Sleeping Is Giving In, No Matter What the Time Is

I'm feeling especially "grown-up" today, this week. I have grown-up problems [taxes, insurance, therapy], grown-up responsibilities [apartment hunting, price comparing, budgeting], and grown-up events to attend [Salman Rushdie followed by a wine and cheese get-together].

I put a reserve deposit down on an apartment after a morning of shopping around different complexes. The apartment I chose is a really cute one bedroom with a nice little sunroom that will make a great dining room/study area. I have a move-in date and a bevy of people to help me move. I have some furniture, and I'm now in search of more furniture [a new bed, more bookcases, a sofa, etc]. I'm really excited about moving out of my tiny bedroom and moving into a real home with real space, a place where I can do what I waaaaant.

Oh, and, uh...Salman Rushdie.

Well, he was amazing. I was as excited to see him as I was to see JCO, but for very different reasons. It was interesting, having already seen her, but they definitely had their own flavors.

Part of the difference is in where the featured book fell in each one's success. Oates's talk was on The Falls, which is her 4000th [ok, probably somewhere around 30th] novel. It didn't get any particular type of awesome acclaim--I think it was chosen because it was relatively new, and because she really seemed tied to the main character. Rushdie's book, on the other hand, was Midnight's Children. His second book, which followed a first book that was widely panned, from how he spoke about it.

With Rushdie, we got to hear about his creative process, about how much work went into this novel. How he changed point-of-view in the middle of the novel, and how much history he had to put into it to make the character he had in his head. Which is a perfect point, and one that I've made before--my characters live in my head before they ever live on paper. It often is more like listening to a story than writing one--the character's actions progress out of their personalities, and never the other way around. My favorite writing professor always said that our characters should be so well defined in our heads, their personalities so specific, that we could answer any question about what they would do in any situation. Rushdie, it seems, believes this too.

It was interesting hearing this widely acclaimed author speak of the frustration of this book. When he finished, he said, he read through it and thought it was a pretty good book. If it was panned, he decided, he obviously did not know what a good book looked like and should stop writing [how tragic that would have been!]

Alas, Midnight's Children went on to win the Booker Prize [Britian's top writing accolade], and then won the "Booker of Bookers"--the best Booker-winning book in the first twenty-five years of the prize. Rushdie went on to be sued by Indira Gandhi for libel for one sentence in the book; by settling, she inadvertently admitted to the other accusations of corruption, a point that did not escape India's media. Rushdie went on to write other novels, including The Satanic Verses, a book so intense that a fatwa was put on Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

So, Salman Rushdie is decidedly a badass. But my favorite part, by far, was his reading. I absolutely love being read to; so much, in fact, that the last two times I have slept at Allison's apartment, I have forced her to read to me until I fell asleep. In her bed. Forcing her to sleep on the couch.

Rushdie's work is less accessible to me than Oates, because he writes about a place I've never been, a culture in which I've never been immersed, with religious and political problems unlike with which I've been surrounded. The simple reading he gave, with slightly different voices for characters and the lilt of his accent--it made the words much more accessible, much more sensible. They made more sense, that is.

But, my favorite part by far, was when he addressed one of my favorite qualities of his work. For about a year, I've been a bit obsessed about magic realism. [A lot of the modern magic realists--Morrison, Marquez, Singer--have been Nobelists!] Rushdie definitely fits the bill, with scalps coming off and men growing horns, and I find all of it absolutely delightful.

To paraphrase:

Someone decided to take a sort of census of all of the gods in India--not just the well-known Hindu gods, but also the local gods of each village. When he was done, the total came to 300 million gods in India. He compared that to the population: at 1 billion people, the ratio of humans to gods in India is currently 3.3:1. In the time in which the book is set, the ratio was 2:1. Following the population curve and assuming the population of the gods is constant [as is their nature], the human population surpassed the divine population around 1940. This is a good place to start understanding why Indians are more likely to accept the magic of his realism than their western counterparts.

Rushdie made my week bright in the midst of Failing two out of four exams! Putting myself in even more jeopardy with the program! Being totally unsure of the future! All of these things, these terribly disheartening disappointing things of which I am sure I will soon speak. But Salman Rushdie is a bad-ass, unrepentant, magic realist amazing writer. I'm sure he will win the Nobel in the next ten years [after Philip Roth, of course], and when he does, I'll be cheering him all the way, clutching my signed hardback copy of The Satanic Verses to my chest.