Midnight’s Children

Sir Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children has been named the greatest Booker-prize winner of all time.

“ [I think of] how astonished my younger self writing Midnight’s Children in the late-1970s would have been about this. It was written with such hope but not with the expectation that this book would still be interesting and relevant to people who were not even born when it was written.” Rushdie, 2008 Booker Prize Ward.

I (finally) just finished reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I am a busy Mother/professional, not enough time to read all the great literature that is out there. But the need, the desire to read these stories is so strong, like a craving that never ends. Most of the time, I like to hear about what people are reading, seeing, experiencing in the arts, so I can take some of the knowledge and not feel like the life of ideas is wasting away in the mundane day-to-day life of a housewife in America. I digress. And I like my mundane life. Anyway… hope I don’t sound like I am inhaling too many cleaning products.
My impressions: Midnight’s Children is a huge book. It is dense yet delightfully entertaining, successfully ambitious. Genius, it reaches and attains the impossible: it tries to define India, its birth and its Indianess. Through the story of children with telepathic powers born at midnight on Independence day, Rushdie tells the history of this new, independent nation, a modern geographical invention of sorts, a linguistic quagmire, a nation of disparate cultures and languages, strung together as an ideal or an idea.
Saleem, the protagonist , like his new India, is fragmented as an individual, a million pieces put together as an invention. Empowered and yet imprisoned by his olfactory powers (he can smell concepts, colors, special relations, emotions); by his telepathic powers (he hears the voices of thousands of children with superpowers); by his relgion( a Muslim in a Hindu nation). Swapped at birth, he is raised by a family that is not his own, creating a domino effect of ironies and tragedies, much like the history of his beloved nation.
And through the intensity of the protagonists’ physical senses, Rushdie weaves the reader into great India and Pakistan. Retaining the idea of a national identity, this nation is enveloped in a complex, colorful web of of a mythological panoply, a melting pot as rich, savory and complex as the chutneys he creates. This is a book worthy of a dissertation, but it leaves a residue, a taste. I want this book to stay with me forever. And by the way, it’s a really funny book too.
Interesting facts about the book:
 Has been compared in its scope and execution to works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Like them, Rushdie’s novel presents an encyclopaedic exploration of an entire society through the story of a single person. It is able to do this, in part, by merging with the novel form a number of non-Western texts such as the Sanskrit epics, The Ramayana, The Mahabharata and, most consciously One Thousand and One Nights.

++++The novel ran into some controversy for its open criticism of Indira Gandhi, India’s then prime minister, and the Emergency that she imposed on the country.

What knowledgeable people say…

In Midnight’s Children, the narrative comprises and compresses Indian cultural history. ‘Once upon a time,’ Saleem muses, ‘there were Radna and Krisna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not affected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn’ (259). At this point Hutcheon’s post-modern perspective can be discerned: characters from Indian cultural history are chronologically intertwined with characters from Western culture, and the devices that they signify — Indian culture, religion and storytelling, Western drama and cinema — are presented in Rushdie’s text with post-colonial Indian history to examine both the effect of these indigenous and non-indigenous cultures on the Indian mind and in the light of Indian independence. It is in this sense, which blends with Loomba’s theory as quoted above, that Midnight’s Childrenis a post-colonial text, via its presentation and examination of the temporal and cultural status of India as an independent nation. This, as Edward W. Said writes, has been initiated in the text to portray the ‘conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories….[This] is of particular interest in Rushdie’s work’ (260).