Midnight's Children is not at all a fast read; it actually walks the line of being unpleasantly the opposite. The prose is dense and initially frustrating in a way that seems almost deliberate, with repeated instances of the narrator rambling ahead to a point that he feels is important--but then, before revealing anything of importance, deciding that things ought to come in their proper order. This use of digressions (or, better put, quarter-digressions) can either be attributed to a charmingly

“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”Living different ways of grasping the meaning of man and the world should offer a deeper perspective than the usual reductionism that we oftentimes subject cultures that diverge from our own...

Reading Rushdie's Midnight's Children is like listening to someone else's long-winded, rambling re-telling of a dream they had. And like all people who describe their dreams -- especially those who do so long past the point where their listeners can believably fake interest or patience -- Rushdie is inherently selfish in the way he chose to write this book. Midnight's Children is one of those novels that are reader-neutral or even reader-antagonistic -- they seem to have been written for the sol...

“Nose and knees and knees and nose” – part of a prophecy about the unborn narrator. A few days after reading this, I was fortunate to be in the Acropolis Museum, and was struck by a collection of three bas-reliefs that were just of knees. Coupled with the relative lack of whole noses on some of the statues, I was transported back to this book.This was my first adult Rushdie, following soon after his gorgeous children’s/YA novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. My initial reaction to this was “The...

The power of the storytelling left me speechless - all the words were in the novel, and there were none left for me! If there ever was a novel that changed the way I read, this is it. I must have read each sentence several times, just to follow the thread of the confusing story, and I still got lost in the labyrinth of individual and collective history that unfolds on the stroke of Midnight, on the night of India's independence. So completely taken in by the children who are born on that partic...

The children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream. Midnight's Children was an unexpected pleasure for me. Maybe that is the reason it took me so long to write down my thoughts on it. Yes, I read some reviews before starting it, but could never have imagined Salman Rushdie’s symphony that is no short of a magnificent blueprint of a labyrinthine palace of fantasy. Let me just

Have you ever been to a Hindu temple? It’s a riotous mass of orange, blue, purple, red, and green. Its walls seethe with deities. In one corner, Ganesha--the god with a human body and elephant head--sits on his vehicle, a rat. In another, a blue Krishna sits on a cow wooing cow girls by playing his flute. Durgha wearing a necklace of skulls kills a demon in another corner. Jasmine-decorated devotees stand around chanting. The press of people, the incense and the noise all combine and you lose yo...

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world." —Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children. For me, one of the most important books of our modern age.I ADORE this playful, historical epic: Salman Rushdie is a literary god in my eyes, and can do little wrong - so I am biased.Rushdie is one of the authors who has influenced my own style of writing, even though his overly-descriptive approach is discouraged by publishing editors the world over.The 'midnight's children' of the story are th

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same. Discard skepticism as you approach this epic. Suspend disbelief. Because myth and truth blend into each other imperfectly to spin a gossamer-fine web of reality on which the nation state is balanced precariously. And we, the legatees of this yarn, are caught up in a surrealist farce which plays out interminably in this land of heat and dust and many smells, our rational selves perennially clashing with our shallow beliefs but eventually

Fantastic, intelligent, hilarious, profound, and historically illuminating. And the narrator is deliciously unreliable too! Need I say more? I will. His sentences are the kind of energetic super-charged masterpieces that I could quote endlessly. Here's one plucked utterly at random:"Into this bog of muteness there came, one evening, a short man whose head was as flat as the cap upon it; whose legs were as bowed as reeds in the wind; whose nose nearly touched his up-curving chin; and whose voice,...

This is my absolute favourite Rushdie novel. Its background of the Partition of India and Pakistan after the disastrous and cowardly retreat of the British occupiers and the ensuing Emergency under Indira Ghandi provides a breathtaking tableau for Rushdie's narrative. His narrator is completely unreliable and that is what makes the story so fascinating. I lend this book out so many times after talking about it so much (and never got my paperback copy returned) that I had to buy a hardcover that

"I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come." ― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children I pull up a chair and ready myself. I had, after all, been promised a fantastical story of the children of midnight. The air crackles with electricity as the story unfolds

Midnight’s Children is an absolute masterful piece of writing. It is entertaining, intelligent, informative, progressive and even funny: it is an astoundingly well balanced epic that captures the birth of a new independent nation. I hold it in such high regard. The children are all fractured and divided; they are born into a new country that is yet to define itself in the wake of colonialism: it has no universal language, religion or culture. The children reflect this; they are spread out and...

Life is simply too short (and this book, far too long).So, Merry Christmas to myself! Robin, you don't have to finish reading this endless, labyrinthine mess tangle. Putting the book down does not mean it "beat" you. It doesn't say anything definitively bad about you, as a reader. It just means that there is limited time on this earth and other great books are calling your name. Books that don't make your eyes cross and furrow your brow in exasperation and frustration. Mr. Rushdie, it's not me,

Nothing but trouble outside my head; nothing but miracles inside it.Being a child is no child’s play. A long wait within the sheltered darkness of a womb subsides when rhythmic beats of the heart resume their role in blinding light and mind, an apparent clean slate hold the fading marks of previous lives. While the time patiently takes its course to reveal the silhouette of million existent enigmas, the colorblind vision gradually sheds its skin and an exhilarating display of a new world comes f...

I truly am sorry, Salman. It’s trite to say, I know, but it really wasn’t you, it was me. I take all the blame for not connecting, ignorant as I am about the Indian subcontinent’s history, culture, and customs. I’m sure your allegories were brilliant and your symbolism sublime, but it was in large part lost on me. At least I could appreciate your fine writing. You were very creative in the way you advanced the story, too — nonlinearly, and tied to actual events. Your device that allowed narrator...

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world” (Everyman’s Library, p. 125). Midnight’s Children’s ambition is elephantine: a multi-layered, dizzying kaleidoscope encompassing and spinning together the narrator’s phantasmagorical biography, the complicated history of 20th-century India, and the deep-rooted beliefs and cultural archetypes of its people. In a (long) word, Midnight’s Children is a sprawling, swirling historical-auto-meta-fictional-polyglottal-confabulating-Bildungsrom...

(Throwback Review) "Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible."The story of Saleem Sinai's life, born at the midnight of India's independence, can be construed as India's story after independence with the sublime intertwining of the protagonist's emotions with that of the country. The violence and callousness are corollaries to any colonial rule...

It was more of a 3* experience but I know it would have been a 5* if I had read this book when I was younger and in love with magical realism. Unfortunately, there is a timing for everything and the genre does not appeal to me anymore. There are exceptions such as Junot Diaz's Oscar. It took me a while to finish as I read a couple of other books in between but I am glad I did. I liked it, it is a masterpiece of the genre and I recommend it to anyone who wants to try magical realism . It is the "...

Midnight’s Children, Salman RushdieSir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British-American novelist and essayist of Indian descent. Midnight's Children is a 1980 novel by Salman Rushdie that deals with India's transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of British India. It is considered an example of postcolonial, postmodern, and magical realist literature. The story is told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual historical events. The style...