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Title: longwinded and dull
Review: A dead pull from start to finish. My feeling is that people tend to overpraise Rushdie's novels as a kind of celebration for having plodded through them. How depressing to spend a week of your life laboring through a narrative that just ultimately wallows in the fetid stink of its own self-absorption. Rushdie doesn't allow his characters to reveal themselves to us, electing instead to drool words, relentlessly, carelessly, sloppily, mercilessly. He tells us everything without ever showing what it's like to be one of his characters. For a novel purportedly grand in scope, this one feels suspiciously like navel-gazing.
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