Midnight's Children and Shame

Authors

Salman Rushdie

Abstract

I've been talking to a lot of journalists for the last week, and I've become very expert at summarizing my books. You know, it's very strange that you write something which is 250,000 words long or, in the case of the new book, a mere 100,000 words long, and people say, 'Can you tell our readers in a couple of sentences what it is you're trying to say?' To be fair to journalists I have to say that it's not only journalists that make these requests. For instance, I went on a lecture tour to India this year, and I remember in Delhi a girl said to me, 'Look, I've read your book, this Midnight's Children-, it's very long, but I read it.' And then she said, 'What I want to know is: what's your point?' To my reply, 'Do I really have to have just one point?' she answered, 'Yes, of course. I know what you're going to say. You're going to say the whole book is the point from the beginning to the end, aren't you?' 'Yes,' I said. 'I thought so,' she said. 'It won't do.' So I thought that instead of talking about a point, I would just talk in a more discursive way about the book, and one might come round to something about a point.

Recommended Citation

Rushdie, Salman, Midnight's Children and Shame, Kunapipi, 7(1), 1985.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol7/iss1/3