It is about 5ish on a weekday evening, a muggy one, very dark as I recall - right in the middle of winter. I'm in Cardiff Central library, on the second floor. I'm sitting on the floor, aged 14, next to a shelf at the bottom of a block containing miscellaneous books, seemingly unrelated. The top shelf has a batch of green Virago paperbacks, I remember that much. The middle shelf is a blur. And this block near the floor - in my memory it has books by writers with names like "Farukh", "Anita", "Narayan", none of which get my attention. The book I'm holding in my lap then, in 1987, is Midnight's Children.
How would one of Rushdie's characters describe this moment? "It was a life-changing moment, see, the earth beneath my feet was reversioned with a whipcrack of zygotic knowledge, how-to-clarify, I was baptized anew baby, re-located to the place I had never known but always been... I was the recipient of stolen ideas... a handler of smuggled truths... I was suddenly not alone is the thing, I couldn't believe it, goddamit, I laughed out loud, belched it out with tears of mad joy you know, it was the beginning of everything!" I had better stop treading the line between homage and parody now, before all Rushdie fans cringe as they remember their own attempts at imitation.
In my experience Rushdie inspires fanaticism, whichever side you are on. It is a deeply personal reaction to the writing itself. It can lead to the kind of heightened response of pure pleasure described above. Or alternatively - utter annoyance, anger, revulsion even, at the wayward density and posturing of his language. What struck me when I first read him was the audacity: the shameless layering of the references - the unabashed romance and hilarity of the authorial voice. It is writing that is littered with secret signs for the reader to either clock or disregard, but all done with such an expansive heart that if you get on the train, you're a goner.
I love this, I thought then, and everyone else can go to hell. Until that point I had been on a classic diet of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence. In Rushdie I had found a writer who gave me a sense of the agony and the ecstasy, plus everything beyond.
Twenty years later, and having read all of his work to date, I still feel that kind of militant belief in his importance as a writer - even though he now represents something other than his novels. For a writer who inspires such private reactions, he has become terribly public - a sign of our times, a symbolic character in one of his own dystopian melodramas: the literary humorist who is ensnared by larger forces.
But for me he will always be the man responsible for the "chutnification" of the English language: a fusion dish with attitude, a balti amif 1,001 plates of fish and chips, beloved to all who dare to try it, once they take the plunge. Remembering my younger self in that library in Cardiff reminds me of the intensely personal experience that literature can offer. It is a memory I hope never to lose.
If you have similar memories, of particular moments of literary fever, then please do let me know. If none come to mind then, well, I've technically "over-shared" but that is OK with me.
