Bibliofreakblog

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

I thought about attempting to write this review in the style of the book: winding, stream-of-consciousness type sentences that seem to spin around in the reader’s head.  But then I thought that nobody would finish reading my post, and so here I am, writing in my plain old style.

But let me tell you, I almost didn’t make it here.  If this book hadn’t been named the best of the Booker Awards, I might have given up.  If it weren’t about a topic I was interested in, India, I might have given up.  If it weren’t written by Salman Rushdie, I might have given up.  If I hadn’t been reading it for the Summer Reading Challenge, I might have given up.

But I persevered.  

The story is more or less about the narrator, Saleem, who could possibly be making up the whole thing about his psychic powers, and the powers of the 1001 other children born in India an hour after midnight on August 15, 1947–the day India and Pakistan became their own nations, free of colonial rule.  I chose to go ahead and believe that the narrator was crazy because of all that had happened to him, and not that he was crazy and so he made it up.  But that’s for the reader to decide.  Whether or not you buy into the whole magical realism of events Saleem writes (addressing the reader, but then reading it out loud to his employee, Padma, who gives him her own, sometimes disbelieving, critiques), they do parallel India’s tribulations post-Independence.

I had no idea what a bitch Indira Ghandi was.

The whole first section of the book, however, deals with Saleem’s family background, which, for me, did not add anything to the story.  Had this information been sprinkled throughout the book, it might have been better because we would have gotten to the heart of the matter more quickly.

I feel that I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer up some of Rushdie’s genius, albeit difficult, prose.  So here’s a few passages.  Before picking this book up, however, keep in mind that the whole 533 pages are pretty much written in this style.

“Banned from the washing-chests: cries of “Pinocchio!  Cucumber-nose!  Goo-face!” Concealed in my hiding-place, I was safe from the memory of Miss Kapadia, the teacher at Breach Candy Kindergarten, who had, on my first day at school, turned from her blackboard to greet me, seen my nose, and dropped her duster in alarm, smashing the nail on her big toe, in a screechy but minor echo of my father’s famous mishap; buried amongst soiled hankies and crumpled pajamas, I could forget, for a time, my ugliness.”

“Saleem was not in the ghetto when Major Shiva arrived by motorcycle; while nuclear explosions rocked the Rajasthani wastes, out of sight, beneath the desert’s surface, the explosion which changed my life also took place out of my sight.  When Shiva grasped Parvati by the wrist, I was with Picture Singh at an emergency conference of the city’s many red cells, discussing the ins and outs of the national railway strike; when Parvati, without demurring, took her place on the pillion of a hero’s Honda, I was busily denouncing the government’s arrests of union leaders.”

Did you notice the use of both the third and 1st person there?  Yeah, he does that a lot.

He also likes to list three things in a row without using commas, which gets really confusing, especially when he’s talking about people.

I’m glad I finished it, but damn, it really took me a long time.

 
Buy Midnight’s Children on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(My reviews in blue)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
The Memory-Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipul
Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Other works by Salman Rushdie:

Grimus: A Novel 
The Enchantress of Florence
East, West
The Satanic Verses
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
The Moor’s Last Sigh
The Jaguar Smile: Nicaraguan Journey
Conversations with Salman Rushdie 
Shalimar the Clown
Haroun and the Sea of Stories 
The Wizard of Oz 
Shame
Fury
Imaginary Homelands

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