Rushdie

I'm finding Midnight's Children particularly difficult to read. I like the way Rushdie portrays feelings, history, and social tensions through flesh and blood characters. The portrayal of India through Saleem, who faces tensions dealing with his own personal cultural identity (like oskar in TD), shows India's pularlism, culture, and struggles to become one nation (much in the same way Oskar wanted a unified poland after WWII and the dominating foreign power, in this case facist germany, finally left (though unlike the situation in India, the Germans were soon replaced by Russians who made Poland a satilite if I remember that right.) I know Rushdie chose his fragmented style to depict a fragmented India and a fragmented Saleem BUT honestly the endless circles make it difficult for me; repetitive themes like the prefferated sheet (seen in Aadam's courtship of Nassem and also in his daguther's determination to fall in love with her husband peice by peice) and even clocks are re-repeated in Saleems narrative style of telling the reader what is going to happen (literally) before it happens. While this functions as forshadowing, and it was Rushdie's choice to do it, it slows the narrative down a lot for me; the ciclical style when added to the fragmentation and dense descriptions made it difficult to read for me. I really really loved 100 Years of Solitude, and I know this book has been compared to Marquez (along with grass) but both though both of those books were dense, they relied on "show not tell" showing us the story and so creating a page-turning plot. You don't see suspense in this book, and also Rushdie seems to have made a consience, post-modern choice to do the reverse of show not tell by telling rather than showing. This choice, while a dilebrate, intresting plot decision, made Midnights Children a little slow for me...