I do want to talk about a little bit more about Rushdie because I don't. There's a couple things to know. Like I think the idea of Rushdie is super fascinating and what he is trying to do and who he is are linked. But he becomes a public figure very quickly. And his pub. He's public about being public. Like there are jokes or not jokes. There's. He's included in Bridget Jones Diary the movie as himself with the understanding that everyone already knows that Salman Rushdie is the kind of person that would go to a party and be married to famous people like that. Like there's like a meta joke about his fame. And then of course his fame and his political and artistic interest. In mid. Excuse me in Satanic Verses representation of Muhammad gets him in trouble with ayatollah who issues a fatwa which is basically you should die. Like, someone should kill you, and there's a bounty on your head. Head. And that is real. Like, I think one thing that's happened and this happens in history. And he talks about this actually how the farther you get from history, it seems inevitable and calcified, but in the moment, it seems incomprehensible and strange and totally contingent. I think this has actually sort of happened to this. This is a real thing. Like, he had translators of his work in other countries were murdered. Like, there was. People died. He was attacked. There was a failed bomb plot. Like, this was a real thing. He was under British protection for many, many years.

Rebecca Schinsky (48:28)

He had security details for, like, decades, decades.

Jeff O'Neill (48:31)

And if you live through the 80s and 90s, as with emerging consciousness, you sort of knew this was happening already. And I. I don't. I can't think of an antecedent for this at all. And that's how transgressive it was, certainly to the theocracies in some of the places where the religions he was interested in talking about and taking the piss out of didn't like it to the point where the guy has to die. And our understanding, in fact, my memory. Right. For knife and is that person who attacked him wasn't responding directly to that, but to radicalization online and other things. Remember?

Rebecca Schinsky (49:06)

Yes. Yeah, he cites the person who attacked him. Cites, like, I mean, got radicalized on YouTube watching the kinds of videos that get served to young men who spend too much time on YouTube. And it was sort of an indirect. It wasn't a message that someone should go kill Salman Rushdie, but it was about the kinds of ideas that Rushdie represents. To your point, about Rushdie showing up in Bridget Jones's diary, like, he eventually moves to the US where he feels safer than he felt overseas. And he starts refusing to let the fatwa define his life anymore. He just starts insisting on going out. He sort of develops a reputation as, like, a bit of a playboy. There's some, like, is Salman Rushdie a bad boyfriend? So it's a press that's out there, but was so well known and the name was so recognizable to just like Normie watching network television that there's a 1993 Seinfeld episode where a whole subplot is about Kramer thinking that he sees Salman Rushdie at the gym and that, like, everybody in the world of Seinfeld knows who Salman Rushdie is. And the expectation is that most people watching the show just on what, like, NBC would have picked that up. And they even do a whole bit about how it's salmon, not salmon, it's not the fish. Like, I can't think of an author who comes anywhere close to having that sort of profile. Like, the best really bad analog I got would be like. It would be like, I don't know, somebody writing a joke into a show today about, like, thinking they saw Carlo Nousgaard at the gym, but like, which no one would nearly.

Jeff O'Neill (50:38)

No, no one would get.

Rebecca Schinsky (50:39)

Yeah, no one would get it.

Jeff O'Neill (50:40)

Wouldn't even know if. They wouldn't even know what he looks like. To think they saw him at the same time. Yeah, he's married a lot of times. I guess we'll put it that.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (50:48)

That.

Jeff O'Neill (50:48)

And I have here probably our greatest champion of good faith freedom expression, one that discomforts many, including me sometimes, often. And I put him in a rare and necessary category of an intellectual, a crucial intellectual gadfly. This is a term that Alcibiades used to describe Socrates. Alcibiades, who became the politician slash general who tried to invade Sicily. And it all went balls up. As I think they actually. That's actually a Greek term term.

Rebecca Schinsky (51:15)

Is that the technical term?

Jeff O'Neill (51:17)

And his teacher was Socrates. And Socrates would come to him and talk to him about what he should be doing and what the good life is, morality. And he was like, just get away. Socrates is just so annoying. Like. Like this fly that's always around me. And what that is is that that's the intrusion of. Not better angels. I don't want to use the divinity of it, but like those. Those ideas that you probably believe to be true, that you somehow don't want to or can't or uncomfortable following or giving full shift shrift. So I think he remains. He remains that and I welcome that and I honor that, even as I sort of want to brush him off, you know, when I get out of this. Did you have horse flies when you were growing up that would get you. When you got out of the pool? I think that's how he thinks. Just get. Come on, just get out of here.

Rebecca Schinsky (51:58)

Yeah, he's challenging, but he's also, like, so gleeful. There's this sense of whimsy.

Jeff O'Neill (52:03)

He's not a scold. He's. He's an intellectual gadfly, but he's not a scold at all. That.

Rebecca Schinsky (52:06)

That's a great and a real glimmer in Rushdie's eye. You can tell he had a great time writing this.

Jeff O'Neill (52:15)

You can't not have loved writing this and made this book. I don't think that would be a real Wild thing to.

Rebecca Schinsky (52:20)

What a labor.

Jeff O'Neill (52:21)

Yeah. How about your first exposure? What was your first time reading this book?

Rebecca Schinsky (52:25)

Oh, my gosh. So I have technically read this book before, but I have not, in practice read this book. This was, like, the second book that we read in my, I think, you know, like, world fiction class my freshman year of college. And I was allowed to sign up for that class because of AP English credits. So I, like, skipped past 101, 102. And that meant that I was in this fiction class with a bunch of juniors and seniors who probably had a better chance at understanding Rushdie.

Jeff O'Neill (52:56)

I don't know that two more years of being in your late teens are going to help you all that much. Probably, maybe. Yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (53:01)

But it was like, the first book in that class was Things Fall Apart, which.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (53:05)

Great. Love it.

Rebecca Schinsky (53:06)

I understand it. The second book was Midnight's Children. And I remember starting it, and, like, no one had told me, you're supposed to be confused or if you're confused, that's part of the experience. Like, there was no laying the groundwork about postmodernism. I don't know what the hell I thought I read. I do remember being really glad that my professor gave us the option to, like, write your paper on these ideas. I as expressed through Things Fall Apart, Midnight's Children or this other third title. And that I just wrote a whole paper about that.

Jeff O'Neill (53:40)

That was no Monty hall problem for you. You knew which door you were opening that right away. Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (53:45)

And so, like, as I started this, I recognized that, like, Salim calls his sister the brass monkey. And I recognized a couple other just big, memorable phrases. But there wasn't, like, a scene in this book that felt familiar to me.

Jeff O'Neill (54:00)

I can understand that.

Rebecca Schinsky (54:01)

It's wild. I had a real, like, there should be a warning label on this. If you' a freshman in college who's never read something like this, and then you just dive in. But it put me off of Rushdie for, like, more than a decade because I just felt so out of my depth that, like, why? Maybe I'm just not a good enough reader to read these kinds of books. And I gradually picked him back up a few more times in my adulthood. But this was my biggest and best Rushdie experience so far. And so, like, I want to say to listeners that have had something similar happen, whether it's with Rushdie or someone else, there's something really, really exciting and validating about going back to an author that at one point was too hard for you and discovering that with more years of reading and More books under your belt. Like now you can tackle it.

Jeff O'Neill (54:48)

I remember when I got to grad school and I hadn't read any Derrida and there's the Theory was all over the place. And I read my first Derrida and I was like, oh, oh, no, I can't. This Everyone, they just get this like, it's a primer. And it took me a while to get up to speed and get my sea legs under me. But also that it's Everfelt reading. And anyone who pretends otherwise either, maybe there are some that sort of grok it and they read it as simply as they would, you know, a Dan Brown novel. But I think for most of us mere mortals, the effort is part of it and it can be even more rewarding when you. It requires demands and thus you deploy a different kind of attention. Even that it's a. It's like going to the gym kind of sucks, but then also it feels good. Like you get reading endorphins from Rushdie. You get reading endorphins from this, if done correct.

Rebecca Schinsky (55:39)

Yeah. There's a. An episode of Dawson's Creek where the kids go to like when they're in their freshman year of college. And I think it's Joey Takes an English class where everyone is so the older kids are so insufferable about Derrida that I have still not touched it.

Jeff O'Neill (55:54)

It's very tough. I mean, today, even now, I'd have to. To warm up and remind myself.

Rebecca Schinsky (56:00)

When did you first encounter him?

Jeff O'Neill (56:02)

Oh, I think 2004. I was in grad school and I had always wanted to read Rushdie. I was super intimidated. I think the first one I tried to pick up was Satanic Verses because it was the, you know, fought one is everything was in the news and I was. I read the first repeat. He's like, whoa, okay, put the lid back on that thing. And then I picked up east west, which is a collection of short stories which I really liked. And. And that gave me a little more confidence. Maybe I was a more. You know, this is my post trying to read Derrida experience. So I had a little bit of learning to ski and falling down as part of the process under my snowshoes. So that became a little more manageable for me. We talked about the reading experience here. Let's talk about some of the big ideas. Yeah. Because I have effortful reading. I'll tell my story here about trying to get it done for this is. I was going to blast through 200 pages, I guess two nights ago. I was telling you like, okay, it's 9 o', clock, I can settle in. I'll read a couple hundred pages and you know, two or three hours and I, my, I couldn't. I was like, this is pointless. What am I trying to do here? It's like, you know when you get drowsy by the side when you're driving, like, I need to pull over, I'm going to hurt somebody. That's what I was doing to my reading experience. So I just want to affirm for people that it's challenging, it's not impossible, but it isn't a leisure reading experience. It's lean in reading, not lean back kinds of reading. Here, here. Allow yourself to be. Feel overwhelmed. And I think that's part and parcel of the process. If you are, you know, if you get 200 pages into it or 100 pages into it and you're really like having an allergic reaction, then stop.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (57:33)

Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (57:34)

There's no plot in any conventional sense I have here. Aristotle could never. The poetics have no frame of reference for doing anything with this. It's an emotional, psychological, sacred, sexual, political, artistic, fabulous chronicle that attempts to convey a sense of the truth through invention, exaggeration, contention and scale. That's my note, that's my Cliff Notes version.

Rebecca Schinsky (57:53)

They're going to reprint Midnight's Children with Aristotle could never. Jeff o' Neill of Bookrum.

Jeff O'Neill (58:00)

It just is not interested in like ready made conventional plotting and shape just doesn't do well.

Rebecca Schinsky (58:08)

I will say also to the reading experience, most of the chapters are like 20ish pages. So I think that is helpful that the chunks that Rushdie divides the story up into are not, not.

Jeff O'Neill (58:18)

You can kind of reset if you need to like just get to the next little thing.

Rebecca Schinsky (58:22)

That's true. And they're not terribly big bites, I would expect. Just go in with the expectation that probably your reading speed will be half of what it normally is or a chapter will take you twice as long as you think. Like I found that a 20 page chapter took me about 40 minutes because there are just, there's just so much language and you need a little space to breathe. And then I would like put it down and take a lap around the house or do some dishes. Like a little break in between each of those 20 page chapters is helpful. As you said, this could fill a whole semester of a class. I think it would be a great candidate for like a month long read where you just read one chapter a day also because it doesn't have a super discernible plot. There's never a moment where you're like on the hook or a cliffhanger of I've gotta keep going. So it really does land lend itself to a more, I think not leisurely, but just a more paced out reading. Like, I wish that I had given myself more time to read it. And I also wish that I had finished it farther in advance of this recording. I finished it three days ago and I have just continued to have new things bubble up. Like this is the thing my brain is still doing in the background when I'm walking the dog or taking a shower. It's like, oh, it's this thing and what about this other thing thing? And that's a signal about how interesting and powerful the work is. But also just like give yourself some space to have a lot of ideas and reactions to it because the book will generate that. And that's just such a rare gift. It is such a rare thing to finish a book and still be thinking about it in a way that makes it feel even richer days or weeks later.

Jeff O'Neill (60:01)

One of the luxuries of having read something before, one of the joys of rereading and the uses of rereading, reading. And I really learned this through teaching where if it was my first time teaching a text, I really needed to have a longer lead time. I needed some marination, I need some fermentation time. But if I'd read it before, I kind of had some of the base notes built in. And then for me it was like, if I could read it the couple days before, then the details stayed fresh because that's the thing I tend to lose with a longer gestation period. So I finished this yesterday afternoon, but I've been reading it on and off for four or five days. And I can remember some of the pieces that stick out too. I think there's a fractal quality to this book too, where.

Rebecca Schinsky (60:41)

Great word.

Jeff O'Neill (60:42)

If you read like 50 pages of it, you kind of get the. You kind of get what the deal is with it. You're not going to get it all, but it crystallizes out and refracts out kind of like a snowflake, where it's not the whole snowflake, but you can get these pieces because of how he writes, but also what he's trying to do is this part versus whole, the one versus many. These. Some of these moments can stand alone, but they become richer if you see the connective tissue. But also you can. You could get rid of that one thing. And the whole thing doesn't fall apart. Right. Even some of the quote unquote plot points of whose dad is who's and what happens. Like, maybe I'm wrong here, but if you miss the reveal of who was whose dad, does it really. No, I mean, it's not. This is not the Sixth Sense, where if you missed, like the last nine minutes, you're like, what the hell was that thing about?

Rebecca Schinsky (61:33)

Right. Yeah. I think that's also why we're this far into this episode and we're not doing a whole lot of here's what happens, here's what happens. Here's another thing, because things do happen and there are strings for you to follow, but that is so secondary to just, like the artistic exercise. And when you were talking about both the part and the whole, this, to me feels like standing in front of like a wall size, like pointillist painting, like that big Surratt that they have at the Art Institute in Chicago, where the closer you get, the more of the tiny details that you see. And most of them are meaningless, but a few of them are really, really important and all of them are necessary for the making of the whole thing. And that, like, movement between being up close to tiny details and zooming out to just try to see the whole picture or let the. The whole vibe of this book wash over you are both really important and valuable parts of the experience.

Jeff O'Neill (62:26)

Yeah. You'll probably hear us and I'm going to transition one. Probably talk about our favorite moments and lines and like many stories, because I think they're as indicative as anything else. But my favorite one comes pretty early, is this doctor is going to see a patient, and the patient's a young woman, and because of decorum, you got to take a look at body parts to see what's wrong. Wrong.

Rebecca Schinsky (62:46)

My favorite bit, too.

Jeff O'Neill (62:47)

The. The. The father won't let him see her naked or even at the hole. So there's this white sheet and there's a 7 inch hole cut in it. And the doctor is then allowed to examine whatever can fit in that hole. If her knees giving her a problem or toe, whatever. But it gets closer and closest to towards base metaphor areas here, I guess, is what we're saying. And then eventually. So the doctor then falls in love with. With this patient by seeing just these random pieces of her. But over time, he can start to put it together until finally sees the face. And by the time the actual sheet falls, it's not a reveal, but it is a synthesis of all the things that he's seen before. So I think some of the great writers can teach you or give you little hole. Give you little holes to see the work through. And I think this story is not a bad one in that regard, which is if you look at these things individually, you can kind of take them one by one and then you can start to put together a piece rather than throwing open the door to the street fair and being like, whoa, look at all this stuff going on. Like, I thought that was so beautiful. And then Rushdie has it in his bag to have these fable, like, very beautiful, very self contained things. Like, I think a lot of writers, that little scene could be the best thing they ever wrote.

Rebecca Schinsky (64:04)

Yeah, yeah. And it's like, it's early in the book. It's so memorable. And it becomes a recurring motif in several ways. These like, things that are part of bigger things or things that you experience bit by bit and then you construct the whole thing. And I think that that mode also allows Rushdie and Salim to create some distance for the characters from the more horrific things that they experience. There are several points where I found my myself being like, oh my God, the thing he just described is terrible.

Jeff O'Neill (64:35)

It's like the firebombing of Dresden, but for India. Like, it's nuts. Yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (64:39)

But the tone of the book is light in point. Like, there's a kind of lightness to the way the book flows and there is this whimsy to it and a playfulness to the way that Rushdie writes that it really like, obscures the horror of the things that happen to the characters. It makes them more approachable for us. But his way with language just allows us to, I think, get closer to some of those details than we're comfortable doing otherwise. And then other writers are able to take us. Like, one of the things that happens in this book is that as a young boy, Salim is hiding in a laundry basket in a bathroom and he can see through it. Like, I imagine this thing is a big wicker basket that a kid can hang out in. And he, while he's in there, his mother comes into the bathroom and she discovers that he's having an affair. Or he discovers that she's having an affair because he's heard her on the phone and now she's in the bathroom unwrapping her sari. He is seeing her whole butt, which he calls the black mango. And then he sees her masturbating. And the way that he reveals this to us is secrets. A man's name never before glimpsed motions of the hands. And you have to kind of really be.

Jeff O'Neill (65:54)

And he can be subtle. You're right. He totally can be subtle when he can do it all. I mean, that's what I'm saying. He can kind of do it every once.

Rebecca Schinsky (66:00)

Yeah. It's like, oh, that's what's happening here. Where. And it just. You're like, okay, yes, of course this is happening to this character because this is the kind of world he lives in. But when you take like half a step back to realize what a wild situation Rushdie has put his characters in, and that he then allows us to figure out this thing that Selima is observing. And this happens over and over in the book where just like a drop in of a subtle sentence about what is a very gross overt kind of action. And that contradiction I found to just. That's so electric to me where you're like, holy shit. Like, this poor kid, first of all, that this is happening to him. He's gonna be in therapy forever. But that like, other writers would make this into, like, that's just told in a different way in most other writers hands. And that Rushdie does it with like 7 words and lets you realize, oh my God, that's what's happening here. It's almost cinematic.

Jeff O'Neill (66:58)

I love this point you have here about. It feels like the book could go on forever. Could you say more about that?

Rebecca Schinsky (67:01)

It does. It does just feel like it could go on forever. There was a point where Salim is. He keeps telling us that he's going to wrap the story up. He keeps telling Padme he's going to get around to the end. And then he keeps on not getting there, instead going down the side path.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (67:17)

And.

Rebecca Schinsky (67:17)

And it just feels like this world is so full that Salim is never going to run out of side characters or new people in his life that he's bumped into, that he can develop mythology for like of this Thousand and One Other Midnight's Children. He tells us the backstories of a couple of them. But like, I could imagine hanging out for a book that has all of them at some point, or that it kind of feels like somewhere Salim is still sitting in a room with Padma telling her her more parts of the story that didn't make it onto the page. And I. I really loved that. Like, I wasn't glad when I got to the end of this 530 page effortful reading experience. It was just like, maybe go on, please keep on.

Jeff O'Neill (68:02)

I mean, it's not a surprise that Salim's son is born with giant ears because he needs a listener, right? Like He. He needs someone to be the ultimate audience. And there's, you know, it's not the most subtle of metaphors, but this idea that there's still more stories to tell, there's still more listening to be done and more saying to be done. But like, there's an element of like, yeah, he's. He's had to contain it in some way and he's just barely done so in the form of 649 pages. But uncontainableness is one of the things he's interested in. Like things bleeding over into other things, like this experience and this memory and paternity and maternity. And I'm not this, but I am that. I'm part of that. And I'm a twin and I'm love with my sister, but I'm also in love with a ghost. Ghost. And there's just no borders. It just bleeds out in the ever. And it's so interesting that we talked about Oedipus recently because that. That feels like a trap. That feels like a swish watch of a trap. There's nowhere else to go. And that this sort of logical contradiction of determinism is so clear and so finely constructive and arid. Where this has. Is dealing with many of the same issues was like, am I in control? Control of my fate? How subject am I to history? But it's. It does so with a big open world. Which makes the question seem even more intractable then, right? Because you could go anywhere and do anything and yet I'm still my parents kid. And the thing parents do is fill their kids with poison. Like, what do I do with that? Like, it's pretty remarkable.

Rebecca Schinsky (69:26)

It's so rich. This world is just so rich.

Jeff O'Neill (69:29)

Yeah, let's do intrusive thoughts.

Rebecca Schinsky (69:31)

Oh my God, I had so many intrusive thoughts.

Jeff O'Neill (69:34)

Some. I have this. And tell me, let me try this on for size. Since this was your first quote, unquote, real reading with it, I'm curious. You have fresher beginner's eyes than I do. I still think Rushdie is overrated. I think the idea of Salman Rushdie.

Rebecca Schinsky (69:47)

You mean underrated.

Jeff O'Neill (69:48)

Underrated. Pardon me. He's underrated because he's such a figure and a public figure that he is more known than the books. But I think this. We still haven't caught up with him or like. Like our understanding of what his project is exceeds what the modern. Whatever modern iconography of him is.

Rebecca Schinsky (70:08)

Give him the Nobel, you cowards.

Jeff O'Neill (70:10)

All right, now you're on my side. This is why we did this, we can close down the show. Thank you so much. Again, we haven't read everything, so who knows? There's a lot of people out there, but boy, oh, boy.

Rebecca Schinsky (70:19)

Yeah. Not a knock on anyone who's won the Nobel, but that every year when the Nobel odds makers come out and they tell us who has a good chance and Rushdie is nowhere near the top of the list, what are we doing?

Jeff O'Neill (70:32)

I mean, I think if I have a big red button that said this person wins a Nobel if I put the right name in the thing, I think I'm. I haven't thought about this too much. But just as you said that, like, I think I put Rushdie in there. I don't know. I mean, I have to think about a little bit more, but I think that's where I go.

Rebecca Schinsky (70:44)

Yeah, I do think that he's underrated. And maybe it is because he became so famous and so well known and that sort of. The legend of Salman Rushdie exceeds in some ways contemporary people's familiarity or understanding of his work. But also he makes it look so easy. Like the writing has that lightness to it that seems effortless. And he's not out there investing in the legend of Salman Rushdie, the turtleneck clad writer. He's not, like, talking about how hard it is to do this work. He really lets the book speak for itself. And I think that sometimes that, like, self mythologizing benefits literary writers and helps them in a way, campaign for recognition, campaign for something like the Nobel. I don't know that he's interested in it. I have a hard time guessing if he cares. But to think about what his work does and also what his later work has meant in terms, especially in this moment in the world, talking about freedom of speech and freedom of expression. That is a body of work. The Nobel is given for the person's body of work that I think really deserves recognition. Like, I'm just gonna be mad if he never gets it.

Jeff O'Neill (71:56)

Yeah, I think too, I'm sure. I mean, it's hard for a writer not to care about something like that. But one thing in this current round of press he's done for his new book, he has talked about being pretty thrilled to be talking about the work, like the stories rather than the knife attacks or the fat war. The other things go into it, because he gets to go back. He just loved. He loves storytelling, he loves books, and he loves reading. And it really comes through in the kind of work he produces. So that's one thing here I. I had a similar. I Had a related intrusive thought. If Rushdie had gone full pension. Full pension. Is he more or less famous?

Sponsor/Ad Reader (72:30)

Oh.

Jeff O'Neill (72:31)

Or, or how. Let me wrinkle that high. More or less highly regarded started.

Rebecca Schinsky (72:38)

It's a great question because the hermit.

Jeff O'Neill (72:41)

Shtick has done wonders for pictures.

Rebecca Schinsky (72:43)

Yeah, it's. I, Well, I think you can't answer this about Rushdie without exploring the fatwa variable that there are the books.

Jeff O'Neill (72:53)

Let's say he still gets it. He still gets it.

Rebecca Schinsky (72:55)

So he, he gets the fatwa, but he is not out being it.

Jeff O'Neill (72:59)

No one knows what he looks like. He's a ghost, he's a myth, he's a rumor. Maybe someone saw him at Zabar's. We don't know.

Rebecca Schinsky (73:04)

Yeah.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (73:05)

Then.

Rebecca Schinsky (73:06)

Then his. I think then his stock does climb. Like Pynchon was the highest rated American writer in the Nobel odds this year. And I think it has more to do with how elusive he seems. Like Pynchon is wonderful, don't get me wrong, but hard pressed. I would give it to Rushdie first.

Jeff O'Neill (73:24)

Yeah. My, my last one though, that you can mop up your intrusive thoughts feels braver and bolder than the multi, multi textual cast that come after. Like there's an audaciousness to the point of, you know, violating some of the truisms of sort of the modern cultural writing. Like write what you know. You can't write a white person if you're a black person. Vice versa. That this project is not possible if those rules. Rushdie tries to speak. He just impossible. And I think. Yeah. So I. It just because he does not heed that admonition either in his heart or his head or I think likely both. You can't do this if you limit yourself to write who you are in your own experience. And I think it's an interesting counterbalance to the representation discourse and I think that it's a worthy one. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm not trying to do that. Don't read this the wrong way. We need lots of stories by a lot of different people. And I want to have room for writers to explore and do the unwieldy unruliness that rushes Rushdie and people like Rushdie try to do.

Rebecca Schinsky (74:28)

Yeah. Just wildly free in where he allows himself to go. Like what doesn't he allow himself to put on the page.

Jeff O'Neill (74:37)

That would be a great. That would have been a wonderful topic for your freshman paper that you cowardly ran from.

Rebecca Schinsky (74:43)

Oh man, that would have been such a word salad. I can't imagine. So my intrusive thoughts. I thought so many times, how the hell did he keep track of all of this?

Sponsor/Ad Reader (74:53)

This.

Jeff O'Neill (74:54)

Like, does he. Do you think if you plotted it out, like, you know, Beautiful Mind style like you have here, does it all connect?

Rebecca Schinsky (75:00)

What kind of. But even the parts that don't always. Like, we don't get the ends of every story. Like, what kind of red string murder board, Beautiful Mind situation did he have going in order to keep track of, like, the main character's lines? And when things are getting revealed, like, we find out that Salim's parents are not. Not all necessary. His biological parents. Other people had family secrets as well that come out. But when do we find that out? Who knows what in the different scenes, like, it's all of that juggling happens. And it does, as I said, seem pretty effortless on the page. Like, I just. Like, this is such a feat of organization in addition to being so creative.

Jeff O'Neill (75:41)

Well, and geography and timelines and languages and names. Yeah. Just there's of a lot. There's a lot of logistics.

Rebecca Schinsky (75:47)

I found myself trying to map a family tree on one of the blank pages at the back of the book just to remember who people were. And then I thought, how come there's not a family tree in the front of this book? Like, if ever a book needs a family tree. But so many of the truths about people's family relationships are surprises in the book that you, like, can't really give a useful tree at the beginning.

Jeff O'Neill (76:08)

And I think you wouldn't even want that. Even though it would just distill it down to like, just a straight line relationship. Like, if he's about anything, he's not about. Yes. This straight line connects that person to that person. And that's the.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:17)

Oh, yeah. I gave up on the project of trying to map who the people were. I had the impulse at first, but, yeah, just so much about bodies. I just kept noticing that because we just don't get that very much in fiction. Vegetables are everywhere. Like, you're gonna talk about chutney later and I'm not gonna walk all over that. But, like, Salim's nose is a cucumber. His penis is a cucumber. He's telling the story in a pickle factory. There's stuff about preservation. And then I couldn't stop thinking about how it felt very Wes Anderson to me at points, like, deeply playful and absurd. There is something cinematic about the way the story is told. That Salim zooms into things and then steps out and sometimes talks about it overtly.

Jeff O'Neill (76:59)

There's discussions about, like, let me. I think it says something like, indulge me in a cinematic moment. A long shot, then a close up. Like it's on the page when the book starts.

Rebecca Schinsky (77:08)

We don't know that he's talking to Padma. That happens. Like that reveal happens in a second or third chapter. And that felt like a pan out of like, oh, we've started this movie and now we're jumping out into a frame that I didn't even know was there. But that ability to be like, playful and absurd and stylistic, but not. And I think Anderson does this well. But not Tweet was really, really fun. And it's just a colorful.

Jeff O'Neill (77:34)

I like that comparison to other wood that we all could be parodied because it means you have a unique style. Like, this is always my thing about one's like, oh, look, you know, you can make this as a. You know what? Most people are so forgettable and most works of art have no point of view and feel like pale imitations of a pale imitation. That I'm thrilled when something is bold enough and identifiable enough that one could do a satire parody of it. But the question then is, what point does the style override, metaphorically interfere, brush over truths or difficulty or complication? And it certainly. I think you could. Whatever critiques you could level at Wes Anderson, you can't level them at Rushdie and maybe vice versa at the same time. I thought that was a really interesting point too. Notable quotes. Oh, Lord of mercy, I have so many. We're going to have to do a couple each. Rebecca, what would you like to do?

Rebecca Schinsky (78:28)

Well, there's one that he repeats several times. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence. You were mentioning Oedipus recently, and so much of this story is concerned with how are we just bound to our fates. Is our story written without our control? What can we do about the world and the circumstances that we find ourselves living in? And that just succinctness of most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence. I thought was really powerful. I said it earlier. You have to understand just one life. You have to swallow the whole world. So much of what I pulled out are just wonderful descriptions. A Sira nose. That's a nose to start a family on. The car that Salim's mother drives off in to have her affair, he describes as the vehicle of maternal perfidy. And I just had this wonderful. This is just wonderful.

Jeff O'Neill (79:26)

You know, I like that. You know, I'm all I Love that kind of thing.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (79:29)

So good.

Rebecca Schinsky (79:30)

But then you also get these philosophical moments like oh, eternal opposition of inside and out. Because a human being inside himself is anything but a whole, anything but homogenous. All kinds of every which thing are jumbled up inside him. And he is one person one minute and another the next. Uncork the body and God knows what you might permit to come tumbling out. And that kind of felt like. Like it just sums up the whole project to me. If we knew more about our sleep, what would we do differently? Would we go to bed at a consistent time or take steps to reduce interruptions to our sleep? With the all new Sleep Score, Apple Watch measures your bedtime consistency, interruptions and sleep duration. Then every morning it combines these factors into an easy to understand score from 1 to 100. So you'll know how to take the quality of yourself sleep from good to excellent. Introducing the new sleep score on Apple Watch. IPhone 11 or later required.

Jeff O'Neill (80:28)

Let's see. He, he. I mean there's so many microcosm moments I love when he describes just for a moment the Taj Mahal described as that mausoleum which has been immortalized on postcards and chocolate boxes and whose outdoor corridor stink of urine, whose walls are covered in graffiti treaty and whose echoes are tested by. Tested for by visitors. So like there's that up, down reality, the image, the icon, the history, the contemporary, the body and the representation. Like it's amazing. And that's just like kind of. That's a side note to a side note. It's amazing. Yeah, I love this scene where his mother goes to see someone who's promised her a prophecy about Salim before he's born. And he finds this huckster prophet who she thinks initially is levitating six inches above a ground like sort of a yogi from a cartoon or mythology or whatever. And then she screams. But then they find out later that it's a trick and that there's like a thin board that is, you know, coming out from the wall and it's six inches above the ground. But the way seating, weights lit and the angle of it, it's a, it's a, it's an illusion.

Rebecca Schinsky (81:36)

Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (81:37)

And he likes, likes, I think he likes the illusion more than he actually likes the supernatural bit of that. Like he likes that someone to the trouble to create a fantastical moment more than like if this guy was actually magic. Like that's one way of.

Rebecca Schinsky (81:49)

Yeah, I loved that, that moment also because it's believable in this world that Rushdie creates that somebody Might be levitating. I remember being like, oh, cool, we got people levitating now. And then, half a page later, you find out that it was a trick.

Jeff O'Neill (82:03)

And it.

Rebecca Schinsky (82:03)

That is more. Even more fun.

Jeff O'Neill (82:05)

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same. I. That one's a thinker, right. Where none of what he's saying is true or real. Pardon me. I'm now conflating them as I go. But is it true is a different question. That's a question about art and fiction and.

Rebecca Schinsky (82:21)

Yeah, and that's a. Tim o' Brien and the Things that Carried puts it as the true truth and the happening truth.

Jeff O'Neill (82:28)

Yeah. Right. That's good. I think this says there. This is a line. There was an oath not to doubt, bow down before God or man. I think Rushdie probably has that tattooed somewhere on his body, because that feels like a very. Rushdie and project. I love this too. As. As open and capacious as this work is. Salim says, the first lesson of my life. Nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time. Yes.

Rebecca Schinsky (82:50)

It's just too much that also.

Jeff O'Neill (82:52)

It's too much. God, look at this. The end. This. The. The implicit in the game is the unchanging two of things. The duality of up and down, good against evil. The solid rationality of ladders balances, the occult sinuosities of the serpent in opposition of staircase and cobra. We can see metaphorically all conceivable oppositions. Alpha against Omega, father against mother. Here, the war of Mary and Musa and the polarities of knees and nose. But I found very early in my life that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity. Because, as venture about to show, is impossible to slither down a ladder or to climb to triumph on the venom of a snake. Keeping things simple for the moment, anyway, goes on and on.

Rebecca Schinsky (83:28)

Yeah, so much about snakes too, in this book.

Jeff O'Neill (83:31)

I really like snakes. Yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (83:32)

Reality can have metaphorical content. That does not make it less real. Also a good blurb for the book as a whole.

Jeff O'Neill (83:38)

Right. And he does talk about, like, trying to understand the horrors of war and some of the real atrocities that happens here. The futility of statistics. During 1971, 10 million refugees fled across the borders of East Pakistan, Bangladesh, into India. But 10 million, like all numbers larger than 1001, that's an Arabian Nights reference. I mean, this is just all over the place. People refuses to be understood. Comparisons do not help. The biggest migration in the history of the human race. Meaningless. So what you do, specific ones and twos is little stories, little moments, little people could go on and on. For you, Rebecca.

Rebecca Schinsky (84:14)

I think it's for you. If you are down for the ride with a book and down with not always knowing what's going on or what all of the references mean. Also, you need to be good with moral ambiguity and with an author who isn't really interested in the moral of the story. That's not what Rushdie is about here or really ever.

Jeff O'Neill (84:40)

Yeah, that's true. If not, you know, linear plots we've talked about long since all the warning signs of things that we've talked about. Again, they're not warning signs. They are features that may not be to everybody's taste. Again, as with most of the books we're going to talk about, if moral slash representational gavel wielders is something that you do or you find yourself, you know, inclined to that kind of reading, I think you might have a hard time with this.

Rebecca Schinsky (85:02)

I think this also just defies that kind of reading. Like.

Jeff O'Neill (85:05)

Yeah, right. And you know, this, this reminds me that there are additions. I really like the addition that I have. And it sounds like you're doing too, where he has an introduction to 30th anniversary. It's interesting that every 10 years is a moment to talk about this, like the 30, 40 and 50 re evaluations. But if you go to Thriftbooks, who is sponsoring this season of zero to well read, you can find for just $9 in acceptable condition a everyman's library that has an introduction by Anita Desai, which I have never seen. This particular.

Rebecca Schinsky (85:35)

I haven't seen that one.

Jeff O'Neill (85:36)

I almost bought it because I just wanted that, but I didn't. But you can also find other editions there. If you want these in multiple language, you can find that. It looks to me like the edition we have is the most commonly available paperback. Like that's the one that's in print and you can buy new, you can use it for six or seven dollars. But there's all sorts of interesting editions from around the world. This is the one where I actually think that that the one we have may have the best cover, but that is a low bar. It's kind of like in British Bake off when someone has to win the technical, but everyone's things are claggy or stodgy and blurping all over the place. It's not a high, but this is the best one. But you can find something over there. Thanks to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season. Immortal Question Time, Rebecca.

Rebecca Schinsky (86:19)

Let's do it.

Jeff O'Neill (86:20)

Here are the Questions we consider, what is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? And the Rst on Ali is who am I? Are all of these here? What do you want to say?

Rebecca Schinsky (86:34)

I mean it's about all of them.

Jeff O'Neill (86:36)

Yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (86:37)

And Rushdie even answers this for us in the introduction to the book. He says for all its surrealist elements, Midnight's Children is a history novel. Looking for an answer to the great question history asks us. What is the relationship between society and the individual, between the macrocosm and the microcosm? To put it another way, do we make history or does it make or unmake us? Are we masters or victims of our time? Huge echoes of Oedipus and of the Greeks all there. But he's. All of these are in the game at every level of the story. Just Rusi's interested in all of it.

Jeff O'Neill (87:14)

Yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (87:15)

And I think would just be a.

Jeff O'Neill (87:16)

Great head saying, I think maybe it's more interesting for this one to say which ones are less interested in. I think it's not actually that interested in what's the deal with good and evil because it's just people.

Rebecca Schinsky (87:24)

No, I also think less interested in what is the good life and what do I owe my neighbor. Less interested in the sort of grounded day to day experience questions and more in the how do I know what I know? What else?

Jeff O'Neill (87:39)

What do I owe my neighbors? Like, how do I get along? Like how do I. How do I be a person in the world where we have competing interests and ideas? I don't know that it's that worried. I mean people die. It's not as worried about that.

Rebecca Schinsky (87:49)

Well, I disagree though because like Salim is telling us through the whole story that the reason he's telling this story now and that there's urgency is that there's this like that which causes cracks in it, that he's. He's ill and he's dying and like there's this like press on him to get the story out and to make sure that Padma has this history of him and that it's going to be preserved after he goes. And so like I think one of the answers that Rushdie is giving here is how do you deal with this certainty of death is you document history so that you die, but the story carries on.

Jeff O'Neill (88:23)

I really like that. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing, Rebecca? This is a Rhetorical question. Because it just absolutely is. Salimi is writing this book in the process. It's about stories. Stories about stories are in this book. I don't know a million percent about stories. Unless there was actually a publishing house or something in. I don't know how it could be more about art and writing, to be perfectly honest with you.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (88:42)

Yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (88:42)

And that he tells us, and he tells Padma over and over that he's concerned with the form and with how he's telling this story to her. Like just. It's meta on. It's meta on, meta on meta.

Jeff O'Neill (88:54)

I mean, maybe to invert the question a little bit, it's more interested in story and storytelling than about art and writing. Like, yeah, it's not as interesting about writing and publishing books and art for art's sake or whatever. River it's like he has a interpersonal task he wants his story to do, which is to give Padma and us and posterity a sense of who he is. You know, writing Kilroy was here across the flag of oblivion. I think that's a Faulkner quote, if I can remember that correctly. Though it's probably a Dave Matthews, as.

Rebecca Schinsky (89:21)

You were saying that I was like, damn, Jeff, good work.

Jeff O'Neill (89:25)

Look that up. Or Vonnegut, one of those. I'm sure it's been misistributed and I hope it's real. If not, I'll take credit for. For it. Jeff o', Neill could you get the gist from watching the Signal adaptation? I think no.

Rebecca Schinsky (89:39)

If there were one.

Jeff O'Neill (89:40)

I think there were.

Rebecca Schinsky (89:41)

There's not a Signal adaptation, but there is an adaptation. Rushdie wrote an adaptation in 2012 that was directed by Deepa Mehta and he also served as the narrator of the movie telling the story. The reviews indicate that you could get the major beats of the realistic elements of the plot, but that all of the of the surrealism and the magic and the weirdness are stripped out.

Jeff O'Neill (90:02)

It's a beloved conundrum like you have that once you get into that maybe could be is weird. It's hard.

Rebecca Schinsky (90:08)

I'm kind of fascinated that Rushdie allowed that to be done. The original the Times interview by Rachel Saltz in 2013. She says to do cinematic justice to Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, it would take a razzle dazzle entertainer with Bollywood flair and a literary bent. Someone equally at home with comedy and allegory, ghosts and little snot nosed boys, Indian history and Indian myth. In short, through some kind of hocus pocus, abracadabra, Mr. Rushdie is fond of pileups and lists without commas. A directorial equivalent of the author would need to be conjured. But there's little magic and even less sense of the storyteller as magician in the modest, respectful adaptation. So, like, just not the magic. I also think you shouldn't try that. Like, this book is doing things that only books can do. Much. As we talked off mic about how a Muppets version where Gonzo is salim because of the nose would be, like, deeply twisted and kind of fun. I just don't want to see it done.

Jeff O'Neill (91:07)

I was thinking. I feel like. Remember the phenomena that Slumdog Millionaire was, you know, similar. Similar Milou. But also has a inside, outside magical realism. You wake up in a latrine, but you're gonna win a million dollars on tv. Feels like a Diet Coke version of some of the things Rushdie is trying to do. I just don't think it. Do it like. But you would need someone. And I'm not great with. I don't have a wide palette of indie filmmakers to. But I feel like you'd need. I don't want Baz Luhrmann to do it. But you would need something like that. Like big, bold and crazy and strange and not afraid to be weird and confusing and just extra times 100. How about. Okay, say we had to. We had. We were told by Apple we have to make it a disaster. Move an adaptation of this and the checkbook is open. Rebecca. And we can make it a movie, musical, TV series or something starring the Muppets. Which of these do you want to pick?

Sponsor/Ad Reader (91:59)

I.

Rebecca Schinsky (92:01)

Don'T know. I'm inclined to musical just because, like, the extra noise of it would be the meta.

Jeff O'Neill (92:08)

Ness that's inherent in a musical would be helpful.

Rebecca Schinsky (92:10)

Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (92:11)

To try to do this.

Rebecca Schinsky (92:12)

The thing I really thought about is how. I don't know if they still do it, but for years the Housing Works bookstore in New York would do these marathon readings of A Christmas Carol where, like, over the course of 24 hours, people would show up and read a chapter at a time. I think this would lend itself to that more than anything else. Like come to a marathon reading of Midnight's Children, maybe with, like, slideshows and music behind it. But there's not a bit of the story that I would want to give up because it's not really about the story. A musical could be. Gets you maybe closer to the experience than a movie or a TV series, certainly than the Muppets. But I don't know, maybe actually the chaos of the Muppets would get you there.

Jeff O'Neill (92:56)

Baz Luhrmann directs the Muppets in a musical adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Now We're Cooking with gas.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (93:04)

Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (93:04)

Now we're cooking with grass. That's a Thomas Pynchon thing to do. Yeah. I mean, again, most, as you can hear us say, mostly this is what story and storytelling and even the frame is oracular. Right. It's him narrating, reading, slash, writing to Padme, what he's talking for. That's what literature is. Metaphor. Let's go talk about chutney. Rebecca. Food and the senses are part and parcel. I think it's maybe my favorite version of this. Talks about. I think the idea of food and smell specifically, is that which resists borders. Right. And also, I'm sure all of the people listening had that experience of smelling something that, like, bang. Instantly takes you back, back. And you have, like, a corporeal. Like, your body feels like it's time hopping to some other place in a way that almost no other sense does. So I don't think it's a mistake that Salim and his family have giant smell receptacles because they are so interested in memory and place and time and food and smell and piss and Curry's cooking. He, you know, even. Even. And then also we learned that for most of his life, or a big chunk of his life, his nose is stopped up full of snot and he gets his sinuses cleared. But it's that moment that he loses this other telepathic power. So we haven't talked about this at all, which is kind of weird. But the Midnights children all have various degrees of, like, little powers or abilities that are extra human. And Salim's is telepathy, where he can inhabit the minds of other people, but as soon as he's able to smell correctly with this giant organ, that goes away and it feels like a loss. But I think both in the terms of the story and the context and metaphorically, it's actually a gain or a different kind of the same thing because. Allows you to have extra sensory. Not extra sensory, but extra intellectual connections and attunements to the world and its mixtures and. And, you know, it's seeping out like it's hard to control a smell. Right. And perfumes are, you know, famously bad and also very, especially in the ancient world, lauded for their ability to cover up the mess of life. But he can then smell hope and love. And then the chutney, then, is the manipulation and concoction of food and Sensory experience, right? Yeah, it is. Can be anything. Like, go Wikipedia yourself what chutney is. It's like, well, it kind of could be anything, right? It could be savory, it could be sweet, it could be cool cooked. It's like chunkier than ketchup. Like, that's kind of the only thing it needs to be. Right? You know, using Indian spice or whatever. But like this idea and then the fermentation and often made out of pickles. And we get a fermented. We get a pickle factory and a fermented pickled umbilical cord. This idea of preserving, preservation, preservation. But also in the preservation, it alters it, right? It is not the thing that it was before. It is the version of that that can be preserved. So there you go. I think that you could do a whole. I'm sure there have been papers written about chutney and someone is working on a magazine chatgpt could probably suck them up and could spit it out for you. Miscellaneous trivia, adaptation rumors, misattributed quotes, etc. What do you think?

Rebecca Schinsky (96:08)

Okay, well, I'm glad that you talked about the bit with the perforated sheet, because that is my favorite of the bits in the book. But Rushdie is just really funny. Like, the way that that plays is really funny on the page, especially in this moment where, quote, pajamas fell from the celestial rump. Like, just come on.

Jeff O'Neill (96:26)

That's such a Tom Robbins line. You. I mean, people who like this, like that would like maybe a less effortful version of some of the softer, lighter notes of Rushdie. You can get a lot of them in Tom Robbins.

Rebecca Schinsky (96:36)

Pajamas fell from the celestial rump. Just incredible shit. Other miscellaneous. In 1984, Indira Gandhi sued Rushdie over one sentence in the book, which referred to a rumor that was widespread about her at the time. So, like, people have been coming for Rushdie since the very beginning and just this is a hell of a way to come back from your first book being panned.

Jeff O'Neill (97:01)

I've got a few. Rushdie said it's not autofiction or whatever, but it leaks in. So Salim goes to the grammar school that Rushdie went to kind of at the same age. Like, they overlap and connect, but they're not the same. But also not. Not them. This is a great anecdote. The Knopf dust jacket for the original, original book was pink. Salmon pink. In which, inaugurated, according to Rushdie himself, the salmon salmon problem plagued me forever after. And I didn't like it, which is hilarious. I've never seen that Cover. I don't even see it on.

Rebecca Schinsky (97:30)

I don't think I have either.

Jeff O'Neill (97:32)

This is my favorite, though. Pinch and invited, I think. I think Pinchin invited Rushdie over to his house for dinner. They hit it off. He's like. Seems like kind of a normal writerly type. And then I think Rushdie assumed they were going to be friends. Pincha never called and. Or saw Rifty ever again.

Rebecca Schinsky (97:46)

Yeah. And Rushdie, by many accounts, great at a party.

Jeff O'Neill (97:49)

Seems like an unbelievable hang.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (97:51)

Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (97:52)

You may not want to marry him or put a lot of chips in your relational basket with him for a long time, but I bet a night on the town with Salman rushdie in, like, 1987 was.

Rebecca Schinsky (98:01)

Yeah. I mean, you might not have wanted to be married to the 1987 version of him, at least the way it sounds in. I think he's coming around to being a better husband now from.

Jeff O'Neill (98:09)

Yeah. Fifth time. Ninth deck.

Rebecca Schinsky (98:12)

Practice.

Jeff O'Neill (98:12)

Hot takes. You did one already.

Rebecca Schinsky (98:14)

Yeah. It feels like Dickens on acid. One of the things that I like to move on from that, that I just was so entertained by was that Salim is just accidentally present at all of these historical events. And the hot take that I'm sure is not actually true is like, was this the inspiration for Forest Gump?

Jeff O'Neill (98:31)

Dude, I had a Forrest Gump thing here, too, and I took it out because you already had it in there. It's amazing. It's amazing.

Rebecca Schinsky (98:36)

Is Forrest Gump just Midnight's just children for normcore? White people like it. It really feels possible.

Jeff O'Neill (98:42)

Well, I would, like. What is the patient zero for this? Whatever you would call it, the Saleem slash Forrest Gump structure in which you have a regular person buffet around between major historical events.

Rebecca Schinsky (98:54)

I don't know.

Jeff O'Neill (98:55)

Does that happen in Twain? It doesn't feel like.

Rebecca Schinsky (98:57)

I don't think it's in Twain, but it's.

Jeff O'Neill (98:59)

Or Voltaire. It might be Candide.

Rebecca Schinsky (99:01)

Oh, I think you're right. I think it is candied.

Jeff O'Neill (99:03)

Anyway, I like those, though. I like these all the time.

Rebecca Schinsky (99:07)

And then there were just also moments where I felt like it's really unfair that Salim gets to wander around so freely in the stories. Because if you let your mind wander for a second and it will wander because just stuff is happening here, you risk missing important details. And I would find that that happened in my experience of reading it, where, like, a paragraph is going on for a whole page or, like, a sentence is going on for a whole page with very little punctuation and your eyes kind of start to glaze over. And then I start to think about, like, what I'm going to cook for dinner. And it's like, oh, shit, I don't know what has happened in this page. So let me go back and get it. And then there's some little detail buried in there that actually does turn out to be a thread that carries forward. And Salim is just like freewheeling it around. But we have to work, right?

Jeff O'Neill (99:51)

I like that. My hottest take is, if you haven't read this, I don't care what you think about Rushdie. I just don't. You can think whatever you want. You can have your opinions, but I don't personally care.

Rebecca Schinsky (99:59)

Well, here at Zero to well read, we really believe in doing the homework to earn your opinion.

Jeff O'Neill (100:04)

I mean, listen, I just, you know, let's. Let's do the homework. Rita likes I have 262666 by Roberto Balano. I mean, really, the. The great novel as Messes Ulysses. I think this is a gendered category, which I want to hang a lantern on that because in thinking about it. And I'd like to know that there was ducks Newsberry port that came out a couple years ago that I think is in this tradition. But like, it's an interestingly gendered. And let's get more cracks of pinata first for wild ladies doing these kinds of unruly, sprawling, difficult, messy points. So there we go.

Rebecca Schinsky (100:38)

I think the God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy bears some of the Rushdie surrealism DNA, but is much more approachable. So that's a good place to dip your toes into this kind of writing. Or you can go to another master who I also think is a little more approachable. With Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 100 Years of Solitude is often mentioned. And as if you like Rushdie, you will also like Garcia Marquez.

Jeff O'Neill (101:01)

I mean, I definitely get that, but also, no, because, like, it's just such a different reading.

Rebecca Schinsky (101:07)

It is a different reading.

Jeff O'Neill (101:08)

If there's an opposite title to. If there's a title that embodies the opposite of Midnight's children, it's 100 years of solitude.

Rebecca Schinsky (101:15)

Yeah, they are very different reading experiences. But like, if you're. It's a similar kind of work, I.

Jeff O'Neill (101:21)

Think as a reader, I think and I think they're interested in similar things, but the style is. Differences are remarkable and worth reading together. But it's funny to think about Rushdie writing 100. The idea of 100 years of solitude is like murder. That's a torture chamber for him. Cocktail party crib sheet. I'll do a couple here. Telepathy versus war is a central metaphor. Telepathy being connectedness, ultimate radical connectedness and war being ultimate radical separateness. So that's one you could take with you. What else you got, Rebecca?

Rebecca Schinsky (101:52)

So much as we've said about the question of fate and how much we do or don't control our lives, like much is made in the book about snakes and ladders, the impact of chance, the cycles of family and history. I think Rushdie's own life, I can't, I don't know if this is you or me in the points would be a great subject.

Jeff O'Neill (102:08)

I did put this here, but I can see that we maybe both had a similar thought.

Rebecca Schinsky (102:11)

Yeah. For a Midnight's Children type project. Like he has been everywhere and lived a hundred lives.

Jeff O'Neill (102:16)

Yes. The narcissism of the individual during history making events. We talked this a little bit. There's this great line of how do you explain a coup to an 11 year old old? This came up in my real life somewhat recently. I was talking to my mom and she's, she's worried about my own kids living through this era. I mean us too, like everyone, but especially the kids. I said, you know what, we talk about it, but also this is what they know, right? Like it doesn't seem that weird to them because if they're going through it in real time, they don't have a lot to compare it to. Like they went through Covid. You know, they were born in 2011 and 2013 but the first president they knew as president was Trump. The first time time. Like it's, it's both there, it's both weird and not weird at the same time. And I really, that, that how do you explain a coup to an 11 year old? Really struck me because I'm not explaining this. I'm having the exact same question but a similar idea of how to connect the specificity and the quotidian nature of your own experience in epoch making events. And how do you deal with that strangeness that isn't strange. That's. That's always there but feels like it's weird and there is no normal. And I don't know, I was super struck by that. But how do you explain a coup to an 11 year old? I'm going to be thinking about that for a long, long time and I.

Rebecca Schinsky (103:26)

Think just to put a bow on it, like this is really about the need for our lives to mean something. Yes, there are. At one point Salim says I became afraid that everyone was wrong. That my much trumpeted existence might turn out to be utterly useless, void and without the shred of purpose. And then later on he says I was doomed until it was far too late. Late to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was for. And like, that's a. What am I for? What is this all about? Why are we here? Is the central question of the human experience. And that Rushdie is going at that central question in such an unusual and playful and wild and evocative and really sensual, filled with senses way. Like it's philosophical, but it's. It's so in the body Final beat.

Jeff O'Neill (104:14)

Our zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Here are the five we do. Historical importance. Readability. Current relevance of central questions. Book nerd read cred. No damn factor. Historical importance. Rebecca, what do you think?

Rebecca Schinsky (104:29)

This one's hard for me.

Jeff O'Neill (104:30)

Very hard.

Rebecca Schinsky (104:31)

Like a seven or an eight. I'm probably an eight.

Jeff O'Neill (104:37)

I feel like it should be an eight, but I feel like it's probably more like a six and a half or something. Seven.

Rebecca Schinsky (104:41)

Okay, we'll. We'll give it a seven then.

Jeff O'Neill (104:44)

I don't think you get taught it's not on high school syllabuses. I don't know how many.

Rebecca Schinsky (104:47)

I mean, how could you?

Jeff O'Neill (104:49)

Well, that's what I'm saying. The historical important ones have been around for a long time and they get. They get read more frequently at a more fundamental level. Like. Yeah, yeah. Readability. Tricky one. Higher or lower than pension. I don't remember what we gave. Pension. Higher or lower than pension. This one's longer. So I think then violent. I think it's similar.

Rebecca Schinsky (105:10)

I think it is similar. Slightly easier in places, maybe. Slightly easier because Rushdie and Salim like tell us from the outset that they're going to weave in all of this mythology that there will be surrealist and magical elements. And with Pynchon, it's a surprise of like wait, are there aliens on this plane now or is that something else? I mean, go. I think this is still challenging. Readability is like a 4.

Jeff O'Neill (105:36)

4. That's what I was going to say too. 4. Ish. Current relevance of central questions. 9.

Rebecca Schinsky (105:41)

9. Yeah. Always forever relevant book nerd read credit.

Jeff O'Neill (105:45)

I think this is a good one. If you've got a full Rushdie and taking it seriously. I think you're in the top quartile, decile, percentile of.

Rebecca Schinsky (105:52)

Of people read 9, 10 territory for me, I think.

Jeff O'Neill (105:56)

I don't know that can. What's a 10? Ulysses. Ulysses. Okay, so let's give it one short of Ulysses. I think nine is right. I mean, is that fair? Maybe I'm.

Rebecca Schinsky (106:04)

I think that's fair.

Jeff O'Neill (106:05)

Yeah. O damn factor. Interesting. Rebecca, I think you're probably best equipped of the two of us to deal with this because you're the. You had the freshest eyes on it.

Rebecca Schinsky (106:14)

So this is so high for me. I was telling you the night that I first started reading it, it really filled me with, why do I bother reading any other kinds of books?

Jeff O'Neill (106:21)

And you got that pretty quick. Like, that was pretty quickly in the book.

Rebecca Schinsky (106:24)

It's just so if you like to be shaken up, nobody's better at it than Rushdie. And in really great hands, that I don't want to read Midnight's Children in perpetuity. I don't want to only read this kind of book. But while I'm in this kind of book, I do think, like, why have I ever bothered to pick up anything else? Like, this is it. Like, this is the apex. This is the kind of. Of, you know, this what I want from reading.

Jeff O'Neill (106:53)

I think mountaintop is not a bad metaphor for this because it takes effort. But if you can get to the vista, you can see things that you can't see from others.

Rebecca Schinsky (107:00)

Yeah. So I'm. I mean, my odam factor, like that nine or ten, it's high ten, I.

Jeff O'Neill (107:04)

Think I. I think I'm willing to entertain a 10. Yeah, definitely. That's pretty high. I mean, it's. It's that it's difficult and you tend not to get. I mean, I think readability and odam factor for us are. Are seesaws. The more readable you are, the higher it is to odam. I can't think of something that's going to get a 10 in both, but.

Rebecca Schinsky (107:24)

We'Ll maybe like Gone Girl.

Jeff O'Neill (107:29)

Yeah, I think that's already. It's. It's existing already on a firmament of trope that they didn't. That Flynn didn't invent for me. I need a lot of like, pure creation. Like a whole bunch of linguistic, stylistic, thematic or content creation.

Rebecca Schinsky (107:46)

Yeah. I think odam. Yeah. For both of us mostly comes out of the place of, like, what do we really want from reading? Why are we doing this? And I felt on every page, like, yeah, this is what I'm. This is what I'm here for.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (108:01)

Right.

Jeff O'Neill (108:02)

I think that's a good place to end. Rebecca Shownotes are@book riot.com. listen, shoot us an email at zero to. Well, read bookriot.com if you can spare a moment to Rate and review the show on Apple podcasts especially, but anywhere. Be wonderful. Hit those five stars. Hit. Follow up there. We're going to be doing A Christmas Carol soon. Thus endeth Season one. We got some other stuff coming in the feed. We're not going to take too much of a break, if any, but we've got some other stuff cooking. I. As I said at the top of the show, I am interested but will not be held to requests and recommendations for things to cover on the show. I would guess would be pretty hard for someone to recommend something. I'm like, never, but I challenge you. That one you would listen to. Here's one I'm not gonna mention someone's name. It's not a book I love, but is a book I think that would be worth doing an episode on is like Atlas Shrugged, for example. I think that's worth getting into for cultural reasons. And, you know, we are. We have more affinity rather than others. We. But that is part of the project, I think, is to, you know, wrestle with some of these books that maybe you don't hold close to your heart.

Rebecca Schinsky (109:12)

The master list for this is several hundred titles long, so we've got decades of work. Yeah, it's. It's going to be hard to suggest a title that we haven't thought of. So actually what I'm really interested in is the case for doing that book now or now.

Jeff O'Neill (109:27)

That's. That's right. That's why we're looking for, you know, because we are doing some of the.

Rebecca Schinsky (109:32)

Like, yeah, like. Yeah, we know that we should do one about Catcher in the Rye someday. And we will do Catcher in the Rye someday. We're gonna do Huck Finn someday. We're gonna get to Romeo and Juliet someday. Like, these are. They're all on the list. But as we look at, like, what we're going to do in the spring, you know, some of the things we're doing are, like, anchored to big anniversaries or to big movie events. Like, there are some hooks. Is there something in the water that makes. Makes the book you're recommending especially relevant for the next season that we're planning. That is the kind of thing that will get you closer to the episode you're asking for.

Jeff O'Neill (110:09)

And the other thing you can't know, dear Listener, is what we might have scheduled around it, because each season or each run, we're kind of trying to make our own kind of literary chutney. Right. It's got a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's you know, we're trying to as as we release episodes, I think you can see a thesis emerging about what we're trying to do. And Atlas Shrugged can certainly be part of that, but it also needs to be blended with some other stuff in a season or a three to five episode run to do that.

Rebecca Schinsky (110:38)

And I think, again, like, if you're wondering about how we think about the show or the philosophy of this first season, or the things we've learned as we put it together, that's all fair game for a mailbag episode. So you can send us those questions to zero to well read@bookriot.com Absolutely.

Jeff O'Neill (110:53)

Rebecca, a pleasure as always. An especially fun conversation today.

Sponsor/Ad Reader (110:56)

Thank you.

Jeff O'Neill (110:56)

Appreciate your time.

Rebecca Schinsky (110:57)

What a great way to end this first season.