He has the hammy self-regard of a Bono or a Dustin Hoffman.
This nigga looks like a Bond villain now.
>>23554698i tried reading his midnight's children and realized he was a little too modern for my tastes, and also a bit less sophisticated. the art has simply degenerated. perhaps i should return to it, but it seemed to me it was a sort of "i'll blatantly steal everything i can to write this damn book, by golly"and i mean that's cool, and probably very effective, but i like more idiosyncratic works if i can find them, this guy felt too "in touch". anyway, like i said, maybe i'll take another whack at his book some year or another. not high priority.
>>23554740Did you even get to the magical realism part of the book? I really enjoyed it and felt it had a lot of personality and style. I'd be interested in hearing exactly what gave you the impression that it was derivative or "stolen".
>>23555173something about its texture is too loose, i don't recall how far i got, maybe twenty pages, it was simply easy to dismiss, and look for something i couldn't accomplish myself. perhaps, of course, i wouldn't actually be able to accomplish something like midnight's children if i tried, but the sense of "within the realm of human possibility sans genius" was strong in me for quite some time. in fact, if i didn't get "the whiff of genius" in a work, i'd put it to the side. I'm less interested usually about even the quality of a novel as I am about the state of the person's mind who made the novel. what angle they've chosen in their creation, how much depth is in each sentence and if present, the way references are connected. i'm more interested in hanging out with old ghosts of men's minds than i am with a sprawling tale, sort of a biographer. i'm sure salman rushdie is a fine writer, but he doesn't meet my standards for "genius". just limited to excessive talent. now, naturally, i could have been mistaken, mistaken in everything i've said. i read those twenty pages around a decade ago. i do remember something about an allusion to tristram shandy, and it sort of fell apart, that book, for me, right from the start. it's like torture reading books like that for me, okay? best i can survive is marquez or calvino, and even those it's like i'm on a book on rails.
>>23555262Interesting perspective, I suppose it's simply a matter of taste. I can vividly remember many things from that book, the idea of the Muslim character at the start laying his mat on the side of a mountain and being to fervent in his praying that the mountain effectually comes up and punches him in his nose, the fact that his nose was his a prominent facet of his character, his becoming a doctor and taking a young lady as his patient whom he has to treat through a small hold in a bed sheet. All of these things have such symbolic weight that I could go into depth on each one, particularly since the setting of India during such an upheaval as its independence from Brittan is teeming with sharp divisions, those of religion, those of country, those of old versus new, tradition versus social progress, and on and on. I do remember certain parts being of more and less quality, but I have strongly positive feelings associated with it, even many years after reading it.
>>23555333i do think there is merit in culturally bound works, i also think there are certain cultures i mesh with better than others. i have some resentment both for indian and muslim cultures, though i do have some concessions and i try to balance that. perhaps that it's in that flavor is what gets me, because i've read many latin american fictions of vaguely magical nature where everything is deeply symbolic, but i can't help but grasp the notion that being deeply symbolic topically to your culture is not the same as being deeply symbolic in a way that transcends your culture. i found much more of that kinship in let's say, Locos, than I did in even a brief glance at this. Are you familiar with the picaresque? I think Salman Rushdie and Dickens are good examples of when a picaresque format can run on for eternity. I've done a lot of study on the subject, and I've tried to pare it all down, the shapes, to simplified things in my mind, so when people play with those puppets a little too long, there's a wonderful digression in tristram shandy (good that i mention it again) where he mentions hobby-horsing, and how fine it is until someone forces you to watch him play with it a bit too long, it's quite the digression, it's very witty, but it serves a point on literature, the forms are one thing, but to manipulate them in exciting ways is another thing. i wouldn't rate the book low because it doesn't fall to my tastes, or because i don't get the cultural underpinnings, but more because of what it seeks to accomplish. you know what it felt like i was reading? Anime. It felt like weird indian spiced anime. sometimes my mind does things when i'm reading certain books to cope, to handle things. for instance, reading a great deal of henry james, i would get the distinct impression of big hairy orangutans undergoing these laborious and impressionistic social strifes and subtle moral battles instead of humans, sort of a humbling hairy bumbling group of apes acting out these events, it changed how i could examine the settings, the period, the themes, the symbols, being able to inhabit a space made as an afterthought for "the master's" play, just kind of kicking rocks individually in a huge scope, that's the sort of genius i look for. i think salman wouldn't consider himself a genius, even if you asked him. it's not an insult. he's accomplished a great deal, and obviously he has touched the minds of many people, which is a feat for an author in this day. he obviously has his history of being nearly assassinated and the whole caliphate or whatever wanting to kill him, but he still lives. maybe when he's dead i'll be more interested. dead people i can completely misinterpret because they're not around to say shit about it. that's how i read.
>>23555173>Did you even get to the magical realism part of the book?It disappointed me, nothing actually felt magical or wondrous to me. The book is meticulously crafted and I appreciated that, but it felt too "clever" with its wordplay and ironical twists of fate. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it didn't feel organic
>>23554698Doesn't draw me in. 100 pages into Midnight's Children and it just feels like "then my grandpa did x, then his second daughter did y, ...". It's definitely well written and I want to like it but I just don't give a shit about the story. Maybe I'm just a midwit
rump
>>23555455>>23554698https://newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-inhuman>The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence—as it were, a criminal running endless charity marathons. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, as these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs. Indeed, vitality is storytelling, as far as these books are concerned. If, say, a character is introduced in London, call him Toby Awknotuby (that is, “ To be or not to be”—ha!) then we will be swiftly told that he has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt, which is an anagram of Toby, of course), who, like Toby, has the same very curious genital deformation, and that their mother belongs to a religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father (who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell’s Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell’s Angels group it is, devoted only to the fanatical study of late Wordsworth), and that Toby’s mad left-wing aunt was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979 and has not spoken a word since. And all this, over many pages, before poor Toby Awknotuby has done a thing, or thought a thought!
>>23556665>https://newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-inhumanI don't think it's possible for me to dislike a person more on merely reading an article they have written. What a pretentious twat that writer is.
>>23554712That's exactly what I was gonna post when I clicked on the thread too, lmao my man
>>23554698>>23555455>>23556401Which of these two should a ,Rushdie newbie start with? The Black Swan & The Kite Runner
I just finished his latest, Knife.Still bitches about how all religions are bad even though it was Islam that carved him up. His leftie politics and those of Martin Amis were retarded; I thought these were supposed to be smart men.
>>23554698i like bono and dustin hoffman, they are fun entertainers
>>23555364>>23555262>>23554740schizoposter can't wait to start monologue about himself when talking about a book
>>23559114schizo? is that part of the schizo m.o.?
>apples have the hammy self-regard of an orange or coq au vinOP is a retard>food analogyOP started it and I did make sure the analogy was extra retarded.
