Feeding the Wandering Soul

This reader and reviewer of fiction is on the road, traveling in Nepal and India followed by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. The wandering reader needs a well-balanced diet of literature that enriches immersion into a host culture paired with works that summon up feelings of pleasant nostalgia for home. I think I’ve settled on a good mix.Traveling the subcontinent, I’ve gotten to know Salman Rushdie and his insights into pre- and post-Independence India. He’s best known for his 1981 Winner-of-The-Best-of-the-Booker masterpiece Midnight’s Children, which chronicles the birth and life of Saleem Sinai. Saleem, born at the precise moment of India’s independence from Britain, is cast as his country’s identical twin. And in The Moor’s Last Sigh- which is not dissimilar in style and subject to Midnight’s Children- Rushdie writes about the Zogoiby – da Gama dynasty, whose family chronicles he expertly weaves into the colorful tapestry of southern Indian history and culture.

Rushdie meditates extensively on the most trying and unsavory aspects of family in both of these works. From Midnight’s Children:

Children get food shelter pocket-money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it’s a sort of compensation for having been born. ‘There are no strings on me!’ they sing; but I, Pinocchio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive- nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness.

And, chillingly, from The Moor’s Last Sigh:

Children make fictions of their fathers, re-inventing them according to their childish needs. The reality of a father is a weight few sons can bear.

More soon, from the road.