Rushdie and the World of Puzzles

I am in front of a huge table covered in tiny puzzle pieces and I can’t wait to put them together. I love puzzles – the play, the expectation, the waiting. I play, invent, construct, destroy, reconstruct puzzles in real life, trying to find the best fit, the best final image. And I love challenges, in books, in people, in life. 

I finished reading Midnight’s Children and there are so many things to be said about this book that it’s difficult to start from somewhere, to find the right words and to put them in the right order. All this year I have been expecting, searching, for a book to challenge me, to discover something new, to represent me when it comes to literature.

I loved the Scheherazade style, the way the story flows on the page, sometimes going straight, sometimes divagating, playing with the past and the present. I loved the puzzle metaphor in contrast with the wholeness for India (and not only) – the multitude of religions, of people, of opinions, of beliefs, of histories, and the whole that it gave in its wars and divisions. I loved the narrator and the reader play, the unreliability of Saleem, the way literature and imagination reflect society in their own way. I loved how mundane, the day-by-day life becomes connected with the Change… And what maybe I loved the most at this book was the new meaning that it gave to “history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, the way personal history mingles in social, historical one, becoming one – even if this part was the most difficult for a reader like me.

 Once in a while, I like to find different cultures, different ways of living, like in all the days of my lives I try to find different people, different thinkings. There is a literature that we know, easy for us to grasp, despite maybe the challenges found in style (like Joyce, Faulkner, McCarthy, etc.). And there is a literature unfamiliar to us, with topics, histories that we did not think of – like Rushdie, Pamuk or Mo Yan.

And, at the end, what is India? For us, Europeans, for cultures like us, for them, Indians, and their diversity. What is left after their independence? How can one grasp the wholeness, how can they escape cosmopolitism? What is now left from Rushdie’s India, or from the image that we made of it? And can one who is outside this culture really grasp its true meaning, really understand it, or do we just see a part of the puzzle?