Where to start with Rushdie
Midnight's Children lets history enter through a body, a family, and a voice that cannot stop telling stories.
Public controversy has obscured Rushdie the novelist, and you want to hear the comedy, excess, and historical argument in the prose itself.
Reading Shame first and concluding Rushdie is a political satirist; reading any of the later novels first and missing the linguistic invention that makes the politics land; or reading him through the news rather than through the books.
Books in order
- Midnight's Children — Read it slowly, the way it is told. Saleem is unreliable on purpose. The pickle metaphor and the nose are not decoration; they are the form of the argument that history happens through specific bodies. The middle of the book is where it lives — give the second hundred pages your full attention.
- Shame — The companion novel — Pakistan instead of India, colder, shorter, sharper. Read after Midnight's Children; the techniques are familiar and the political grief is more concentrated. The novel is angrier than its predecessor and the anger is part of the argument.
Further reading
- Haroun and the Sea of Stories — The textbook gentlest Rushdie — a children's book written for his son during the fatwa years. Not in this catalog yet, but it is the door we would put before Midnight's Children if we had it.
- The Satanic Verses — The famous deep-end novel. Save it; the linguistic ambition rewards a reader who already trusts Rushdie's prose at full pressure. Not currently in this catalog.