Review: Midnight's Children

Midnight’s Children is the pseudo-autobiography of Saleem Sinai, the first baby born in independent India. Saleem tells the story of his life, as enmeshed in the history of the first 31 years of post-colonial India and entwined in the lives of the other 1,000 children born between midnight and 1:00 a.m. on the first day of the new country. Saleem describes this complicated, vivid, magical, funny, and disturbing mix as the "chutnification of history."

This was the first novel Salman Rushdie wrote and the first of his that I have read. I could kick myself for waiting so long. This book is a delight. There is a reason it show up on so many lists, including: Booker Prize Winners Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century Radcliffe's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

OTHER REVIEWS

Please leave a comment with a link if you would like your review posted here.

Pondering on Life of Pi and Others

After reading a recent review of Life of Pi on The Complete Booker, I have been pondering memorable books in general and Booker winners in particular. I remembered that I really loved Life of Pi while I read it. I thought it was an incredible book. But I also realized that it is a novel that did not stick with me. I never find myself thinking about it, much as I loved it at the time. On the other hand, there are plenty of books that did not pack the same wallop, but I dwell on them for years after -- for example, Last Orders by Graham Swift (1996 Booker winner): Or, The Old Devils by Kinglsley Amis (1986 Booker winner): Why is this? Why do some books linger, while others might pop, but then fade?

Summer Reading Lists: Redux

Two days into my summer reading list and I'm already messing with it. I finished Hallam's War and am about to finish Water for Elephants, which will free up some space, so I may add a couple of titles. In the meantime, while searching my TBR stacks for Venusberg, I came across O, How the Wheel Becomes It, also by Anthony Powell. I started it last night and was immediately sucked in. It is a terrific lampoon of writers, publishers, and the whole Life of Letters idea, along the lines of Mauagham's Cakes and Ale or, more recently, McEwan's Amsterdam.

Review of the Day: Hallam's War

To describe Hallam’s War as an interesting, substantive Civil War novel is to explain both its strengths and weaknesses.

Elisabeth Payne Rosen writes well, knows her subject matter, and has crafted a story that explores the ambiguity of racial and political issues at the center of the Civil War. Through her efforts, the book rises above the requisite hoop skirts, hollerin’, and hacksaws of all Civil War novels, but not by enough to transcend the genre and become a novel of general appeal.

First, in the hoop skirt, or antebellum, section of the story, Rosen includes the necessary Southern belles, genteel society, class structure, loyal house slaves, angry field hands, and King Cotton. But the twist is that the Hallam family has turned its back on the charms of coastal Charleston for the quiet pleasures of their west Tennessee log home. There, Hugh Hallam experiments with modern farming methods in order to produce high quality cotton without destroying the land, with the dream of making his farm profitable without the need for slave labor. It is this angle that makes the book worthwhile.

Second, there is plenty of the typical hollerin’ in the way of demands for secession, complaints from teenagers that the war will be over before they are old enough to fight, rebel yells, and the cries of men wounded in battle. It is Rosen’s detail-laden coverage of the war as it moved through Tennessee that is either the best or worst part of the book, depending on the reader’s inclinations. For Civil War buffs, these details give the book the depth lacking in other novels; for general readers, these sections feel like being trapped in a Ken Burns documentary.

Third, in the hacksaw segment of the book, Serna Hallam, like all Civil War heroines, volunteers in the army hospital where she assists surgeons in amputating limbs using household tools and no anesthesia. Everyone is exhausted, the fields are barren, food is scarce, and profiteers smuggle luxury items to the spoiled elite. Rosen sticks to formula in this part of the story, which, while dramatic, feels like a time killer while waiting for the war, and the story, to wind to an and.

Which is a general problem with any book about a real war – everyone knows how it ends. Rosen chose to end her story with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, rather then the end of war itself, but the resolution of the personal story seems likewise arbitrary. It feels like the Hallams’ story wraps up because Rosen was coming to the end of the book, rather than the book ending because she had come to the end of their story.

For readers enthralled with all things Civil War, Hallam’s War will be a real treat. General readers may find the personal story compelling enough to finish the book, but it is no page-turner.

OTHER REVIEWS

(Please leave a comment with a link if you would like your review posted here.)

Summer Reading Lists

Elizabeth at CvilleWords gave me the idea of creating a summer reading list. How could I resist? This is the list of the ten books that I will be tackling first this summer. They are in roughly the order that I will be reading them, but it is hard to predict exactly because I usually have a book book and an audio book in progress at the same time. I will likely get to a couple more before Labor Day, but these are the titles that are at the top of my TBR list: Hallam's War by Elisabeth Payne Rosen (a Civil War novel for which I have to write a review); Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (on my iPod and almost finished); Venusberg by Anthony Powell (because his Dance to the Music of Time is one of my all-time Top 10 favorites); Resistance Fighter by Jorgen Kieler (about the Danish resistance movement in WWII); Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (which I've been avoiding but the book club chose); The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (which I have been carrying around in my car for emergencies); The Trial by Franz Kafka (I'm two-thirds of the way through the audio version and it is killing me); Abbeville by Jack Fuller (another for which I need to write a review); Wildfire by Nelson DeMille (as a treat for finishing The Trial); and My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl (so I can completely finish his Omnibus).