Reading Notes W17: Rushdie, Part A

Salman Rushdie (1129-1143)

• Rushdie was born into a wealthy Muslim business family in Bombay in 1947, a few weeks before the end of British colonial rule and the Partition of the subcontinent into the two new nations of India and Pakistan
• he published his 4th novel, The Satanic Verses, in England in September 1988
• after early education in the city, Rushdie attended boarding school in England and received his undergraduate and master's degree from the University of Cambridge, where he studied Islamic history
• he worked in advertising in London for several years, and wrote his first book
• with the publication of Midnight's Children (1980) and its immense literary and commercial success, however, Rushdie was able to turn writing full time, contributing to periodicals throughout the anglophone world in the 1980s while producing his next 2 novels, Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses
• Rushdie described himself as a "historian of ideas," and many of his novels are "novels of ideas" rather than narratives centered on a plot or character (1130)
• he is not a realistic writer
• he is the foremost practitioner in English of magic realism
• Rushdie builds his narratives around conflicting ideas and fantastic characters and events with wit and playfulness, and with the precise attention  to the sensuous details of everyday life (1130)
• "The Perforated Sheet," reads like a self-contained short story but is actually an excerpt, prepared by Rushdie himself, from the first two chapters of Midnight;s Children, with a few connecting lines found in the novel
• it introduces Saleem Sinai, the protagonist and narrator, and to the story of his life and origins, which constitutes the novel's Protean narrative
• the story encounters in the beginning that Saleem sees it: the time, almost half a century before his birth, when his grandfather returns from Europe with a medical degree; sets up a practice in his hometown of Srinagar, Kashmir; and meets the woman who is destined to become his wife (1131)
• in the novel itself, every important event in history of the Sinai family, from Saleem's grandparents onward, is a funny, farcical echo of every major event in the history of the Indian subcontinent