He is a skillful writer at least. 

I always always despise crude humor that aims to shock and offend. Sure, I understand it will always be expressed but it makes me sick personally 🤷

Very expansive and well constructed and circular and layered narrative that was rich and captivating and thematically potent

I'm not sure what to make of it in the end because I have a hard time evaluating texts with this extent of sexual violence. I don't know what to make of it

One of my impressions though was that while Rushdie clearly had intent to explore the life of women repressed by the duality of shameful/shamelessness, his writing felt very objectifying to me in itself. In that he could not grasp the life of women beyond sexual action or humiliation of some kind. I felt frequently disappointed or troubled by this. Especially in his attempts to portray disabled women's sexuality, or women's masculinity, it felt estranged like it came from a place of not understanding. While the women characters were deep and vivid in some ways and served prominently in the themes and shifting dynamics of the story I felt like they were also emptied of the wholeness their personhood. Which is unfortunate because of his narrative skill

Would be interesting to do a deeper read on misogyny textually and in criticism of the text 

Aside from being intentionally crass I do like the stylistic approach and would read more magical realism in the future, perhaps. The shiftingness of time and place and the metanarration were not an issue to me, I thought they were interesting techniques and I could follow the tone and pace of the story

Quote below, I think I understand the aim of the text but the implication that the "female side" of the story is only limited to rivalry or domination or disloyalty or failures etc in their spousal roles is sad because he wants to tell you that all this he has written is the sum of women's tragedies and histories and comedies and not so so so much more, I guess he can't really know but women's lives are so much more expansive and with rich interiority beyond their function and dysfunction in the heterosexual patriarchal dynamic so that suggestion is something I just can't really feel that okay with:

Once upon a time there were two families, their destinies inseparable even by death. I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my ‘male’ plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and ‘female’ side. It occurs to me that the women knew precisely what they were up to – that their stories explain, and even subsume, the men’s. Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well.


- Yes I get it and there's much of interest that he's getting at I just want to pull it apart because it's interesting. Frustrating that his sense of humor is occasionally so gross. Despite his vision I personally find a variety of unfortunate shortcomings. Another is his equation of fatness to moral character. In the end he has made an interesting contribution to literature. Much to think about. I feel sick