Friday, April 22, 2011

May Book

Date: to be figured out
Place: to be figured out
Book: Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdi


The Amazon reviews on this one ranges from, "This is, in every way, a perfect novel," to "A Total Piece of Horse Doo Doo."

Apparently Midnight's Children is being made into a movie, possibly called Approaching Midnight. Rushdie is doing the screen play.

Here's a brief look at the man, culled from Wikipedia.



The only son of a Cambridge-educated lawyer turned businessman and a teacher, Rushdie was born in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), India, into a Muslim family He was in Mumbia and at Cambridge, where he studied history

He's been married four times!


In 1976 he married for the first time, and kept at it 11 years. His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; this marriage lasted until 1993, five years. Four years later, he married Elizabeth West. This marriage lasted seven years. In 2004, he married the Indian American actress and model Padma Lakshmi. Have you guys seen Padma? She's beautiful and self- Padma divorced him three years later. He seems to be on a spat of dating Ballywood stars the last few years.



With Padma




His first job was a copywriting gig for ad agencies. He wrote Midnight's Children while working full time as an ad man. Apparently, this book though wasn't his first published, which was Grimus, which no one paid any attention to. Midnight's Children came out next and catapulted him to literary notability. It significantly shaped the course that Indian writing in English followed over the next decade, and is regarded by many as one of the great books of the last 100 years. This work won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years.

He wrote a bunch of other books in the 80s, some of which won prizes. In 1988, The Satanic Verses cam out.

Here a long and in-depth interview in which Rushdie speaks on Islam and how the fatwa influenced  his life.





In 1999, he came out with The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which is an alternative history of modern rock music. The song of the same name is one of many song lyrics included in the book, hence Rushdie is credited as the lyricist. He's continued to produce a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels.

Yes, Rushdie is actually in this U2 music video. Don't blink or you'll miss him.


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