Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
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Book Summary Information
Author: Salman RushdieEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1991-01-01
ISBN: 0140132708
Number of pages: 552
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Midnight's Children
Book Review: "Your life, which will be, in a sense, a mirror of our own..."
Summary: 4 Stars
The children in question are those hundreds of infants born at midnight on August 15, 1947 - the precise moment at which the independent Indian nation state came into existence. They all have supernatural gifts, but few more so than the narrator, Saleem Sinai, blessed (or cursed) with the enormous nose of his presumed ancestors which gives him the gift of telepathy, the ability to "sniff out" what others are thinking. But he is not his father's son. Switched at birth with another baby, Saleem is a Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. This book is his written record of Indian national history from 1910 to 1978, through its concordances with his own family life - an expression of what Rushdie calls "the national longing for form", the obsession with correspondences and similarities. We follow Saleem and his riotous extended family through the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law. As Saleem discovers, "midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots ..." Readers familiar with the history of twentieth-century India will find this more enjoyable than most, as much of the pleasure here lies in the way Rushdie folds national-political events into Saleem's experiences using four modes of connection which Saleem helpfully describes midway through - active-literal, passive-metaphorical, passive-literal, and active-metaphorical. The other pleasure is Rushdie's language, which is rich and complex (however there were times when I found his rhetorical style almost tedious). Fortunately, this is a very funny book, taking many of its cues from Bollywood cinema, and it's also quite acidic: part comedy, part angry polemic, it's a an odd combination but the result is a wonderful piece of literature. This is a book you will probably read several times in your life and enjoy in new ways with each encounter.
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