Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

17:35Jeff O'Neal:Yes. He says a couple of times through the book that to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. And that's what reading the book feels like. It's really postmodern in this way that Rushdie is expressing to us, it's impossible to get your arms around this story of India and this place that has so many people. And so Salim gives us a book that is also impossible to fully get your arms around, but in a way that feels like exciting and enervating. Like it's not frustrating. It's not, oh my gosh, this doesn't make sense to me. I suppose it could be that way for readers. But my experience of this, is that this is a huge undertaking and Rushdie pulls it off.

18:18Jeff O'Neal:Like I just felt like I was in good hands the whole time. He seems so confident about what he is doing. Salim tells us like, I know that I'm wandering away from this, but I'm going to come back. I'm going to tell you the thing, Padma, don't worry, we're going to get there. And you do ultimately get there. But by the time that we get there, you really know that this is not just about the place we have landed. It's about the whole process that it took and about how Salim tells the story, how Rushdie has chosen to tell us this story in a way that is just noisy and crowded and chaotic and makes us feel the way that I think he's telling us it felt to be in India at that time.

18:57Rebecca Schinsky:I think that's right. And then Salim's own position is similar to Rushdie's. He comes from a Muslim family of an upper middle class, educated class, and then we're subject to history in the way that everyone was and everyone always is in time, no matter whether they think so or not. but one of the central revelations, I think, of a post-postmodernist moment, which I think this is, we're striving towards multiculturalism, a moment I think we're still living in many ways, is to distinguish between making sense and making meaning. Like this book doesn't make sense, but it tries to make meaning out of senselessness, right?

19:40Rebecca Schinsky:It's difficult to understand the reasons all of these things happen. It's beyond... There's also a chaos theory of culture seems to be Rushdie's operating principle, but then he doesn't just throw up his hand and say, well, what are you going to do? This is an artistic intervention to try to get to do something with something that feels impossible to do something with. And I think one of my hot takes or intrusive thoughts is what would an American version of this, like what time period do you pick? And you could do worse than sort of the Iran or like 1980 Jimmy Carter losing an election because of hostages to now, right?

20:22Rebecca Schinsky:That's a 40-year period, which written in a rusty way would feel as carnivalesque and bizarre and ungovernable in a similar kind of way. Because it is. It would be fascinating to see.

20:39Jeff O'Neal:If you sort of did Vineland by Pynchon, which we talked about earlier this year and is the inspiration for one battle after another, but through a little bit more of a rusty lens that carried it forward, like that book takes place over a couple of years in the early 80s. But if you started it in the late 70s, early 80s and carried it through to even like right now would be fascinating and wild and just unruly is a term that I keep coming back to about Rushdie. But unruly, but so masterfully managed by him. Yeah.

21:14Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, he doesn't want to try, and Salim talks about this overtly in the text, and clearly Rushdie doesn't want to simplify, water down, boil down, simplify the situation, but also doesn't want to be just completely subject to it. So this, Salim and Rushdie's project have parallel tracks in which, all right, what are we going to do with this? It's like, how do we locate ourselves? How do we just, how do we not become flotsam of history or have a narcissistic point of view where it's all about me? And Salim sort of tries to do both. Like, as you said before, it's like, well, this battle, this emergency, all of this was just to get my family out of this one particular location, which was it feels like to an individual, you know, as we've lived long enough lives to have gone through some history.

22:02Rebecca Schinsky:And when you have a moment that feels like, oh, this is history, it is both unique and specific, but also you're just one amongst many, and it's not about you. And that is, to live in a modern world where you have so much information and knowledge about the world, I think that is maybe one of the central things of post-modernity or even post-post-modernity, and are hyper-aware. You can get all of the world's experience beamed to your pocket in any particular moment. So now what are you going to do, McCoy, I think is a real situation that because of the compressed time that Roshi is dealing with and the nature of Indian culture and Indian governments is always polyglot already and always a teeming mass of contradictions and push me, pull use.

22:47Rebecca Schinsky:I think that was a early look at what globalization might look like and multicultural might look like, especially when there was this one moment when the political realities changed and you had to make a political being out of this whatever, you know, this non-governable doesn't really neatly align with the idea of the nation state at all, frankly, what are you going to do with that stuff? And I think that's a lot of what Midnight's Children as an idea, a metaphor within the book and the book itself are trying to do.

23:17Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. One thing that I thought about a lot was what would it have been like to read this when the book was new, like to be a person who was politically conscious in a moment of time where the world was becoming increasingly global and understanding this. Like, I think we both want to make the point that it's fine if you are not an expert on Indian history. There are a ton of references here that I just don't get. You pick up a little bit about the history of India and colonialism throughout the text. And you could go Googling, but you would be Googling 17 things on each page, you know, like, if you wanted to try to nail down all of the references.

23:55Jeff O'Neal:I think Rushdie knows that most average readers, almost no one is going to pick it up and be able to, like, fully recognize what each of the events is. But you're able to have, I think, a still very complete and meaningful reading experience out of it, precisely because he's working on so many levels. One of the levels is the allegory of what is happening in this time in India that Salim is living in and telling us about. But another one is on a broader level, this is just what it feels like to be a person, to be, as you were saying, living through, we're all always living through history of one sort or another.

24:31Jeff O'Neal:And that is, I think, just timeless.

24:34Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And it's the kind of book that could bear to be the subject of a semester-long college course. You could read this like Ulysses or War and Peace or whatever, and it bears that. It could bear that kind of weight. But also, as you say, you can have a meaningful, alive, and incomplete experience with it. I'll say, I think that's fair to say as well, that feels like you touch the live wire that runs through it. And this is one of those books that feels as a live wire running through it. And the orgy of imagination and storytelling that Rushdie embarks in here, I think is what is most transportable to a reader who maybe doesn't know anything about anything that's going on here, sort of a general reader who's willing to go along for a literary ride.

25:20Rebecca Schinsky:The stories within stories, there's wonderful moments and super interesting little anecdotes or part stories that are in a parentheses with an digression within a subplot from the quote unquote main story. And I think once you, if you can give yourself over to that, of like, what's this about? Like what's going to happen? What the plot is? Who done it? Where are we going? Like Pynchon in this regard, you could also then go two pages. Like, I don't understand what's going on. And that is okay. And also I think maybe one of the tools Rushdie is deploying is because he wants you to feel, I think he wants you to feel as overwhelmed as these moments felt overwhelming.

26:02Rebecca Schinsky:And one thing you do with that is to present it and not narrativize it, not break it down, not make it into a nice little clean Chris Hemingway sentence with beautiful, memorable, quotable dialogue. There are moments of that, right? And we'll talk about some of them, but there are also moments of surreal, almost trauma-induced incomprehensibility. And you get these long sentences and long paragraphs and long sections where like, boy, I don't really know. And I think I would give yourself, I certainly give myself permission in those moments. It's like, let me regroup. I'm going to maybe look for something for my eye to hold on to.

26:41Rebecca Schinsky:And I'll maybe someday I'll come back, but also I'll recognize that feeling, really any reading feeling, give yourself permission and also the latitude and then benefit of the doubt to the writer that maybe that thing you're feeling is a feature, not a book. And that can be very liberating.

26:59Jeff O'Neal:If you get a hundred pages into Midnight's Children and you start to have that overwhelmed feeling or the like, maybe I can't hack this. I think you're having the right experience.

27:09Rebecca Schinsky:A median reading experience of Midnight's Children.

27:11Jeff O'Neal:A right experience that Rushdie, like you sit down to write a book like this and you know that people are going to be bamboozled by it. And like, he's trying to bamboozle us in a lot of ways. That if you can be okay with that, with a like, I'm feeling, as you were saying, I'm feeling this maybe because I'm supposed to be feeling this way. Or what is the function of making me feel this way? Why did the author want to make us feel this way? Like, there's a moment where one of the characters is recalling like a ransom, kind of a ransom letter that they constructed, where they've cut out letters from a magazine.

27:42Jeff O'Neal:And instead of just saying, I cut out letters from a magazine to spell these words, it's like, I cut out the C-O-M from the headline, Commander, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I cut out this letter from these other things. And it goes on for two pages. And you get snippets of the articles.

27:58Rebecca Schinsky:It's all a mishmash of wildness. Yeah.

28:01Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, it's wild. But just one of the examples of he's giving us these headlines that would have been popular, common at the time, relevant to the history of India at the moment. Those are some clues to things, but also just the chaos of being like, this is how I'm going to tell my readers about this ransom note. I'm not just going to tell them what it said. You have to piece it together three letters at a time in between all of the headlines. The whole thing is presented like all as one at the end of that chunk of pages. And then like a paragraph later, there's this moment of clarity where there's a couple of sentences that are just so crisp and pure and obvious that that's a thing you're supposed to pay attention to.

28:47Jeff O'Neal:And that happens repeatedly. And I do think that that's one of the things Rusty does is he upsets us, like shakes everything up into these moments where you don't know which way is up, what you're supposed to be holding on to.

29:00Rebecca Schinsky:Who's saying what to whom about what and why? I mean, just to put a fine point on it.

29:04Jeff O'Neal:And then as it settles, Salim zooms out into his narration of the thing again, and make some remark either to us or to Padma as the listener, that just sums the whole thing up or tells us the thing that we actually need to know right then. And it just feels like such a relief after the chaos that you're like, thank you for giving me that. And I just do think that's part of it. If he just wanted to tell this story, as a straight ahead story, the book would be like 200 pages long. It's not really about what happens.

29:40Rebecca Schinsky:If you look at, I'm just trying to think of these, you know, another more book club friendly, and I'm not using that derogatory. It's a different work. It's a different artistic project of something like the Kite Runner, which is about a difficult moment in history. It's dealing with subjects that are foreign to a lot of the readers that are reading it, right, especially in America. And it focuses a lot more characters and plot and relationship and dialogue and what happens and this thing. This is operating on a different kind of register. And I'm trying very hard not to prioritize, hierarchize them.

30:16Rebecca Schinsky:This is art writing. And I guess this is a good way to transition to when it came out, though, it was hugely popular, kind of hard to believe now. Not everything that wins a book or sells a million copies. Like this one did. Like this was a genuine cultural phenomenon. And I'm having a hard-ass time thinking of an American – it's probably Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest did not sell a million copies when it came out in 1960. I really don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd love to be wrong. Well, I should have looked that up. I really don't think it did. But quickly after that book was published, like David Foster Wallace is a writer, and he's an important one, and he's a generational one.

30:54Rebecca Schinsky:and this book and all the lit bros can tell you. And I have a lot of affection for Infinite Jest, but it is not this book. I have much more affection for Rushdie himself and this book. And I think there's a reason the lit bros don't pick up Midnight's Children, even though it's doing a lot of the same things better, more complicatedly, with much broader import. And that's a subject for a different podcast. But this is the real McCoy, Rebecca. This is the real McCoy of when you have a book that comes out and challenges, expands, and then also envelops what came before. Rushdie is not putting at arm's length Indian cultural tradition or religious text or Western.

31:37Rebecca Schinsky:He's like, this is a great... He loves it all. He loves stories. He loves reading. He loves the idea of storytelling. He loves the... I'm sure he loves a good joke. And he is so invested in the idea of story and narrative as power that he will not eschew anything that adds another club to his storytelling golf bag.

32:01Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. And this book must have felt like it came out of nowhere. This is his second novel. His first novel, Grimus, was universally panned and really lit a fire under him. to he had begun rewriting or he begun writing this book before but the bad reviews of the first book really motivated him to start this one over to try to do something big so this comes out he wins the booker prize as you said it sold more than a million copies in the uk just huge and then it goes on to win the booker of bookers in 1994 which was the booker prize's 25th anniversary that was selected by a jury. And then it won the best of the Booker in 2008 for the Booker Prize's 40th anniversary.

32:42Jeff O'Neal:That was a jury and public voting in the early days of people being able to vote for things on the internet. Then in 2018, when the Booker Prize turned 50, it was unseated to the English Patient, which won the Golden Booker, for which I blame the voting public. I went back like, we love the English Patient. We both have a lot of affection for it. It's a great book. But I went back and looked at other Booker Prize winners, especially since Rushdie. And nothing has the profile that Midnight's Children has.

33:16Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, it sits up. I mean, Rushdie, when asked who his favorite authors are, he mentions Dickens and Tolstoy and some poets from India that I don't really know the work of that well. But he says, and it varies by day, as for most of us who like books and reading, it will vary. But he's like, when it comes down to it, it's probably Joyce. And that's all. I mean, that's an easy comp, right? Ulysses probably, you know, we've done annotateds about Ulysses and what a phenomenon was and banned and censors. And it had this sort of underground into explosive awareness that announced it really from day one as being a foundational work of modernity.

33:54Rebecca Schinsky:And like, we think this is going to join the greats. Midnight's Children had the same thing. And I think I would like to know how many of those million copies were read all the way through, the data that we're never going to get. And that's no knock on Midnight's Children or Rushdie, but I know readers. And I know when you read to that level, there are people that are picking it up because they hear people talking about it. And this would have been a cold splash of water on the face to someone picking it up because they think they're going to get... I mean, even something like The English Patient, which is more subversive and strange than the movie.

34:30Rebecca Schinsky:And the movie is quite beautiful. Again, we love that. But this is a step or two beyond that in terms of the effortfulness of the reading experience you need to put into it.

34:38Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. And I mean, I see Salmon Roosty books on the Barnes & Noble paperback favorites tables. And it's next to The Kite Runner and The Life of Pi. And The Lovely Bones. Yes. Like four Ann Patchett novels. And those are all wonderful.

34:52Rebecca Schinsky:Yes.

34:53Jeff O'Neal:And then if you read Salman Rushdie, it's like not what you were expecting based on the other books on those tables. I think a lot of folks were probably really surprised when they opened this up. And this is the experience they had. I'm glad you mentioned Dickens because Midnight's Children feels to me like Dickens on acid. Yes. And one of the other more... Well, it's Dickens on India.

35:15Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, the way that he portrays India is for those of us who grew up in the Midwest eating mayonnaise on white bread. The reality of everyday life in Mumbai feels like acid to us because it's the intensity and variety of the experience. I think that's what we mean when we say that, right? I want to put words in your mouth.

35:33Jeff O'Neal:Yes, but also that there are so many surreal elements and stuff about mythology. It just has a wild, heady feeling. Like the on-the-ground experience of being in India is certainly very different from being an American, especially in the 80s. But that he is incorporating like religion and mythology and magic and curses and all of this stuff that exists outside of our reality. As you were making the comparison to The Kite Runner, I was thinking also about The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, which is another big popular book club novel that roams over decades of people's lives where you are pulling threads together over the course of time.

36:14Jeff O'Neal:And there are secrets and secrets get revealed and then secrets on secrets and all that sort of stuff. Rushdie is doing that and then like 17 other things. Yeah, that's right. Right, yeah.

36:25Rebecca Schinsky:The idea that anything could happen is not really at stake in Dickens, except for maybe Christmas Carol. We have one interesting, we're going to talk about the, I think the one speculative element in the entire work of Dickens. It's been a while since I've looked over the whole work of Dickens, so forgive me, internet, if I'm not quite right on that. But you're absolutely right in that regard, which is this reality, the fabulism, the not quite magical realism, because that's its own literary tradition, but certainly in that vein of things that wouldn't happen in real life can happen here and they matter and they're not just there to be strange.

37:00Rebecca Schinsky:They're there to give a different perspective on what we've experienced and what we know.

37:03Jeff O'Neal:Rusty wrote the introduction to the paperback version that I have. And he says in the introduction that he was inspired by the capaciousness of the immense epics of India. So if you've read some of the Indian mythology, like I had to read a chunk of the Mahabharata in my yoga teacher training. And I was like, oh, I kind of get that. Like, you get like, there is so much going on and these stories are working on so many levels. And Rushdie certainly doesn't expect his readers to be scholars of any of that, but he's giving you a sense of, yeah, what it feels like to be in that place that India is cacophonous and crowded.

37:40Jeff O'Neal:And the story feels like you're wandering around and it's absurd, but it's also really self-assured. Just a huge undertaking. but I never felt like he was out over his skis.

37:53Rebecca Schinsky:No, I mean, it's even hard to, what would even that look like, right? It's so even beyond what we think of normal skiing that I don't even know what out over your skis would have felt like, but I agree with you. And it has, you know, it's a little bit of a you note when we see it. And we've talked about this in, again, discussions we've had about other books that is not a part of this show, but it has that zing in it, like when we read White Noise. I know that was your, when we read White Noise, that was your first reading experience. And you can sort of feel like there's juice to it, right? And that is categorically different.

38:26Rebecca Schinsky:You don't get it all the time. And even the books we've talked about here, you always don't get it to this degree. At the same time, it's dizzying and incomprehensible and can be quite frustrating. It's extraordinarily long. And that's part of the journey as well. So why does this matter? Like, is the world different before or after? Like, how different is it? And the answer is yes. I mean, there was a lot of writing that came quickly after this, especially amongst Anglo-Indian writers, to the point that there was sort of a post-Rushdi cabal. Like people would get slapped with the post-Rushdi or they're trying to be Rushdi label, which is a great compliment to the originator of something like this.

39:05Rebecca Schinsky:If you get a post-hyphen-you, that's very interesting. We're going to talk about in my, that's what literature's metaphor, Chutney as the central or one of the central metaphors here. Rushdie invented this idea of Chutnification as a model of cultural experience, right? And we can talk about what that means. But for this book to win and then win multiple times into the future and sell so well, represents a kind of reckoning and awareness of especially the English colonial project, right? Like, as it's surprising to read this again and see how little time and interest Rushy seems to be had for taking shots at English rule of India sort of up until 1947.

39:50Rebecca Schinsky:Clearly not, you know, clearly not a fan of it. It's not like we should have stayed under there. But it's also not, the book is not just like, screw the British and look what they've done to us. That's not what the book is about. And that is an interesting idea of thinking about a post-colonial project is then what's left in its wake, because the thing that's left by the British, but it's left by this artificial multi-century rule, there's an implicit critique of that forced making. And there's actually inside of that a forced critique of really politics writ large. I don't think there's any...

40:26Rebecca Schinsky:No figure here, even the great ones that have Oscar-winning roles done in their stead, escape his satire, his skepticism, and out-and-out deflation. So this capaciousness is very interesting too. We move out of postmodernism to multiculturalism, I think is the quickest word. And we've sort of lost that grain. I don't know what they're doing in academia now, if the academics out there can tell me, but to re-engage with the specificity of culture and the blendingness of cultures. Like we talked about postmodernism with Pynch and the jester dancing through the grave, you know, the ruined castle. The multicultural movement and the post-postmodernist movement is much, it's even more disjointed and less of a coherent whole.

41:11Rebecca Schinsky:But you can see in Rushdie interest in the specificity and culture, and that people's lives are actually at stake here. Like, all right, the project of liberal history as we know it maybe fell apart during modernism, but there are still bodies out there, man. There are still people being born and dying and wars being fought. And I'm not going to, I, the writer here, going to abdicate any sort of political awareness because of the impossibility of whatever, or the end of whatever. History's not over. People are still being born and dying. and that has important, what are we going to do about that?

41:44Rebecca Schinsky:And your culture is different than mine and they're not all available, not all the same, but they're all available, they're all interesting. They're all worthy of inclusion and introspection and commingling. So I think that's what we really get here. And then this is, V.S. Neipold won the Booker and it was the first of the Commonwealth quote unquote writers to really, you know, he wins the Nobel Prize. Derek Walcott does a little bit later. But Rushdie is a cultural moment. None of them were as read as Wildly. If you're listening to this show and you've heard of Rushdie, you may not have heard of BS Nightball and Derek Walcott, and that's fine, but it's indicative of something.

42:19Rebecca Schinsky:And so I think that's where you can sort of see how... There's so many books that are still living in... I don't know if it's a shadow because I don't know if it would have happened anyway, but follow Midnight's Children and follow Rushdie, and that are interested, I guess that's the best way of putting, interested in so many of the same things Rushdie is still interested in. Does that sound about right to you, Rebecca? What did I miss there?

42:41Jeff O'Neal:Oh, yeah. I think that's right. You have a great sentence in here in our notes that I just don't want us to miss about how this is the profane and the profound playing tiddlywings while the angels rain fire. And just that mixing of popular low culture with high culture, with mythology, with like what the largest possible, most capacious understanding of multiculturalism is. And I think Rushdie is a very like, okay, everybody in the pool kind of writer. Like everybody, every culture, every kind of food, every smell. He's so concerned with bodies in this book, with the actual stuff of bodies. There's Salim, we are given to understand is ugly and has a huge weird nose And so much is made about Salim's nose.

43:31Jeff O'Neal:Then there's a character who's defined by his knees. Salim's mother has a huge butt that Salim refers to as the black man. Salim's son has giant ears. Yeah. And the senses are such a part of it. Like it is sensual in that definition of the word that Salim understands things through scent. His son understands things through like an extra power of hearing the ways that we experience the world directly are so on the page. And Rushdie is just so, I think, interested in and comfortable with human bodies in a way that we just don't encounter in fiction very often. There are so many bodily functions.

44:13Jeff O'Neal:There's like there's poop and there's so much snot. Is this the great snot novel?

44:17Rebecca Schinsky:Is this the greatest snot novel of all time?

44:19Jeff O'Neal:I think it might be Apex Mountain for snot. That also feels of a particular moment, and it feels electrifying. And it goes to that, yes, this is what it is to be a person. This is what it is to be in a body. For a writer to be so heady, but also for the characters to be so fully embodied and in a really gross, and not just in disgusting gross, but big gross way, I found to be really exciting and so unusual.

44:51Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And I think you can see, even to my Midwestern, like, Puritan-descended upbringing, feels transgressive even to talk about. It's not as, it's not like erotic. I mean, there's sex in the book, but it's not erotic. It's not exploitative. There's very few, like, titillating sort of situations. But just to talk about butts and talk about noses and snots and all that stuff, it gives me like my shoulders go up because I was told not to talk about that sort of thing. And you could certainly understand how the, I don't know, the arrival of a book that will talk about bodies like this, especially in England, which is, you know, proper.

45:28Rebecca Schinsky:And there's like a whole tradition of propriety there would have felt transgressive in its own way. Let's, we're going to talk more about what the book means and about here in a second. I do want to talk about a little bit more about Rushdie because I don't, there's a couple of things to know. I think the idea of Rushdie is super fascinating, and what he is trying to do and who he is are linked, but he becomes a public figure very quickly, and he's public about being public. There are jokes, or not jokes, he's included in Bridget Jones' Diary the Movie as himself with the understanding that everyone already knows that Salman Rushdie is the kind of person that would go to a party and be married to famous people.

46:07Rebecca Schinsky:There's a meta joke about his fame. And then, of course, his fame and his political and artistic interest in satanic verses, representation of Muhammad, gets him in trouble with the Ayatollah, who issues a fatwa, which is basically, you should die, like someone should kill you, and there's a bounty on your head. And that is real. I think one thing that's happened, and this happens in history, and he talks about this, actually, how the farther you get from history, it seems inevitable and calcified. but in the moment it seems incomprehensible and strange and totally contingent. I think this has actually sort of happened to this.

46:41Rebecca Schinsky:This is a real thing. He had translators of his work in other countries were murdered. People died, he was attacked, there was a failed bomb plot. This was a real thing. He was under British protection for many, many years.

46:53Jeff O'Neal:He had security details for like decades.

46:57Rebecca Schinsky:And if you lived through the 80s and 90s with emerging consciousness, you sort of knew this was happening already. And I can't think of an antecedent for this. at all. And that's how transgressive it was, certainly to theocracies in some of the places where the religions he was interested in talking about and taking the piss out of didn't like it to the point where the guy has to die. And our understanding, in fact, my memory for Knife is that person who attacked him wasn't responding directly to that, but to radicalization online and other things.

47:30Jeff O'Neal:Does that your mind remember as well? Yes. Yeah. He cites the person who attacked him sites like, I mean, got radicalized on YouTube, watching the kinds of videos that get served to young men who spend too much time on YouTube. And it was sort of an indirect, it wasn't a message that someone should go kill Salman Rushdie, but it was about the kinds of ideas that Rushdie represents. To your point about Rushdie showing up in Bridget Jones's diary, he eventually moves to the US where he feels safer than he felt overseas. And he starts refusing to let the fatwa define his life anymore. He just starts insisting on going out.

48:07Jeff O'Neal:He sort of develops a reputation as like a bit of a playboy. There's some like, is Salman Rushdie a bad boyfriend sorts of press that's out there, but was so well known. And the name was so recognizable to just like normies watching network television, that there's a 1993 Seinfeld episode where a whole subplot is about Kramer thinking that he sees Salman Rushdie at the gym. And that like, Everybody in the world of Seinfeld knows who Salman Rushdie is. And the expectation is that most people watching the show, just on what, like NBC, would have picked that up. And they even do a whole bit about how it's Salman, not Salmon.

48:45Jeff O'Neal:It's not the fish. Like, I can't think of an author who comes anywhere close to having that sort of profile. Like, the best really bad analog I got would be like, it would be like, I don't know, somebody writing a joke into a show today about, like, thinking they saw Karl of Nausgaard at the gym. but like not nearly. Which no one would get. No.

49:04Rebecca Schinsky:No one would get a reference to a literary writer like that. They wouldn't even know what he looks like to think they saw him at the same time. Yeah, he's married a lot of times, I guess we'll put it that. And I have here probably our greatest champion of good faith freedom expression, one that discomforts many, including me, sometimes, often. And I put him in a rare and necessary category of an intellectual, a crucial intellectual gadfly. This is a term that Alcibiades used to describe Socrates, Alcibiades who became the politician slash general who tried to invade Sicily and it all went balls up, as I think that's actually a Greek term.

49:41Rebecca Schinsky:Is that the technical term? And his teacher was Socrates, and Socrates would come to him and talk to him about what he should be doing and what the good life is and morality. And he was like, just get away. Socrates, it's just so annoying. Like this fly that's always around me. And what that is, is that that's the intrusion of not better angels. I don't want to use the divinity of it, but like those ideas that you probably believe to be true that you somehow don't want to or can't or uncomfortable following or giving full shrift. So I think he remains that. And I welcome that and I honor that even as I sort of want to brush him off, you know, when I get out of the...

50:16Rebecca Schinsky:Did you have horseflies when you were growing up that would get you when you got out of the pool? I think that's how I think. Just get, come on, just get out of here. The Colonel's cooked up a new$10 bucket of the day just for you. Monday, 24 nuggets for$10. Tuesday, 8-piece fried chicken for$10. Wednesday, 10 wings for$10. Thursday, 8 tenders for$10. Friday, 24 nuggets for, ooh, you guessed it, didn't you? $10. Finger-lickin' the same. The$10 bucket of the day deal. Every weekday, only at KFC, it's finger-lickin' good.

50:49Jeff O'Neal:Prices and participation variable supplies last night. Available on third-party ordering platforms. Tax extra. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

51:08Rebecca Schinsky:I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch.

51:12Jeff O'Neal:Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at mintmobile.com.

51:24Rebecca Schinsky:Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyam, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industry's shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing. And of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

51:57Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, he's challenging, but he's also like so gleeful. There's this sense of whimsy. Oh yeah, he's not a scold.

52:03Rebecca Schinsky:He's an intellectual gadfly, but he's not a scold at all. That's a great point.

52:06Jeff O'Neal:And a real glimmer in Rushdie's eye. You can tell he had a great time writing this.

52:13Rebecca Schinsky:You can't not have loved writing this and made this book, I don't think. That would be a real wild thing to have done.

52:19Jeff O'Neal:What a labor.

52:20Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. How about your first exposure? What was your first time reading this? Oh, my gosh.

52:25Jeff O'Neal:So I have technically read this book before, but I have not in practice read this book. This was like the second book that we read in my, I think, you know, like world fiction class of my freshman year of college. and I was allowed to sign up for that class because of AP English credits. So I like skipped past 101, 102. And that meant that I was in this fiction class with a bunch of juniors and seniors who probably had a better chance at understanding Rushdie than I did. I don't know. Two more years

52:56Rebecca Schinsky:of being in your late teens are going to help you all that much. Probably not. Maybe. Yeah.

53:00Jeff O'Neal:But it was like the first book in that class was Things Fall Apart, which great. Love it. I understand it. The second book was Midnight's Children. And I remember starting it and like, no one had told me you're supposed to be confused. Or if you're confused, that's part of the experience. Like there was no laying the groundwork about postmodernism. I don't know what the hell I thought I read. It's, I do remember being really glad that my professor gave us the option to like, write your paper on these ideas as expressed through Things Fall Apart, Midnight's Children, or this other third title, and that I just wrote a whole paper about Things Fall Apart.

53:40Jeff O'Neal:That was no Monty Hall problem for you.

53:41Rebecca Schinsky:You knew which door you were opening. Yeah.

53:44Jeff O'Neal:As I started this, I recognized that Salim calls his sister the brass monkey, and I recognized a couple other just big memorable phrases, but there wasn't a scene in this book that felt familiar to me. I can understand that. It's wild. I had a real, there should be a warning label on this if you're a freshman in college who's never read something like this, and then you just dive in. But it put me off of Rushdie for more than a decade because I just felt so out of my depth that maybe I'm just not a good enough reader to read these kinds of books. And I gradually picked him back up a few more times in my adulthood, but this was my biggest and best Rushdie experience so far.

54:30Jeff O'Neal:And so I want to say to listeners that have had something similar happen, whether it's with Rushdie or someone else, there's something really exciting and validating about going back to an author that at one point was too hard for you and discovering that with more years of reading and more books under your belt, like now you can tackle it.

54:47Rebecca Schinsky:I remember when I got to grad school and I hadn't read any Derrida and the theory was all over the place. And I read my first Derrida and I was like, oh no, I can't. Everyone, they just get this, like it's a primer and it took me a while to get up to speed and get my sea legs under me, but also that it's effortful reading and anyone who pretends otherwise, maybe there are some that sort of grok it and they read it as simply as they would a Dan Brown novel. But I think for most of us mere mortals, the effort is part of it and it can be even more rewarding when you... And it requires demands and thus you deploy a different kind of attention.

55:29Rebecca Schinsky:Even that, it's like going to the gym kind of sucks, but then also it feels good. Like you get reading endorphins from Rushdie. You get reading endorphins if done correctly.

55:38Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. There's an episode of Dawson's Creek where the kids go to like when they're in their freshman year of college. And I think it's Joey takes an English class where everyone is so the older kids are so insufferable about Derrida that I have still not touched it.

55:53Rebecca Schinsky:it's very tough i mean today even now i'd have to warm up and remind myself when did you first encounter him oh i think 2004 i was in grad school and i had always wanted to read rushti i was super intimidated i think the first one i tried to pick up was satanic verses because it was the you know thought one is everything was in the news and i was i read the first few pages like whoa okay i put the lid back on that thing yeah and then i picked up east west which is a collection of short stories which I really liked. And that gave me a little more confidence. Maybe I was a more, you know, this is my post trying to read Derrida experience.

56:29Rebecca Schinsky:So I had a little bit of learning to ski and falling down as part of the process under my snowshoes. So that became a little more manageable for me. We talked about the reading experience here. Let's talk about some of the big ideas. Yeah, because I have effortful reading. I will tell my story here about trying to get it done for this is I was going to blast through 200 pages, I guess, two nights ago. I was telling you like, okay, it's nine o 'clock. I can settle in. I'll read a couple hundred pages in two or three hours. And I couldn't... I was like, this is pointless. What am I trying to do here?

57:01Rebecca Schinsky:It's like, you know, when you get drowsy when you're driving, like, I need to pull over. I'm going to hurt somebody. That's what I was doing to my reading experience. So I just want to affirm for people that it's challenging. It's not impossible, but it isn't a leisure reading experience. It's lean in reading, not lean back kinds of reading here. Allow yourself to be feel overwhelmed. And I think that's part and parcel of the process. If you are, you know, if you get 200 pages into it or a hundred pages into it, and you're really like having an allergic reaction, then stop. There's no plot in any conventional sense I have here.

57:35Rebecca Schinsky:Aristotle could never, the poetics have no frame of reference for doing anything with this. It's an emotional, psychological, sacred, sexual, political, artistic, fabulous chronicle that attempts to convey a sense of the truth through invention, exaggeration, convention, and scale. That's my note. That's my Cliff Notes version.

57:52Jeff O'Neal:They're going to reprint Midnight's Children with Aristotle could never, Jeff O 'Neill of Booker.

57:58Rebecca Schinsky:It just is not interested in like ready-made conventional plotting and shape. Just doesn't. Yeah.

58:06Jeff O'Neal:I will say also to the reading experience, most of the chapters are like 20-ish pages. So I think that is helpful that the chunks that Rushdie divides the story up into are not You can kind of reset if you need to.

58:19Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Just for the next little thing.

58:21Jeff O'Neal:That's true. And they're not terribly big bites. I would expect, just go in with the expectation that probably your reading speed will be half of what it normally is, or a chapter will take you twice as long as you think. I found that a 20-page chapter took me about 40 minutes because there's just so much language and you need a little space to breathe. And then I would put it down and take a lap around the house or do some dishes, like a little break in between each of those 20-page chapters is helpful. As you said, this could fill a whole semester of a class. I think it would be a great candidate for a month long read where you just read one chapter a day.

59:03Jeff O'Neal:Also, because it doesn't have a super discernible plot, there's never a moment where you're like, on the hook or a cliffhanger of I've got to keep going. So you it really does lend itself to a more, I think not leisurely, but just a more paced out reading. Like, I wish that I had given myself more time to read it. And I also wish that I had finished it farther in advance of this recordings. I finished it three days ago. And I have just continue to have new things bubble up. Like this is the thing my brain is still doing in the background when I'm walking the dog or taking a shower is like, oh, it's this thing.

59:37Jeff O'Neal:And what about this other thing? And that's a signal about how interesting and powerful the work is. But also just like give yourself some space to have a lot of ideas and reactions to it because the book will generate that. And that's so that's just such a rare gift. It is such a rare thing to finish a book and still be thinking about it in a way that makes it feel even richer days or weeks later.

1:00:00Rebecca Schinsky:One of the luxuries of having read something before, one of the joys of rereading and the uses of rereading, and I really learned this through teaching, where if it was my first time teaching a text, I really needed to have a longer lead time. I needed some marination. I need some fermentation time. But if I'd read it before, I kind of had some of the base notes built in. And then for me, it was like, if I could read it the couple days before, then the details stayed fresh. Because that's the thing I tend to lose with a longer gestation period. So I finished this yesterday afternoon, but I've been reading it on and off for four or five days.

1:00:34Rebecca Schinsky:And I can remember some of the pieces that stick out too. I think there's a fractal quality to this book too, where if you read like 50 pages of it, you kind of get what the deal is with it. You're not going to get it all, but it crystallizes out and refracts out kind of like a snowflake where it's not the whole snowflake but you can get these pieces because of how he writes but also what he's trying to do is this part versus whole the one versus many these some of these moments can stand alone but they become richer if you see the connective tissue but also you can you could get rid of that one thing and the whole thing doesn't fall apart right even some of the quote-unquote plot points of whose dad is whose and what happens.

1:01:20Rebecca Schinsky:Maybe I'm wrong here, but if you miss the reveal of who was whose dad, does it really jeopardize? This is not the sixth sense, where if you miss the last nine minutes, you're like, what the hell was that thing about?

1:01:32Jeff O'Neal:Right. Yeah, I think that's also why we're this far into this episode and we're not doing a whole lot of, here's what happens, here's what happens, here's another thing, because things do happen and there are strings for you to follow, but that is so secondary to just the artistic exercise. And when you were talking about both the part and the whole, this to me feels like standing in front of like a wall-sized, like pointillist painting, like that big Surratt that they have at the Art Institute in Chicago, where the closer you get, the more of the tiny details that you see. And most of them are meaningless, but a few of them are really, really important.

1:02:07Jeff O'Neal:And all of them are necessary for the making of the whole thing. And that like movement between being up close to tiny details and zooming out to just try to see the whole picture or let the whole vibe of this book wash over you are both really important and valuable parts of the experience.

1:02:25Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, you'll probably hear us. And I'm going to transition to one, probably talk about our favorite moments and lines and like many stories, because I think they're as indicative as anything else. But my favorite one comes pretty early is this doctor is going to see a patient. And the patient's a young woman. And because of decorum, you got to take a look at body parts to see what's wrong. My favorite bit too. The father won't let him see her naked or even at the hole. So there's this white sheet and there's a seven inch hole cut in it. and the doctor is then allowed to examine whatever can fit in that hole, if her knee is giving her a problem or a toe, whatever.

1:03:00Rebecca Schinsky:But it gets closer and closer towards base metaphor areas here, I guess is what we're saying. And then eventually, so the doctor then falls in love with this patient by seeing just these random pieces of her, but over time he can start to put it together until finally sees the face. And by the time the actual sheet falls, it's not a reveal, but it is a synthesis of all the things that he's seen before. So I think some of the great writers can teach you or give you little holes to see the work through. And I think this story is not a bad one in that regard, which is if you look at these things individually, you can kind of take them one by one, and then you can start to put together a piece rather than throwing open the door to the street fair and being like, whoa, look at all this stuff going on.

1:03:50Rebecca Schinsky:Like, I thought that was so beautiful. And then Rushdie has it in his bag to have these fable-like, very beautiful, very self-contained things. Like, I think a lot of writers, that little scene could be the best thing they ever wrote.

1:04:04Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. And it's like, it's early in the book. It's so memorable. And it becomes a recurring motif in several ways. These like things that are part of bigger things or things that you experience bit by bit, and then you construct the whole thing. And I think that that mode also allows Rushdie and Salim to create some distance for the characters from the more horrific things that they experienced. There are several points where I found myself being like, oh my God, the thing he just described is terrible.

1:04:34Rebecca Schinsky:It's like the firebombing of Dresden, but for India, like it's nuts. But the tone of the book is light in point.

1:04:42Jeff O'Neal:There's a kind of lightness to the way the book flows. And there is this whimsy to it and a playfulness to the way that Rushdie writes that it really obscures the horror of the things that happen to the characters. It makes them more approachable for us. But his way with language just allows us to, I think, get closer to some of those details than we're comfortable doing otherwise. And then other writers are able to take us. Like, one of the things that happens in this book is that as a young boy, Salim is hiding in a laundry basket in a bathroom. And he can see through it. Like, I imagine this thing is a big wicker basket that a kid can hang out in.

1:05:22Jeff O'Neal:And while he's in there, his mother comes into the bathroom and she discovers that he's having an affair. He discovers that she's having an affair because he's heard her on the phone and now she's in the bathroom unwrapping her sari. He is seeing her whole butt, which he calls the black mango, and then he sees her masturbating. and the way that he reveals this to us is secrets a man's name never before glimpsed motions of the hands and you have to kind of really be subtle you're right he totally can be subtle when he

1:05:56Rebecca Schinsky:can do it all i mean that's what i'm saying he can kind of do it everyone yeah it's like oh that's

1:06:00Jeff O'Neal:what's happening here where and it just you're like okay yes of course this is happening to this character because this is the kind of world he lives in but when you take like half a step back to realize what a wild situation Rushdie has put his characters in and that he then allows us to figure out this thing that Salim is observing. And this happens over and over in the book where just like a drop in of a subtle sentence about what is a very like gross, overt kind of action. And that contradiction I found to just, that's so electric to me where you're like, holy shit, But this poor kid, first of all, that this is happening to him, he's going to be in therapy forever.

1:06:42Jeff O'Neal:But that other writers would make this into... That's just told in a different way in most other writers' hands. And that Rushdie does it with seven words and lets you realize, oh my God, that's what's happening here. It's almost cinematic.

1:06:57Rebecca Schinsky:I love this point you have here about it feels like the book could go on forever. Could you say more about that? It does.

1:07:01Jeff O'Neal:It does just feel like it could go on forever. There was a point where Salim is, he keeps telling us that he's going to wrap the story up. He keeps telling Padma he's going to get around to the end. And then he keeps on not getting there, instead going down these side paths. And it just feels like this world is so full that Salim is never going to run out of side characters or new people in his life that he's bumped into that he can develop mythology for. Like of this thousand and one other Midnight's children, he tells us the backstories of a couple of them. But like, I could imagine hanging out for a book that has all of them at some point, or that it kind of feels like somewhere Salim is still sitting in a room with Padma telling her more parts of the story that didn't make it onto the page.

1:07:49Jeff O'Neal:And I really loved that. Like, I wasn't glad when I got to the end of this 530 page effortful reading experience. It was just like, maybe go on, please.

1:08:01Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, it's not a surprise that Salim's son is born with giant ears because he needs a listener, right? Like he needs someone to be the ultimate audience. And there's, you know, it's not the most subtle of metaphors, but this idea that there's still more stories, there's still more listening to be done and more saying to be done. But like, there's an element of like, yeah, he's had to contain it in some way and he's just barely done so in the form of 649 pages. But uncontainableness is one of the things he's interested in, like things bleeding over into other things, like this experience and this memory and paternity and maternity and I'm not this, but I am that, I'm part of that, and I'm a twin, and I'm in love with my sister, but I'm also in love with a ghost.

1:08:41Rebecca Schinsky:And there's just no borders. It just bleeds out in the ever. And it's so interesting that we talked about Oedipus recently, because that feels like a trap. That feels like a swish watch of a trap. There's nowhere else to go. And that this sort of logical contradiction of determinism is so leer and so finely constructive and arid, where this is dealing with many of the same issues was like, am I in control of my fate? How subject am I to history? But it does so with a big open world, which makes the question seem even more intractable then, right? Because you could go anywhere and do anything, and yet I'm still my parents' kid, and the thing parents do is fill their kids with poison.

1:09:22Rebecca Schinsky:Like, what do I do with that? It's pretty remarkable.

1:09:24Jeff O'Neal:It's so rich. This world is just so rich.

1:09:28Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Let's do intrusive thoughts. Oh my God, I had so many intrusive thoughts. I've got some. I have this. And tell me, let me try this on for size. Since this was your first, quote unquote, real reading with it. You have fresher beginner's eyes than I do. I still think Rushdie is overrated. I think the idea of Salman Rushdie... You mean underrated. Underrated, pardon me. He's underrated because he's such a figure and a public figure that he is more known than the books. But I think this, we still haven't caught up with him or like our understanding of what his project is exceeds what the modern, whatever modern iconography of him is.

1:10:07Jeff O'Neal:Give him the Nobel, you cowards.

1:10:09Rebecca Schinsky:All right. Now you're on my side. This is why we did this. We can close down the show. Thank you so much. Again, we haven't read everything. So who knows? There's a lot of people out there, but boy, oh boy.

1:10:18Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, not a knock on anyone who's won the Nobel, but that every year when the Nobel odds makers come out and they tell us who has a good chance and Rushdie is nowhere near the top of the list, what are we doing?

1:10:31Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, I think if I have a big red button that said this person wins a Nobel, if I put the right name in the thing, I think I'm, I haven't thought about this too much, but just as you said that, like, I think I put Rushdie in there. I don't know. I mean, I have to think about it a little bit more, but I think that's where I go.

1:10:43Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I do think that he's underrated. And maybe it is because he became so famous and so well-known and that sort of the legend of Salman Rushdie exceeds in some ways contemporary people's familiarity or understanding of his work. But also he makes it look so easy. Like the writing has that lightness to it that seems effortless. And he's not out there investing in the legend of Salman Rushdie, the turtleneck clad writer. He's not like talking about how hard it is to do this work. He really lets the book speak for itself. And I think that sometimes that self-mythologizing benefits literary writers and helps them in a way campaign for recognition, campaign for something like the Nobel.

1:11:27Jeff O'Neal:I don't know that he's interested in it. I have a hard time guessing if he cares. but to think about what his work does and also what his later work has meant in terms, especially in this moment in the world, talking about freedom of speech and freedom of expression. That is a body of work that Nobel is given for the person's body of work that I think really deserves recognition. Like, I'm just going to be mad if he never gets it.

1:11:56Rebecca Schinsky:I think too, I'm sure, I mean, it's hard for a writer not to care about something like that. But one thing in this current round of press he's done for his new book, he has talked about being pretty thrilled to be talking about the work, like the stories, rather than the knife attacks or the fought war, the other things go into it, because he gets to go back. He just loves storytelling. He loves books, and he loves reading, and it really comes through in the kind of work he produces. So that's one thing here. I had a related intrusive thought. If Rushdie had gone full pension, full pension, is he more or less famous?

1:12:29Rebecca Schinsky:oh or or let me wrinkle that high more or less highly regarded it's a great question because the hermit the hermit stick has done wonders for yeah it's i well i think you can't answer this about rushti without exploring the fatwa variable that there are the books let's say he still gets it he still gets so he he gets the fatwa but he is

1:12:56Jeff O'Neal:not out being a party-going playboy. No one knows what he looks like.

1:12:59Rebecca Schinsky:He's a ghost. He's a myth. He's a rumor. Maybe someone saw him at Zabar's. We don't know.

1:13:04Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. I think then his stock does climb. Pynchon was the highest rated American writer in the Nobel odds this year. And I think it has more to do with how elusive he seems. Pynchon is wonderful, don't get me wrong. But hard-pressed, I would give it to Rushdie first. Yeah.

1:13:24Rebecca Schinsky:My last one, though, that you can mop up your intrusive thoughts, feels braver and bolder than the multitextral cast that come after. Like, there's an audaciousness to the point of, you know, violating some of the truisms of sort of the modern cultural writing, like write what you know, you can't write a white person if you're a black person, vice versa, that this project is not possible if those rules Rushdie tries to speak. It's just impossible. And I think, yeah, so I, it just, because he does not heed that admonition either in his heart or his head, or I think likely both, you can't do this if you limit yourself to write who you are in your own experience.

1:14:07Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And I think it's an interesting counterbalance to the representation discourse. And I think that it's a worthy one. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm not trying to do that. Don't, don't read this the wrong way. We need lots of stories by a lot of different people. and I want to have room for writers to explore and do the unwieldy unruliness that Rushdie and people like Rushdie try to do. Yeah, just wildly free

1:14:30Jeff O'Neal:and where he allows himself to go. Like what doesn't he allow himself to put on the page? I said, that would be a great,

1:14:37Rebecca Schinsky:that would have been a wonderful topic for your freshman paper that you cowardly ran from.

1:14:42Jeff O'Neal:Oh man, that would have been such a word salad. I can't imagine. That's my intrusive thoughts. I thought so many times, how the hell did he keep track of all of this?

1:14:53Rebecca Schinsky:Does he think if you plotted it out like, you know, beautiful mind style like you have here, does it all connect?

1:14:59Jeff O'Neal:What kind of but even the parts that don't always like we don't get the ends of every story. Like what kind of red string murder board, beautiful mind situation did he have going in order to keep track of like the main characters lines? And when things are getting revealed, like we find out that Salim's parents are not his biological parents. Other people had family secrets as well that come out. But when do we find that out? Who knows what in the different scenes? Like it's all of that juggling happens. And it does, as I said, seem pretty effortless on the page. Like I just like this is such a feat of organization in addition to being so creative.

1:15:39Rebecca Schinsky:Well, and geography and timelines and languages and names. Yeah, just there's a lot of logistical stuff.

1:15:46Jeff O'Neal:I found myself trying to map a family tree on one of the blank pages at the back of the book just to remember who people were. And then I thought, how come there's not a family tree in the front of this book? Like if ever a book needs a family tree, but so many of the truths about people's family relationships are surprises in the book that you can't really give a useful tree at the beginning.

1:16:07Rebecca Schinsky:And I think he wouldn't even want that, even though it would just distill it down to just a straight line relation. If he's about anything he's not about, this straight line connects that person to that person. Oh, yeah.

1:16:16Jeff O'Neal:I gave up on the project of trying to map who the people were. I had the impulse at first. But yeah, just so much about bodies. I just kept noticing that because we just don't get that very much in fiction. Vegetables are everywhere. Like you're going to talk about chutney later, and I'm not going to walk all over that. But like Salim's nose is a cucumber. His penis is a cucumber. He's telling the story in a pickle factory. There's stuff about preservation. And then I couldn't stop thinking about how it felt very Wes Anderson to me at points, like deeply playful and absurd. There is something cinematic about the way the story is told that Salim zooms into things and then steps out.

1:16:57Jeff O'Neal:And sometimes we discover - Talks about it overtly.

1:16:58Rebecca Schinsky:There's discussions about like, I think it says something like, indulge me in a cinematic moment, a long shot, then a closeup. Like it's on the page.

1:17:06Jeff O'Neal:When the book starts, we don't know that he's talking to Padma. that happens, like that reveal happens in a second or third chapter. And that felt like a pan out of like, oh, we've started this movie. And now we're jumping out into a frame that I didn't even know was there. But that ability to be like, playful and absurd and stylistic, but not and I think Anderson does this well, but not twee. It was really, really fun. And it's just a colorful.

1:17:33Rebecca Schinsky:I like that comparison to other what that we all could be parodied because it means you have a unique style like this is always my thing about you know what most people are so forgettable and most works of art have no point of view and feel like pale imitations of a pale imitation that I'm thrilled when something is bold enough and identifiable enough that one could do a satire or parody of it but the question then is what point does the style override metaphoric interferometry brush over truths or difficulty or complication. And it certainly, I think you could, whatever critiques you could level at Wes Anderson, you can't level them at Rushdie and maybe vice versa at the same time.

1:18:17Rebecca Schinsky:I thought that was a really interesting point too. Notable quotes. Oh Lord of mercy. I have so many. We're going to have to do a couple each, Rebecca. What would you like to do?

1:18:27Jeff O'Neal:Well, there's one that he repeats several times. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence. You were mentioning Oedipus recently, and so much of this story is concerned with how are we just bound to our fates? Is our story written without our control? What can we do about the world and the circumstances that we find ourselves living in? And that just succinctness of most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence, I thought was really powerful. I said it earlier, you have to understand just one life. You have to swallow the whole world. So much of what I pulled out are just wonderful descriptions.

1:19:07Jeff O'Neal:A Cyrano's, that's a nose to start a family on. The car that Salim's mother drives often to have her affair, he describes as the vehicle of maternal perfidy. And I just had this like wonderful, this is just wonderful.

1:19:25Rebecca Schinsky:You know, I like that. You know, I love that. It's so good.

1:19:29Jeff O'Neal:But then you also get these philosophical moments like, oh, eternal opposition of inside and out, because a human being inside himself is anything but a whole, anything but homogenous. All kinds of every which thing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next. Uncork the body, and God knows what you might permit to come tumbling out. And that kind of felt like it just sums up the whole project to me.

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1:20:54Rebecca Schinsky:Do you hear that? Sounds like breakfast is ready. Because Quaker's coming in hot with morning nutrition. 100 % whole grain oats and a good source of fiber to fuel the rhythm of your morning and kickstart your day. And that sounds absolutely delicious. Fuel to start whatever's next. Quaker, official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26. I, O, let's go! Let's see. He, I mean, there's so many microcosm moments. I love when he describes, just for a moment, the Taj Mahal. Described as that mausoleum which has been immortalized on postcards and chocolate boxes, and whose outdoor corridors stink of urine, whose walls are covered in graffiti, and whose echoes are tested for by visitors.

1:21:44Rebecca Schinsky:So, like, there's that up, down, reality, the image, the icon, the history, the contemporary, the body and the representation. Like, it's amazing. And that's just like kind of, that's a side note to a side note. It's amazing. Yeah. I love this scene where his mother goes to see someone who's promised her a prophecy about Salim before he's born. And he finds this huckster prophet who she thinks initially is levitating six inches above a ground, like sort of a yogi from a cartoon or mythology or whatever. and then she screams but then they find out later that it's a trick and that there's like a thin board that is you know coming out from the wall and it's six inches above the ground but the way seating weights lit and the angle of it it's a it's a it's an illusion yeah and he likes i think he likes the illusion more than he actually likes the supernatural bit of that like he likes that someone to the trouble to create a fantastical moment more than like if this guy was actually magic.

1:22:44Rebecca Schinsky:That's one way.

1:22:45Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I loved that moment also, because it's believable in this world that Rushi creates that somebody might be levitating. I remember being like, oh, cool, we have people levitating now. And then half a page later, you find out that it was a trick and that is even more fun.

1:23:01Rebecca Schinsky:What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same. That one's a thinker, right? Where none of what he's saying is true or real. Pardon me, I'm now conflating them as I go. But is it true? Is it a different question? That's a question about art and fiction and so forth.

1:23:18Jeff O'Neal:Tim O 'Brien in The Things That Carried puts it as the true truth and the happening truth.

1:23:23Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, right. That's good. I think this is a line, there was an oath not to bow down before God or man. I think Rushdie probably has that tattooed somewhere on his body because that feels like a very Rushdiean project. I love this too. As open and capacious as this work is, Salim says, the first lesson of my life, nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

1:23:46Jeff O'Neal:Yes. It's just too much. I watched that also. It's too much.

1:23:49Rebecca Schinsky:God, look at this. The implicit in the game is the unchanging two-ness of things, the duality of up and down, good against evil, the solid rationality of ladders, balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent. In opposition of staircase and cobra, we can see metaphorically all conceivable oppositions, alpha against omega, father against mother. Here, the war of Mary and Musa and the polarities of knees and nose. But I found very early in my life that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity. Because as a venture about to show, it's impossible to slither down a ladder or to climb to triumph on the venom of a snake.

1:24:22Rebecca Schinsky:Keeping things simple for the moment. Anyway, it goes on and on. Yeah.

1:24:24Jeff O'Neal:So much about snakes, too, in this book. So much about snakes, yeah. Reality can have metaphorical content that does not make it less real. Also a good blurb for the book as a whole.

1:24:34Rebecca Schinsky:Right. And he does talk about like trying to understand the horrors of war and some of the real atrocities that happens. Here, the futility of statistics. During 1971, 10 million refugees fled across the borders of East Pakistan, Bangladesh into India. But 10 million, like all numbers larger than 1 ,001, that's an Arabian Nights reference. I mean, this is just all over the place. People refuse to be understood. Comparisons do not help. The biggest migration in the history of the human race, meaningless. So what you do, specific ones and twos is little stories, little moments, little people. Could go on and on.

1:25:06Rebecca Schinsky:For you, Rebecca.

1:25:10Jeff O'Neal:I think it's for you if you are down for the ride with a book and down with not always knowing what's going on or what all of the references mean. Also, you need to be good with moral ambiguity and with an author who isn't really interested in the moral of the story. That's not what Rushdie is about here or really ever.

1:25:35Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, that's true. If not, you know, linear plots we've talked about long sentences, all the warning signs of things that we've talked about, again, they're not warning signs. They are features that may not be to everybody's taste. Again, as with most of the books we're going to talk about, if moral slash representational gavel wielders is something that you do or you find yourself inclined to that kind of reading, I think you might have a hard time with this.

1:25:57Jeff O'Neal:I think this also just defies that kind of reading. Yeah, right.

1:26:04Rebecca Schinsky:And this reminds me that there are editions. I really like the edition that I have, and it sounds like you're doing too, where he has an introduction to 30th anniversary. It's interesting that every 10 years is a moment to talk about this, like the 30, 40, and 50 re-evaluations. But if you go to Thrift Books, who is sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read, you can find for just$9 in acceptable condition, a Everyman's Library that has an introduction by Anita Desai, which I have never seen this particular book. I haven't seen that one. I almost bought it because I just wanted that, but I didn't.

1:26:34Rebecca Schinsky:But you can also find other editions there. If you want these in multiple language, you can find that. It looks to me like the edition we have is the most commonly available paperback. That's the one that's in print and you can buy new. You can get it for$6 or$7, but there's all sorts of interesting editions from around the world. This is the one where I actually think that the one we have may have the best cover, but that is a low bar. It's kind of like in British Bake Off when someone has to win the technical, but everyone's things are claggy or stodgy and blurping all over the place. It's not a high, but this is the best one, but you can find something over there.

1:27:10Rebecca Schinsky:Thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season. Immoral question time, Rebecca. Let's do it. Here are the questions we consider. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? And the RST on Ali is, who am I? Are all of these here? What do you want to say?

1:27:30Jeff O'Neal:I mean, it's about all of them. And Rishi even answers this for us in the introduction to the book. He says, for all its surrealist elements, Midnight's Children is a history novel. Looking for an answer to the great question history asks us, what is the relationship between society and the individual, between the macrocosm and the microcosm? To put it another way. Do we make history or does it make or unmake us? Are we masters or victims of our time? And huge echoes of Oedipus and of the Greeks all there. But all of these are in the game at every level of the story.

1:28:08Jeff O'Neal:Rushi's interested in all of it. And I think it would just be a great hang.

1:28:13Rebecca Schinsky:I think maybe it's more interesting for this one to say which ones there's less interested in. I think it's not actually that interested in what's the deal with good and evil because

1:28:19Jeff O'Neal:it's just people no i also think less interested in what is the good life and what do i owe my neighbor less interested in the sort of grounded day-to-day experience questions and more in the how do i know what i know what else what do i owe my neighbors like how do i get along like how do i

1:28:36Rebecca Schinsky:how do i be a person in the world where we have competing interests and ideas yeah i don't know that it's that i mean people die it's not as worried about that well i disagree though because

1:28:46Jeff O'Neal:It's like Salim is telling us through the whole story that the reason he's telling this story now that there's urgency is that there's this like that which causes cracks. And he's he's ill and he's dying. And there's this like press on him to get the story out and to make sure that Padma has this history of him and that it's going to be preserved after he goes. And so I think one of the answers that Rushdie is giving here is how do you deal with this certainty of death is you document history so that you die, but the story carries on.

1:29:18Rebecca Schinsky:I really like that. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing, Rebecca? This is a rhetorical question because it just absolutely is. Salim is writing this book and the process. It's about stories. Stories about stories are in this book. I don't know.

1:29:30Jeff O'Neal:Just a million percent about stories.

1:29:32Rebecca Schinsky:Unless there was actually a publishing house or something in there. I don't know how it could be more about art and writing, to be perfectly honest with you.

1:29:37Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, and that he tells us and he tells Padma over and over that he's concerned with the form and with how he's telling this story to her. It's meta on meta on meta.

1:29:50Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, maybe to invert the question a little bit, it's more interesting in story and storytelling than about art and writing. It's not as interesting about writing and publishing books and art for art's sake or whatever. It's like he has a interpersonal task he wants his story to do, which is to give Padma and us and posterity a sense of who he is. You know, writing Kilroy was here across the flag of oblivion. I think that's a Faulkner quote, if I can remember that correctly. Though it's probably a Dave Matthews.

1:30:17Jeff O'Neal:As you were saying that, I was like, damn, Jeff, good work. I think it is.

1:30:21Rebecca Schinsky:I'll have to look that up. Or Vonnegut. One of those. I'm sure it's been misattributed, and I hope it's real. If not, I'll take credit for it. Jeff O 'Neill. Could you get the gist from watching the signal adaptation? I think no, Rebecca. I think no. If there were one. I think if there were one, no.

1:30:37Jeff O'Neal:There's not a signal adaptation, but there is an adaptation. Rushdie wrote an adaptation in 2012 that was directed by Deepa Mehta. And he also served as the narrator of the movie, telling the story. The reviews indicate that you could get the major beats of the realistic elements of the plot, but that all of the surrealism and the magic and the weirdness are stripped out. It's a beloved conundrum.

1:31:00Rebecca Schinsky:Like you have that once you get into that maybe could be is weird.

1:31:03Jeff O'Neal:And I'm kind of fascinated that Rushdie allowed that to be done. The original The Times interview by Rachel Saltz in 2013, she says, to do cinematic justice to someone Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, it would take a razzle dazzle entertainer with Bollywood flair and a literary bent. someone equally at home with comedy and allegory ghosts and little snot-nosed boys indian history and indian myth in short through some kind of hocus pocus abracadabra mr mr rushti is fond of pileups and lists without commas a directorial equivalent of the author would need to be conjured but there's little magic and even less sense of the storyteller as magician in the modest respectful adaptation so like just not the magic i also think you shouldn't try that like this book is doing things that only books can do.

1:31:51Jeff O'Neal:Much as we talked off mic about how a Muppets version where Gonzo is Salim because of the nose would be like deeply twisted and kind of fun. I just don't want to see it done.

1:32:02Rebecca Schinsky:I was thinking, I feel like, remember the phenomenon that Slumdog Millionaire was, you know, similar, similar Melu, but also has a inside outside magical realism. You wake up in the latrine, but you're gonna win a million dollars on TV. feels like a Diet Coke version of some of the things Rushdie is trying to do. I just don't think it'd do it. But you would need someone, and I'm not great with, I don't have a wide palette of indie filmmakers, but I feel like you'd need, I don't want Baz Luhrmann to do it, but you would need something like that, like big and bold and crazy and strange and not afraid to be weird and confusing and just extra times 100.

1:32:40Rebecca Schinsky:How about, okay, say we had to, we were told by Apple, we have to make it an adaptation of this. And the checkbook is open, Rebecca. And we can make it a movie, musical, TV series, or something starring the Muppets. Which of these do you want to pick? I don't know.

1:32:57Jeff O'Neal:I'm inclined to musical just because the extra noise of it would be helpful.

1:33:04Rebecca Schinsky:The meta-ness that's inherent in a musical would be helpful to try to do this.

1:33:07Jeff O'Neal:The thing I really thought about is how, I don't know if they still do it, but for years, The Housing Works bookstore in New York would do these marathon readings of A Christmas Carol where, like, over the course of 24 hours, people would show up and read a chapter at a time. I think this would lend itself to that more than anything else. Like, come to a marathon reading of Midnight's Children, maybe with, like, slideshows and music behind it. But there's not a bit of the story that I would want to give up. Because it's not really about the story. that like a musical could get you maybe closer to the experience than a movie or a TV series, certainly than the Muppets.

1:33:48Jeff O'Neal:But I don't know, maybe actually the chaos of the Muppets would get you there.

1:33:52Rebecca Schinsky:Baz Luhrmann directs the Muppets in a musical adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children. Now we're cooking with grass. That's a Thomas Pynchon thing to do. Yeah. I mean, again, most, as you can hear us say, mostly this is what story and storytelling, and even the frame is oracular, right? It's him narrating slash writing to Padme, what he's talking for. That's what literature is metaphor. Let's go talk about chutney, Rebecca. Food and the senses are part and parcel. I think that's maybe my favorite version of this. Talks about, I think the idea of food and smell specifically is that which resists borders, right?

1:34:31Rebecca Schinsky:And also, I'm sure all of the people listening have that experience of smelling something that like, bang, instantly takes you back and you have like a corporeal, like your body feels like it's time hopping to some other place in a way that almost no other sense does. So I don't think it's a mistake that Salim and his family have giant smell receptacles because they are so interested in memory and place and time and food and smell and piss and curry's cooking. And then also, So we learn that for most of his life, or a big chunk of his life, his nose is stopped up, full of snot, and he gets his sinuses cleared.

1:35:12Rebecca Schinsky:But it's that moment that he loses this other telepathic power. So we haven't talked about this at all, which is kind of weird, but the Midnight's children all have various degrees of little powers or abilities that are extra human. And Salim's is telepathy, where he can inhabit the minds of other people. But as soon as he's able to smell correctly with this giant organ, that goes away. And it feels like a loss. But I think both in the terms of the story and the context and metaphorically, it's actually a gain or a different kind of the same thing, because it allows you to have extra sensory, not extra sensory, but extra intellectual connections and attunedness to the world and its mixtures.

1:35:55Rebecca Schinsky:And, you know, it's seeping out, like it's hard to control a smell, right? And perfumes are, famously bad and also very, especially in the ancient world, lauded for their ability to cover up the mess of life. But he can then smell hope and love. And then the chutney then is the manipulation and concoction of food and sensory experience, right? It can be anything. Go Wikipedia yourself what chutney is. It's like, well, it kind of could be anything, right? It It can be savory. It can be sweet. It can be cooked. It's like chunkier than ketchup. Like that's kind of the only thing it needs to be, right?

1:36:31Rebecca Schinsky:You know, using Indian spice or whatever. But like this idea, and then the fermentation and often made out of pickles. And we get a fermented, we get a pickle factory and a fermented pickled umbilical cord. This idea of preserving.

1:36:42Jeff O'Neal:A lot about preservation.

1:36:43Rebecca Schinsky:Preservation, but also in the preservation, it alters it, right? It is not the thing that it was before. It is the version of that that can be preserved. So there you go. I think that you could do a whole, I'm sure there've been papers written about chutney in midnight. Someone is working on a master's thesis about that. ChatGBT could probably suck them up and could spit it out for you. Miscellaneous trivia, adaptation rumors, misattributed quotes, etc. What do you think?

1:37:04Jeff O'Neal:Okay, well, I'm glad that you talked about the bit with the perforated sheet, because that is my favorite of the bits in the book. But Rushi is just really funny. The way that that plays is really funny on the page, especially in this moment where, quote, pajamas fell from the celestial rump. Like, just come on.

1:37:22Rebecca Schinsky:That's such a Tom Robbins line. I mean, people who like this, like, would like maybe a less effortful version of some of the softer, lighter notes of Rushdie. You can get a lot of them in Tom Robbins. Pajamas

1:37:33Jeff O'Neal:fell from the celestial rump. Just incredible shit. Other miscellany. In 1984, Indira Gandhi sued Rushdie over one sentence in the book, which referred to a rumor that was widespread about her at the time. So, like, people have been coming for Rushdie since the very beginning. And just, this is a hell of a way to come back from your first book being panned.

1:37:57Rebecca Schinsky:I've got a few. Rushdie said it's not auto fiction or whatever, but it leaks in. So Salim goes to the grammar school that Rushdie went to kind of at the same age. Like they overlap and connect, but they're not the same, but also not not them. This is a great anecdote. The Knopf dust jacket for the original book was pink, salmon pink, and which inaugurated, according to Rushdie himself, the Salmon Salmon problem that would plague me forever after, and I didn't like it, which is hilarious. I've never seen that cover. I don't even see it on Twitter.

1:38:26Jeff O'Neal:I don't think I have either.

1:38:27Rebecca Schinsky:This is my favorite, though. Pynchon invited, I think, I think Pynchon invited Rushdie over to his house for dinner. They hit it off. He's like, seems like kind of a normal writerly type. And then I think Rushdie assumed they were going to be friends. Pynchon never called or saw Rushdie ever again.

1:38:42Jeff O'Neal:yeah and Rushdie by many accounts great at a party seems like an unbelievable hang yeah

1:38:48Rebecca Schinsky:you may not want to marry him or put a lot of chips in your relational basket with him for a long time but I bet a night on the town with Salman Rushdie in like 1987 was yeah I mean you

1:38:57Jeff O'Neal:might not have wanted to be married to the 1987 version of him at least the way it sounds in I think he's coming around to being a better husband now from yeah fifth time ninth deck eighth

1:39:07Rebecca Schinsky:to decade. It's got some practice. Hot takes. You did one already.

1:39:10Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. It feels like Dickens on acid. One of the things that I like to move on from that, that I just was so entertained by was that Salim is just accidentally present at all of these historical events. And the hot take that I'm sure is not actually true is like, was this the inspiration for Forrest Gump? Dude, I had a Forrest Gump thing here too.

1:39:28Rebecca Schinsky:And I took it out because you already had it in there. It's amazing. It's amazing.

1:39:32Jeff O'Neal:Is Forrest Gump just Midnight's Children for Normcore white people? Like it really feels possible.

1:39:38Rebecca Schinsky:Well, I would like, what is the patient zero for this, whatever you would call it? The Salim slash Forrest Gump structure in which you have a regular person buffeted around between major historical events. I don't know.

1:39:51Jeff O'Neal:Does that happen in Twain? It doesn't feel like. I don't think it's in Twain, but it's. Or Voltaire.

1:39:56Rebecca Schinsky:It might be Candide. Oh, I think you're right. It could be Candide.

1:39:58Jeff O'Neal:I think it is Candide. Anyway, I like those though. I like these all the time. And then there were just also moments where I felt like it's really unfair that Salim gets to wander around so freely in the story. Because if you let your mind wander for a second, and it will wander because just stuff is happening here, you risk missing important details. And I would find that that happened in my experience of reading it where like a paragraph is going on for a whole page or like a sentence is going on for a whole page with very little punctuation. and your eyes kind of start to glaze over. And then I start to think about like what I'm going to cook for dinner.

1:40:32Jeff O'Neal:And it's like, oh shit, I don't know what has happened in this page. So let me go back and get it. And then there's some little detail buried in there that actually does turn out to be a thread that carries forward. And Salim is just like freewheeling it around, but we have to work.

1:40:46Rebecca Schinsky:Right. I like that. My hottest take is if you haven't read this, I don't care what you think about Rushdie. I just don't. You can think whatever you want. You can have your opinions, but I don't personally care.

1:40:55Jeff O'Neal:Well, here at Zero to Well-Read, we really believe in doing the homework to earn your opinions.

1:40:59Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, listen, I just, you know, let's do the homework. Read-alikes. I have 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. I mean, really, the great novel as messes, Ulysses. I think this is a gendered category, which I want to hang a lantern on that because in thinking about it, and I'd like to know that there was Ducks Newsbury Report that came out a couple years ago that I think is in this tradition, but like it's an interestingly gendered, And let's get more cracks in the pinata for wild ladies doing these kinds of unruly, sprawling, difficult, messy books. That's a great point. So there you go.

1:41:34Jeff O'Neal:I think The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy bears some of the Rushdie surrealism DNA, but is much more approachable. So that's a good place to dip your toes into this kind of writing. Or you can go to another master who I also think is a little more approachable with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude, is often mentioned. And if you like Roshy, you will also like Garcia Marquez.

1:41:57Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, I definitely get that, but also no. Because it's just such a different reading.

1:42:02Jeff O'Neal:It is a different reading experience.

1:42:04Rebecca Schinsky:If there's an opposite title to... If there's a title that embodies the opposite of Midnight's Children, it's 100 Years of Solitude.

1:42:11Jeff O'Neal:Yeah.

1:42:12Rebecca Schinsky:They are very different reading experiences.

1:42:14Jeff O'Neal:But it's a similar kind of work, I think, as a reader.

1:42:18Rebecca Schinsky:I think they're interested in similar things, but the stylistic differences are remarkable and worth reading together. But it's funny to think about Rushdie writing 100. The idea of 100 years of solitude is like murder. That's a torture chamber for him. Cocktail party crib sheet. I'll do a couple here. Teleprathy versus war is a central metaphor. Teleprathy being connectedness, ultimate radical connectedness, and war being ultimate radical separateness. So that's one you could take with you. What else you got, Rebecca?

1:42:47Jeff O'Neal:So much as we've said about the question of fate and how much we do or don't control our lives. Much is made in the book about snakes and ladders, the impact of chance, the cycles of family and history. I think Rusty's own life, I don't know if this is you or me in the points, would be a great subject. I did put this here,

1:43:04Rebecca Schinsky:but I can see that we maybe both had a similar thought.

1:43:07Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, for a Midnight's Children type project. He has been everywhere and lived 100 lives.

1:43:13Rebecca Schinsky:The narcissism of the individual during history-making events, we talked this a little bit. There's this great line of, how do you explain a coup to an 11-year-old? This came up in my real life somewhat recently. I was talking to my mom and she's worried about my own kids living through this era. I mean, us too, like everyone, but especially the kids. I said, you know what? We talk about it, but also this is what they know, right? It doesn't seem that weird to them because they're going through it in real time. They don't have a lot to compare it to. They went through COVID. They were born in 2011 and 2013, but the first president they knew was president was Trump the first time.

1:43:49Rebecca Schinsky:it's both weird and not weird at the same time. And I really, that how do you explain a coup to an 11-year-old really struck me because I'm not explaining this, I'm not having the exact same question, but a similar idea of how to connect the specificity and the quotidian nature of your experience in epoch-making events. And how do you deal with that strangeness that isn't strange, that's always there, but feels like it's weird and there is no normal. And I don't know, I was super struck by that. But how do you explain a kudo to an 11-year-old? I'm going to be thinking about that for a long, long time.

1:44:21Jeff O'Neal:And I think just to put a bow on it, like this is really about the need for our lives to mean something. Yes. At one point, Salim says, I became afraid that everyone was wrong, that my much-trumpeted existence might turn out to be utterly useless, void, and without the shred of purpose. And then later on, he says, I was doomed until it was far too late to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was for. and like that's a what am i for what is this all about why are we here is the central question of the human experience and that rushti is going at that central question in such an unusual and playful and wild and and evocative and really sensual filled with senses way like it's philosophical but it's it's so in the body final beat our zero to well-read score each one gets a

1:45:11Rebecca Schinsky:Score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Here are the five we do. Historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book, nerd, read cred, and oh damn factor. Historical importance. Rebecca, what do you think?

1:45:24Jeff O'Neal:This one's hard for me. Very hard. Like a 7 or an 8?

1:45:31Rebecca Schinsky:I'm probably an 8. I feel like it should be an 8, but I feel like it's probably more like a 6.5 or 7.

1:45:37Jeff O'Neal:Okay. We'll give it a 7 then.

1:45:39Rebecca Schinsky:I don't think it gets taught. it's not on high school syllabuses. I don't know how many. I mean, how could you, well, that's what I'm saying. The historical important ones have been around for a long time and they get, they get read more frequently at a more fundamental level. Like, yeah. Yeah. Readability, tricky one. Higher or lower than pension? I don't remember what we gave pension. Oh. Higher or lower than pension? This one's longer. So I think then, then violent, I think it's similar. I think it is similar. They're just, Easier in places

1:46:10Jeff O'Neal:Maybe slightly easier Because Rushdie and Salim like tell us from the outset That they're going to weave in all of this mythology That there will be surrealist and Magical elements and with Pynchon it's a surprise Of like wait are there aliens on this plane now Or is that something else I'm going to go I think this is still Challenging readability is like a four

1:46:31Rebecca Schinsky:Four that's what I was going to say too four-ish Current relevance of central questions Nine nine yeah always

1:46:37Jeff O'Neal:is forever relevant.

1:46:40Rebecca Schinsky:Book nerd, read credit. I think this is a good one. If you've got a full Rushdie and taken it seriously, I think you're in the top quartile, decile percentile of people who read.

1:46:49Jeff O'Neal:This is 9-10 territory for me.

1:46:51Rebecca Schinsky:I don't know that it can... What's a 10? Ulysses.

1:46:55Jeff O'Neal:Okay, so let's give it a 9.

1:46:56Rebecca Schinsky:It's one short of Ulysses. I think 9 is right. I mean, is that fair? I think that's fair, yeah. Oh, damn factor. Interesting, Rebecca. I think you're probably best equipped of the two of us to deal with this because you're the, you had the freshest eyes on it.

1:47:10Jeff O'Neal:It's so, this is so high for me. I was telling you the night that I first started reading and it really filled me with, why do I bother reading any other kinds of books?

1:47:17Rebecca Schinsky:And you got that pretty quick. Like that was pretty quickly in the book. It's just so, if you like to be shaken up,

1:47:25Jeff O'Neal:nobody's better at it than Rushdie. And in really great hands that I don't want to read Midnight's Children in perpetuity. I don't want to only read this kind of book, But while I'm in this kind of book, I do think like, why have I ever bothered to pick up anything else? Like this is it. Like this is the apex. This is the kind of, you know, this is what I want from reading.

1:47:49Rebecca Schinsky:I think mountaintop is not a bad metaphor for this because it takes effort. But if you can get to the vista, you can see things that you can't see from others.

1:47:55Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. So I mean my O'Damn factor, like nine or ten, it's high. I think I'm willing to entertain a 10. Yeah.

1:48:06Rebecca Schinsky:Definitely. That's pretty high. I mean, it's that it's difficult. And you tend not to get, I mean, I think readability and oh damn factor for us are seesaws. The more readable you are, the higher it is to oh damn. I can't think of something that's going to get a 10 in both. Maybe like Gone Girl.

1:48:25Rebecca Schinsky:yeah i think that's already it's it's existing already on a firmament of trope that they didn't that flynn didn't event for me i need a lot of like pure creation like a whole bunch of linguistic stylistic thematic or content creation yeah i think oh damn yeah for both of us mostly

1:48:45Jeff O'Neal:comes out of the place of like, what do we really want from reading? Why are we doing this? And I felt on every page, like, yeah, this is what I'm here for. Right.

1:48:58Rebecca Schinsky:I think that's a good place to end, Rebecca. Show notes are at bookriot.com slash listen. Shoot us an email at zero to wellread at bookriot.com. If you can spare a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts especially, but anywhere, be wonderful. Hit Hit those five stars. Hit follow up there. We're going to be doing Christmas Carol soon. Thus endeth season one. We got some other stuff coming in the feed. We're not going to take too much of a break, if any. But we've got some other stuff cooking. I, as I said at the top of the show, I am interested but will not be held to requests and recommendations for things to cover on the show.

1:49:37Rebecca Schinsky:I would guess it would be pretty hard for someone to recommend something. I'm like, ah, never. But I challenge you that one you would listen to. Here's one. I'm not going to mention someone's name. It's not a book I love, but is a book I think that would be worth doing an episode on is like Atlas Shrugged, for example. I think that's worth getting into for cultural reasons. And we have more affinity rather than others. But that is part of the project, I think, is to wrestle with some of these books that maybe you don't hold close to your heart.

1:50:08Jeff O'Neal:The master list for this is several hundred titles long.

1:50:10Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, we've got decades of work.

1:50:12Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, it's going to be hard to suggest a title that we haven't thought of. So actually, what I'm really interested in is the case for doing that book now or soon.

1:50:22Rebecca Schinsky:Now, that's right. That's why we're looking for, you know, because we're doing some of these.

1:50:28Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, we know that we should do one about Catcher in the Rye someday. And we will do Catcher in the Rye someday. We're going to do Huck Finn someday. We're going to get to Romeo and Juliet someday. Like, these are, they're all on the list. But as we look at like what we're going to do in the spring, you know, some of the things we're doing are like anchored to big anniversaries or to big movie events. Like there are some hooks. Is there something in the water that makes the book you're recommending especially relevant for the next season that we're planning? That's, that is the kind of thing that will get you closer to the episode you're asking for.

1:51:04Rebecca Schinsky:And the other thing you can't know, dear listener, is what we might have scheduled around it, because each season or each run, we're kind of trying to make our own kind of literary chutney. It's got a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But it's, you know, we're trying to, as we release episodes, I think you can see a thesis emerging about what we're trying to do. And Atlas Shrugged can certainly be part of that, but it also needs to be blended with some other stuff in a season or a three to five episode run to do that.

1:51:34Jeff O'Neal:And I think, again, like if you're wondering about how we think about the show or the philosophy of this first season or the things we've learned as we put it together, that's all fair game for a mailbag episode. So you can send us those questions to zero to well read at book riot.com.

1:51:48Rebecca Schinsky:Absolutely. Rebecca, a pleasure as always an especially fun conversation today. I appreciate your time.

1:51:53Jeff O'Neal:What a great way to end this first season.