Midnight's Children

Jul 05, 2012 Tanu rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classic, emotional-drama, excellent-prose, serious-literature, the-eternal-quest, well-developed-plot, cringe-worthy

If beating around the bush was a crime; then, Salman Rushdie would be charged with aggravated assault and attempt to murder of that bush.

If there was of contest of master of digressions; he would emerge as the undisputed winner.

And, if any novel could even come close to portraying India’s vast cultural identity;that novel would be Midnight’s Children .

Salman Rushdie is a wicked, WICKED author. In this booker of booker’s novel, he has given us one of the most unreliable, irritating, annoying, cl...more

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Apr 18, 2012 Whitaker rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-canon, india, 2009-read

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...more 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 your bearings. That’s what reading Midnight’s Children is like.

In many ways, it’s apt that it’s like that. This is a country of 330 million deities and about as many languages and dialects. It’s large, messy, contradictory, and bursting with people. As with the country, so with the book. Like the nation whose birth it writes about, Midnight’s Children strains at the seams to hold its contents in one whole. Its language is as spicy and pungent as one of south India’s curries. Its plot packs a punch as potent at its toddies. And being set in a country where film stars are venerated as incarnations of Shiva and Brahma and Vishnu, reality often takes a rain check.

Rushdie’s plot ends somewhere in the 70’s. A key theme in the novel is fragmentation: of our hero, and of the country. At time of writing, India’s Congress Party led by a scion of the Ghandi dynasty has won the national elections. Technological wiz-kids work in Bangalore while their cousins labour in rice fields. Modern Indian women dance in jeans in clubs while nationalist conservative Hindus plot to bash them for immodesty. The country is being forcibly pushed into a capitalist 21st century and the tensions show. And yet for all that it doesn't all fly apart.

One wonders what a sequel to the novel would be like. Would we see a son of our hero fly off to study in the United States and return to start a technology company and engage in a tumultuous love-hate relationship with an American woman while keeping a Chinese lover on the side? And what would happen to the 1,001 children of midnight? India faces as many possibilities at this juncture of her history as at the time of her bastard incarnation (don’t flame me, it’s in the book). How can we even begin to grasp what she is about? One visit will not be enough. And as with the country, so with the book. (less)

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Jun 10, 2008 Turhan Sarwar rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more 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 distractable narrator or a vehicle for (perhaps cheaply) tantalizing the reader... or both.

I'll admit that at first I didn't appreciate being so persistently manipulated. Many times in the first few chapters I found myself closing the book in anger, thinking to myself "If the story is worth it, this tactic is utterly unnecessary."

The tactic, it turns out, is unnecessary. The book--the story--is stunning. It's stunning enough that the frustrating aspects of the telling are forgivable and actually retrospectively satisfying (which I suspect is what the author wanted). While the fractional digressions, on the one hand, can have you groping around for a lighter--they, on the other hand, work to accustom you to the novel's epically meandering pace. Also, they effectively allow you to feel a certain urgency near the end of the book, as the narrator "runs out of time."

The imagery is lush; the characters are curiously, magically lopsided; the language is complicated and beautiful; the chapters are nicely portioned despite the initial plodding pace; the narrative is deliberately allegorical, which perhaps suggests an enhanced enjoyment of the work after studying a bit of Indian history. Elements of the story's frame (the narrator writing in a pickle factory with sweet Padma reading along) are particularly amusing, and the chapter entitled "In the Sundarbans" is nothing short of breathtaking.

The book will go slow in the beginning; the book means to; give it patience--it's worth it, I think.(less)

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Aug 11, 2008 Taylor rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Rushdie newcomers, the ambitious, people who love their hometown

Shelves: fiction, own, signed, favorites, golden-years, ramble-on

Back in 2000, lit critic James Wood wrote a huge manifesto on the problem of "the 'big' novel" for the New Atlantic (disguised as a review of Zadie Smith). He basically attacked quirky novels like Underworld, Infinite Jest & White Teeth. There were a lot of things about it that I agreed with - particularly his point that a lot of cutesy things some writers tend towards are in place of good structure. One major thing I didn't agree with was his inclusion of Rushdie in this lot of wacky writer...more

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Oct 31, 2012 Lona rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Lona by: صالون الجمعة

منذ الصفحات الأولى شعرت أنني موعودة بقراءة نص غير اعتيادي، وقعت تحت سطوة سحره فوراً، أسلوب الكتاب، المحتوى، طريقة السرد كانت مميزة بشكل لافت

نص الرواية خرافي وكأن كاتب الرواية أصيب بالبكم وبداخله الكثير الذي لم يبح به بعد، وعندما منحوه ورقة وقلم، تفجَّر القلم و خطَّ على الورق ما تضخم بداخله ليصنع لنا هذه التحفة الفنية من "الثرثرة اللامتناهية" .. .. نعم ثرثرة ولكنها ليست فارغة

ما هذه الثرثرة؟!! طوال 667 صفحة لم أشعر أبداً أن هناك حشواً زائداً يُثقل كاهل النص، بل كانت ثرثرة من الطراز الرفيع، ثرثرة ف...more منذ الصفحات الأولى شعرت أنني موعودة بقراءة نص غير اعتيادي، وقعت تحت سطوة سحره فوراً، أسلوب الكتاب، المحتوى، طريقة السرد كانت مميزة بشكل لافت

نص الرواية خرافي وكأن كاتب الرواية أصيب بالبكم وبداخله الكثير الذي لم يبح به بعد، وعندما منحوه ورقة وقلم، تفجَّر القلم و خطَّ على الورق ما تضخم بداخله ليصنع لنا هذه التحفة الفنية من "الثرثرة اللامتناهية" .. .. نعم ثرثرة ولكنها ليست فارغة

ما هذه الثرثرة؟!! طوال 667 صفحة لم أشعر أبداً أن هناك حشواً زائداً يُثقل كاهل النص، بل كانت ثرثرة من الطراز الرفيع، ثرثرة فخمة، ثرثرة أقل ما يقال عنها أنها خرافية .. .. على رأي إخواننا في مصر إيه الهبل ده

سليم سيناء يحكي ويُحيي ماضية بطريقة سردية تعتمد الكشف عن الأحداث بطريقة متداخلة تكاد تكون عشوائية لنا، ممنهجه ذات أهداف له، تجعل الصورة لا تكتمل إلا في الصفحة الأخيرة وهذا ما زاد النص تشويقاً وإثارة غير عادية

لم أشعر أني مفصولة عن الأحداث، فالحوار موجَّه للقارئ/ة أيضاً بجمل تطلب منَّا أن لا نتسرع وأن هناك شيء سيحدث ولكن علينا أن ننتظر قليلاً لأن الوقت لم يحن بعد، وشخصيات يكشف عنها بشكل جزئي كأنها خيال شبح يؤدي دورة الجزئي فقط في تلك اللحظة قبل أن يحين دوره ( قد ننتظر لنهاية الرواية ليظهر) .. .. هذه الالتفاتات خلقت نوع من الارتباط الحميمي بالرواية، فطريقة الراوي جعلتني جزاءاً رئيسياً منها مثل "بادما" تماماً التي خصَّها "سليم سيناء" بحكايته

أيضاً:-رغم أن الرواية ترتبط بتاريخ دموي (فترة مهمة في تاريخ الهند والباكستان ) بالإضافة لتاريخ "سليم" البائس إلا أن في ذروة البؤس لا يبخل علينا الكاتب بالدعابة، فللكاتب حس دعابة عالي جداً فالابتسامة والضحك من الأعماق لم يفارقني طوال القراءة

ملاحظة مهمة:- الترجمة راااااااااائعة

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Dec 28, 2012 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, india

Update:

Just back from watching the movie and.... well... it kind of highlights the less great parts of the book, just because it's a movie. You notice the non-plot, you notice that the characters get dragged around from India to Pakistan to Bangladesh depending which big political event or war is happening as we make our way from 1947 to 1977; and we really notice how gushingly sentimental it all turns out in the end. All of these problems are there in the book but are melted, dissolved, and ble...more

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Mar 07, 2010 indri rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: ade stp

Recommended to indri by: wirotomo, miaaa

Shelves: sastra-dunia, asia-land

#2010-19# baca bareng mbak Endah

yang lahir di malam kemerdekaan India

Aku Saleem Sinai, dilahirkan pada dentang jam tengah malam, sementara dunia tertidur, India terbangun menuju kehidupan dan kebebasan. Bersamaan dengan Jawaharhal Nehru mengumandangkan, "Bertahun-tahun yang lalu kita berjanji untuk bertemu dengan takdir; dan sekarang tiba waktunya ketika kita akan menebus janji kita-- tidak sepenuhnya atau secara menyeluruh, tetapi secara sangat substansial.."
Malam itu, 15 Agustus 1947, suara te...more

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Aug 12, 2009 miaaa rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: echa, dahlia

Recommended to miaaa by: prima, icha, vashti

Shelves: ophelia-s-library, favourites

I should not even dare to write a review about this book. It's crazy, emotionally challenging, and able to bring you down and up, loving and hating the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, at the same time. But by recounting his story, no not just recount but Saleem did take me to India, to watch and experience the frenzy of the Independence, to the Midnight Children, to a bloody separation of Pakistan, to a 'meat versus vegetable' war which actually the Bangladesh separation from Pakistan. You know as a...more I should not even dare to write a review about this book. It's crazy, emotionally challenging, and able to bring you down and up, loving and hating the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, at the same time. But by recounting his story, no not just recount but Saleem did take me to India, to watch and experience the frenzy of the Independence, to the Midnight Children, to a bloody separation of Pakistan, to a 'meat versus vegetable' war which actually the Bangladesh separation from Pakistan. You know as a reader, I couldn't ask for more. But apparently as a writer Salman Rushdie wants to give more that any reader would expect from him.

Yes Indian or Pakistani or Bangladesh political unrests are not something new, but do we really understand what is going on? I got bits from here and there, mostly from my Indian friends, but somehow now I'm learning that there are more to the fragile issue. The famous name of Gandhi and the Nehru, it looks like someone (read: a family or a clan) has an extra burden on her shoulder, or I'm the only one who think of it as a burden? But hey look politic is merely a game, at least for most politicians. If you're in power then you do anything necessary to keep that power, so when you're not in power you do anything necessary to takeover the power. And on and on and on. And by playing the game these politicians then forget about the people whose interests are the one they should fight for.

And so who can provide insights to all these Independence, Separations, State of Emergency situations, class and religious clashes, as well as political vulnerability than the two mightiest Midnight Children of all, Saleem and Shiva, who were cheated since born which occured at the stroke of midnight the very moment of India's Independence. Name-tags are switched so that the heir of a Moslem and wealthy family was raised in poverty as a Hindu whilst the son of a Hindu fortuneteller/singer took his twin-not-really-a-twin place to be raised as a Kashmiri Prince of whom the Indian first Prime Minister wrote a personal letter regarding his birth.

Oh how one wishes she could write her stories the way Salman Rushdie reflected his nation in such masterpiece like this Midnight Children.

***

Butuh keberanian luar biasa untuk mereview buku ini, apalagi untuk memasangnya untuk dibaca orang lain seperti ini. Saat mengecek variasi bintang plus review dari beberapa orang yang telah membacanya di Goodreads, yang awalnya untuk mencari ide, malah membuatku semakin bingung.

Sulit, ini buku yang sulit untuk dibaca. Dan tidak hanya itu. Secara emosional isinya menantang karena aku bisa membenci namun juga menyukai tokoh utama cerita ini, Saleem Sinai, di saat yang bersamaan. Saat ia menceritakan kisahnya, aku tidak hanya sebagai pendengar tapi persis berada di sebelahnya saat India merayakan kemerdekaannya, kemudian ke pertemuan para Midnight Children. Aku, bersama Saleem, menyaksikan pertumpahan darah yang terjadi saat Pakistan memisahkan diri dari India, atau perang 'Daging lawan Sayuran' menurut seorang anggota pasukan khusus Pakistan ketika mengira perang yang ia jalani adalah melawan India padahal ternyata berujung pada pemisahan Bangladesh dari Pakistan.

Memang pergolakan politik di India, Pakistan maupun Bangladesh bukan sesuatu yang baru lagi bagi dunia, tapi apa lantas kita menerimanya begitu saja tanpa ingin tahu kenapa hal itu terus terjadi? Jelas ada banyak hal dalam pertikaian politik mereka dan isu tersebut begitu rapuh. Nama Gandhi dan darah Nehru, bagiku pribadi adalah beban yang luar biasa berat, tapi sepertinya tidak bagi seorang perempuan. Jelas panggung politik itu semacam permainan bagi kebanyakan politisi. Jika sedang berkuasa, semua cara dilakukan untuk mempertahankannya sebaliknya ketika belum memegang kekuasaan makan semua cara dilakukan untuk merebut kekuasaan itu. Dan terus begitu hingga para politisi melupakan rakyat biasa yang seharusnya mereka perjuangkan.

Lantas siapa lagi yang bisa menceritakan semua kisah ini, mulai dari Kemerdekaan India ke Pemisahan Pakistan dan Bangladesh, perselisihan antar kelas dan agama, termasuk rentannya panggung politik di ketiga negara ini selain dua anak terkuat dari Midnight Children, Saleem dan Shiva? Kedua sengaja ditukar sejak mereka lahir, sehingga pewaris sebuah keluarga Khasmir yang beragama Muslim dibesarkan dalam kemiskinan oleh seorang Hindu dan kembaran-bukan-kembar-sesungguhnya yang beragama Hindu dibesarkan layaknya seorang pangeran dan kelahirannya secara khusus dicatat dalam sejarah oleh Perdana Menteri India pertama lewat sepucuk surat.

Membacanya sungguh membuat seseorang berharap dia punya kemampuan untuk menceritakan kisahnya, sama seperti Salman Rushdie merefleksikan negaranya di buku ini.(less)

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Dec 02, 2007 Ben rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone who reads fiction written after 1965

This was an extremely good book; one which, for some reason, I couldn't quite fall in love with. I was, however, more and more impressed with Rushdie's master over his novel as I made my way through it.

Midnight's Children is as much a tale of history and nationhood as it is of a person. I think, in some sense, the book was a sort of authorial attempt to bring into the realm of substantial palpability everything that had happened to the Indian subcontinent since Independence in '47 (or thereabout...more This was an extremely good book; one which, for some reason, I couldn't quite fall in love with. I was, however, more and more impressed with Rushdie's master over his novel as I made my way through it.

Midnight's Children is as much a tale of history and nationhood as it is of a person. I think, in some sense, the book was a sort of authorial attempt to bring into the realm of substantial palpability everything that had happened to the Indian subcontinent since Independence in '47 (or thereabouts). In so doing, Rushdie had to deal with many of the themes that have been the standards of world literature in the passing decades: the richness of pre-modern superstition falling away to the antiseptic light of post-colonial progress, the upheavals of third-world political instability, magical realism, the individual as a link in the hereditary chain.

I don't know for sure, but I'm certainly willing to grant the benefit of the doubt to the notion that Rushdie (along with with Gabriel Garcia Marquez) was among the first to employ these literary devices. And in some ways, he does it best. I was repeatedly impressed by the fact that Midnight's Children didn't just talk about history, patterns, and the past and the future interlinking. No -- its author had done the hard and uncommon work of planning the book so that those patterns would really be there. So that images from the beginning of the book would effectively and reliably return to haunt at the apex and at the climax of the tale. I *often* lose patience (and Marquez is on this list) with books that make great promises (witness: Love In the Time of Cholera) early on, but end up meandering, without focus, robbing the book's conclusion of greater meaning and impact. Rushdie did not make this mistake.

I think that one of the problems I had with Midnight's Children is that I read it out of order. Clearly clearly clearly God of Small Things and Middlesex to pick two at random among many, were heavily influenced by this novel. But I read them first. And in some ways, you have to admit that they improved on the techniques that I suspect Rushdie pioneered.

Rushdie brings history to life in Midnight's Children, and he does it by adding magic. He weaves a personal, wonderful, and improbable life into the history of Indian independence, the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh. It is set in an even more charming, and considerably more personal (and personable) frame-tale narrative. The structure is not born of whimsy. The author is making a strong and cogent point about the nature of knowledge and history and experience. Official records contain one version of history. Rather than just smugly assert that there are others, he provides us a literary illustration. Who knows what could have happened? When Reasons swept its bright and ruinous hand over this part of the world, who can say what got lost? What was looked over? It is as if the thesis of the book (if there were one, other than that Indira Ghandi was a plague to the nation), was that within the cracks and crevices of official knowledge are rich seams of midnight-black possibility, a dark rainbow of being.

My final criticism: the book brought all of this history and insight beautifully to life. I felt the sacrifice was the actual protagonist. In the present, he is a charming reality. The versions of himself that he narrates feel like a frail sort of cipher. He rarely has strong attachments, wer are not told much about his feelings, and when we are, they don't seem to be connected to the main thread of the narrative. He changes as needed to move the story forward, but, ultimately, the story is not a personal one. The person at its center has worked too hard to be a symbol, a nation, history.

Is Midnight's Children worth reading? Absolutely. Will it enter my list of most-beloved novels? I'm afraid not.(less)

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Nov 12, 2012 Andrea Schweiger bregman rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It doesn’t happen often, but from time to time after I finish a work of literature, I wonder, “What just happened?” In an effort to answer that question, my brain attempts to turn itself inside out to make sense of it all. This time that torture came from Rushdie’s Midnight Children. This novel is my first experience reading Rushdie’s work, so I am not sure if the writing style of this book is typical of the author, but I am not in any hurry to find out.

Being an English Literature student and an...more It doesn’t happen often, but from time to time after I finish a work of literature, I wonder, “What just happened?” In an effort to answer that question, my brain attempts to turn itself inside out to make sense of it all. This time that torture came from Rushdie’s Midnight Children. This novel is my first experience reading Rushdie’s work, so I am not sure if the writing style of this book is typical of the author, but I am not in any hurry to find out.

Being an English Literature student and an avid reader, I felt a certain expectation of myself to admire Rushdie and his work. After all, he is a very celebrated author, and his books appear on many “must read” lists compiled by authors I respect. After the first 250 pages of Midnight’s Children I felt self-conscious that I that I didn’t like the book, in fact, I was beginning to despise it.

I consider Midnight’s Children a triple dog dare from Rushdie to read his book to the very end. As with most dares, it was daunting to face, and to test my resolve, he made every attempt to make me put down the book for good. The fact that I see all dares through, from eating worms to kissing a friend’s younger brother, and that Midnight’s Children was a class assigned book, were the only motivations that I had not to. Within the more than six-hundred pages of text, there are about one hundred pages of straight forward biography written by the protagonist Saleem Sinai, and Rushdie makes you work very hard to find them hidden among the overwhelming quantity of details, a task I found tedious, frustrating and at times mind numbingly boring.

I simultaneously pitied and despised Saleem. Like the other 1,000 children born at the stroke of midnight of India’s independence, Saleem has special powers, the telepathic ability to communicate with all of these children. Despite his gift, he is not particularly respected among the children for very long. His average life is also not spectacular. He is not handsome or physically co-coordinated. He is bullied by children and adults, often betrayed and physically mutilated, and so emotionally sensitive he seeks comfort by surrounding himself with dirty laundry. However, this same Saleem that my heart went out to was the one writing the story that was torturing me page after page after page.

Rushdie does provide the reader with a representative in the plot, Padma. She is the novel’s saving grace, the one person who is able to stop Saleem’s self important dialogue. She is frustrated with the slow moving pace of the narrative and gives voice to the like minded reader when she urges Saleem to write more concisely and get to the point faster. At first I found Padma’s sudden entries into the plot distracting, but after awhile I found myself peeking ahead in order to see when she would appear again to gauge exactly how much longer I had to continue reading before respite.

I confess I am very ignorant of the events surrounding the formation of Pakistan, the independence of India, and the decades of war and political maneuvering between them. I didn’t even make it through the entire movie “Gandhi”. At first I welcomed the history lesson Rushdie provides of those times. However, by the middle of Book II, I found the sheer volume of details confusing and obtuse, and was skimming over these parts. By the end of Book II, I was skipping them altogether. In the chapter “How Saleem Achieved Purity”, I felt vindicated of my behavior. Saleem’s description of the events that led to the demise of his family in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 starts with, “Which facts to present?” and continues with pages of questions and conjecture, “Did it happen this way or didn’t it?” The seemingly endless expansion on his proposed questions finally raised my own: “I don’t know exactly how it happened, I don’t care, and can you please get to the point?!”

Rushdie misses, or maybe ignores the perfect opportunity to end his story. With the final dispersal of Midnight’s Children after their captivity by the government, most of the loose ends are tied up, or the reader has learned enough essential plot elements to forgive Rushdie if he ended Saleem’s story this way. To me, I felt the last forty pages were Rushdie’s last challenge to me to complete his dare: would I or could I read through these superfluous pages of obvious revelations or would I finally quit. The sense of power and freedom I felt after reading the very last sentence was made sweeter by my accomplishment.

To be fair to Rushdie, objectively, his writing skills are incredible. His ability to tie Saleem’s life to history and his ability to overlap events, religions, and mysticism is something for some to aspire to. His overwhelming details created vivid images: beautiful Kashmirian landscapes, putrid slums and titillating, (almost) love scenes. His skills in these areas might be enough for some people to excuse the tedium of Midnight’s Children, but for me it didn’t. By the end of the novel, I didn’t even feel bad that I didn’t like Rushdie’s writing, or this novel.

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Jan 06, 2013 Emma rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A friend of mine adores Salmon Rushdie. She's very into literature and magical realism (think, Pan's Labyrinth if you don't know what magical realism is). I'm not an english major, but I can absolutely understand why a literary addict would love this book/author. Wow! "Creative" is a word that doesn't even describe it. However, this book is based on India's history, so I feel like I missed a lot of the symbolism and effect because I didn't know the historical event. I don't think I'm qualified t...more

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Dec 07, 2012 Sarah Keliher rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lit, read2012, bollywoodbroughtme, bestof2012

This year I pretty much stopped reading. Instead I watched hundreds of Bollywood movies. This is no exaggeration: I ran through the netflix offerings, found them on youtube, bought them in little Indian markets, and ordered them online. I was partly enthralled by the things that enthrall westerners about Bollywood - the colors! the music! the mashed-together plots! the crazed optimism! - but also by the sheer sweep of history revealed by these light-hearted movies. In school, I think our teacher...more

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Dec 26, 2008 James rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have mixed feelings about this, and the whole project is so huge that I don't know what to say -- the closest analogue is probably "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and I definitely liked it better than that. It's a big national epic, and so on, and it has all sorts of crazy magical happenings. "The Tin Drum" is the same -- any novel with pretensions to "epic" status in the twentieth century has to resort to magic, I guess, because "realism" defines itself consciously against the very project o...more

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Sep 24, 2008 Ian rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature

Midnight's Children is my first encounter with Salman Rushdie, so I didn't have many preconceptions when I began reading it. Relative to most novels, this one is lengthy, and it isn't exactly a light read, but it is crafted masterfully and is well worth turning through its pages until the end.

In general, it's a story of how an infant named Saleem, born at the moment of India's birth as an independent nation, is swapped with another infant shortly thereafter and finds his life interwoven with tha...more Midnight's Children is my first encounter with Salman Rushdie, so I didn't have many preconceptions when I began reading it. Relative to most novels, this one is lengthy, and it isn't exactly a light read, but it is crafted masterfully and is well worth turning through its pages until the end.

In general, it's a story of how an infant named Saleem, born at the moment of India's birth as an independent nation, is swapped with another infant shortly thereafter and finds his life interwoven with that of India and its people. The circumstances of his birth are critical because in many ways Saleem is a reflection of the newborn India that is explored in the story. The intrusion by the British, the tension between religion and secularism, the uneasy truce between Muslims and Hindus, and the repeated efforts to build political consensus--these are all themes explored by Rushdie and interwoven with Saleem's life.

As the narrator, Saleem is able to tell us about himself exactly what he wishes. He frequently shifts the narrative between the recounting of historical events and the "present," in which he frequently comments on the world around him. Saleem writes about his grandfather at one moment and in the next makes observations about cooking and watching employees work in his pickle factory. Some may find this irritating, but there are often cues ("...") and other mechanisms to aid in the transition. And there's more at work here than art for art's sake; it serves a legitimate function.

As a child, Saleem discovers that he has an uncanny ability to read minds and communicate telepathically. He hears voices in his head from all over India, in every language--a development that he calls "All-India Radio." He finds other children who were born within the same hour as him--dubbed "midnight's children"--and learns that they all have their own special powers (or curses). In a flailing attempt to unite the children behind a common cause, Saleem struggles to convince them to speak with one voice. In this respect, Saleem is a microcosm of the political growing pains of India, spending his time alone in a bell tower (i.e. tower of Babel) away from his alcoholic father, domineering mother, and pyromaniac sister.

We also learn from the beginning that during his writing, Saleem's body is falling to pieces; time is short. Saleem worries he is in a process of disintegration. We cannot initially tell if this is true. But his past is full of divisions, both familial and on the national front, where the threat of a fractured state is constant. Saleem's style of narration is a symptom of this political frustration, which Rushdie uses as a literary tool to tie Saleem's psyche to his tumultuous surroundings.

The conflicts between private and public existence, master and servant, subjugation and rebellion, fantasy and reality--these are recurring themes in Saleem's story. Saleem intentionally takes liberties with history, recreating it as he thinks necessary and unabashedly defending his wild tales. At one point, he calls himself a "the humblest of jugglers-with-facts." But he also admits to errors (such as the date of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi) and an occasional ignorance. In this way, it is a curious fable, grounded in history but also divorced from it by a near-reckless disregard for truth. The distinction between what is real and what is simply in Saleem's head is blurred and often questioned by Saleem's love interest Padma, who has a habit of peering over his shoulder as we writes. But this, I think, is intentional, as Saleem later bemoans the politics and culture that render truth meaningless.

Midnight's Children is littered with politics, religion, and "real-world" events from India, Pakistan, Kashmir, and the sub-continent, and so it helps to have a source handy to make sense of it. At times, I found this necessary. But in many cases, Saleem explains the significance of these details or provides enough clues for the reader to follow. On occasion, Saleem makes it excruciatingly obvious. But overall, this book requires attention and reflection by its audience. Some may find the style tedious or "pretentious," but not all writers experiment in order to show that they can be fanciful. I think that, at least in this book, Rushdie had a purpose behind his dense, subversive style. Beautifully written, occasionally florid, and colored by the narrator's inflated self-grandeur, Rushdie's creation simply shines here. The primary characters are intriguing and unforgettable, although they are typically deeply flawed and may be difficult to love.

I read in one professional book review that this was an "angry" book, and I agree. There is tremendous displeasure here as Saleem sees the dawn of independence squandered. But throughout it is a bizarre and persistent sense of humor that made me laugh out loud.

Due to its length, this may be a bit of a time investment, depending on the pace of the reader. But I found it was worth it.(less)

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Oct 26, 2012 ميّ أحمد rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: روايات

إن قراءة سلمان رشدي في هذه الرواية لم تكن سهلة يجب على القارىء أن يمسك خيوطها منذ البداية فإن أفلتت منه سيكون من الصعوبة الإمساك بها من جديد ..شخصيا وصلت إلى أعلى قمة للمتعة تلك الحالة التي أشعر بها بالرضا الشديد بالإعجاب والإنذهال والتساؤل كيف يتأتى لكاتب أن يكتب بهذا الإحتراف أن يطلق بندقيته في وجه التاريخ دون وجل أن يخترع أفكارا وشخصيات خرافية لها صلة بشخصيات حقيقية كانت صانعة ومؤثرة.. تبدو لي أن الكتابة عنها ليست أيضا بهذه السهولة سأبدأ في اقتباس لفت نظري جدا لأنه يبدو لي لا يلخص السبب بل ال...more

إن قراءة سلمان رشدي في هذه الرواية لم تكن سهلة يجب على القارىء أن يمسك خيوطها منذ البداية فإن أفلتت منه سيكون من الصعوبة الإمساك بها من جديد ..شخصيا وصلت إلى أعلى قمة للمتعة تلك الحالة التي أشعر بها بالرضا الشديد بالإعجاب والإنذهال والتساؤل كيف يتأتى لكاتب أن يكتب بهذا الإحتراف أن يطلق بندقيته في وجه التاريخ دون وجل أن يخترع أفكارا وشخصيات خرافية لها صلة بشخصيات حقيقية كانت صانعة ومؤثرة.. تبدو لي أن الكتابة عنها ليست أيضا بهذه السهولة سأبدأ في اقتباس لفت نظري جدا لأنه يبدو لي لا يلخص السبب بل الهدف والدافع

يقول سليم سيناء في الجزء الأخير من الكتاب : ذات يوم قد يتذوق العالم
مخللات التاريخ وهي قد تكون لاذعة جدا لبعض الحلوق ، رائحتها قد تكون طاغية جدا ، قد تدفع بالدموع إلى العيون مع ذلك آمل أن يكون في الإمكان القول عنها إن فيها طعم الحقيقة الصادقة وإنها رغم كل شيء نابعة عن حب ..

هنا بدا لي كل شيء أكثر وضوحا تلاشى الضباب كلية فالمخللات لم تكن سوى هذه الرواية التي تحمل تلك الحقيقة اللاذعة في نظر رشدي للأوضاع السياسية التي عاشتها الهند بعد الإستعمار البريطاني ووليدتها باكستان ..حروب وصدامات وإنقسامات إلى بعض الحكام الفاسدين ..هذه الحقيقة التي صدح بها سلمان رشدي طوال الرواية في جو خرافي من الواقعية السحرية أعطت الكاتب الحق في أن يعلن حبه الكبير للهند من خلال شخصية سليم ووصفه الكاريكاتوري الساخروالناقد لشخصيات حقيقية كان له أدوراها التاريخية .. سليم المنقذ والمخلص كما لم يتأتى له أن يكون! ..

ولد بطل الرواية في نفس اليوم الذي أعلن فيه عن إستقلال الهند في منتصف الليل هو وخمسمائة طفل في نفس اللحظة ولأنها لحظة غير عادية فأولاد تلك اللحظة لم يكونوا اعتياديون لقد وهبتهم تلك اللحظة خوارق ..يمضي رشدي بطريقته الحكواتية الرائعة وخياله الممتد ليحكي قصصا عن تلك الخوارق الهبة أو اللعنة أيا كانت ! والتي حصل عليها أطفال منتصف الليل ، ما يهمنا هو إن هؤلاء الأطفال المنتشرين في أنحاء الهند يجتمعون في عقل هذا الطفل ليحاولوا حل مشكلات الهند سياسية إجتماعية فكرية إلخ .. كما لو إن كل طفل منهم يمثل شريحة أو مذهب أو فكر أودين بكل أطياف الهند التعددية أما هذا العقل المسرح أو الملعب الذي سمح بالتخاطر متجاوزا كل حدود اللغات العديدة فلم يكن سوى عقل سليم سيناء ..

كتبت الرواية على لسان سليم سيناء نفسه.. وفي خطاب موجه لبادما والتي لم تكن ذا أهمية تذكر سوى أن تكون إذنا كما كان سليم صوتا وأنفاهي حلقة الوصل بين القارىء وبين السارد .. سليم ذا الأنف الذي لا يكف عن السيلان والذي شوه وجهه لكنه هو مصدر القوة والعظمة في إشارة لما ممكن أن تقدمه حاسة الشم العظيمة الحاسة التي لا نعرف قيمتها إلا إذا أصبنا بزكام سد أنوفنا وأصبح روائح الأشخاص والأشياء كلها تتشابه ليست بذات قيمة وهنا بلاشك لا يمكن ألا استحضر رواية العطر لزوسكيند والتي كانت حاسة الشم هي ركيزة من ركائز النص فالبطل دون رائحة ويعمل في صنعة العطور تلك المفارقة قادته لصنع عطر خاص به من خلال جرائم القتل ، بينما بطلنا سليم هنا قادر على شمّ الرغبات الغير معلنة الحقد والإنتقام والكراهية رائحة الشر والحب هذه الروائح كاشفة النوايا محطمة للعلاقات الإنسانية وليصل الخيال بالكاتب إلى أبعد ما يمكن أن يتصوره عقل القارىء ..كل ذلك من خلال سرد ذاتي بالغ النرجسية يتضخم على مدار صفحات الرواية فقصته لا تقل أهمية عن أي كتاب مقدس كما يقول لذلك فهو لا يكف عن المقارنة بين حين آخر..أن سليم لم يكن سوى هو صوت الهند تحكي تاريخها بطريقة غير تقليدية متحررة من كل شيء وبعيدة تماما عما هو سائد ومدون..

الهند هي سليم وليست الأرملة أنديرا كما كان يكرر سليم بسخرية وشيفا ( إله الشر عند الهندوس) شيفا الذي تم استبداله واستبعاده عن جنة العائلة ليس سوى ذلك الجزء الفاسد .. الذي دمر وسحق أطفال منتصف الليل وداست أفعاله الشريرة أمومية الهند الكبرى لأطفالها كما إن كل شخصية من شخصيات الرواية تمثل شريحة أوفئة ولدت أو عاشت في الهند وإن ظهرت بصورة مبالغ بها كالرسم الكاريكاتوري الذي يركز على جزء ما من أعضاء الجسد فيضخمه بينما تبقى الأعضاء الأخرى وكأنها في حالة ضمور !

هناك فصول في الرواية بلغت قمة البراعة وصل فيها رشدي القمة في إبداعه كفصل القتال على الحدود بين الهند باكستان حين تجسد الخوف على شكل أشباح وما تبعه من ضياع الجنود الأربعة في الغابة السحرية و تلك الفصول التي تلاعب فيها سلمان رشدي بالمتناقضات والرموز كالأنف والركب ( اليست هي جزء من الأطراف التي يرتكز عليها الإنسان في وضعية السجود هل سجد سليم للخير وشيفا للشر ! ) ألم يكن سليم هو الأنف وشيفا هو الركب ، فلسفة السلّم والثعبان ، فصل ولادة آدم سيناء في عرض مهيب للكلمات والحدث تتخلله حرب أنديرا للبقاء في السلطة ، إنتخابات وولادة ... خروج آدم للحياة وخروج آنديرامن السلطة .. ميثولد الذي يمثل بقايا إستعمار بشروطه المغالية و القاسية ! ماري رغم خطيئتها الوجه الحاني الباقي والوحيد .. المبصقة الذكريات والزمن الذي ضاع .. أحياء السحرة في دلهي وسبر أغوارها ناهيك عن استخدامه للسحر للشعر للأغاني للميثولوجيا القديمة وتوظيفها في البعد الأسطوري لهذه الحكاية ..

إن صوت رشدي في هذه الرواية صوتا ضد الإنقسام وما نتج عنه من عنف وحرب وتطرف فاق الحد
وإن نيله جائزة البوكر على هذه الرواية هو ما استحقته هذه الرواية الملحمية ..
لذلك خمسة نجوم وأنا مغمضة العينين :)(less)

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Feb 27, 2010 Ikra Amesta rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: booker-prize-winners, times-100-best-novels, indian-authors

Memang butuh semacam perjuangan untuk bisa melewati buku ini, kalimat demi kalimat, peristiwa demi peristiwa, bab demi bab, sampai pada akhir dari cerita panjang ini. Dan keputusan untuk tidak menyerah membaca buku ini dari sejak awal-awal halaman memang membawa saya pada kepuasan, sebuah apresiasi baru terhadap daya kreatif, imajinasi, serta gaya penulisan Salman Rushdie, sebuah alat bantu untuk dapat memaknai sejarah, memaknai "apa yang membuat segalanya menjadi seperti sekarang", dan pada akh...more Memang butuh semacam perjuangan untuk bisa melewati buku ini, kalimat demi kalimat, peristiwa demi peristiwa, bab demi bab, sampai pada akhir dari cerita panjang ini. Dan keputusan untuk tidak menyerah membaca buku ini dari sejak awal-awal halaman memang membawa saya pada kepuasan, sebuah apresiasi baru terhadap daya kreatif, imajinasi, serta gaya penulisan Salman Rushdie, sebuah alat bantu untuk dapat memaknai sejarah, memaknai "apa yang membuat segalanya menjadi seperti sekarang", dan pada akhirnya membawa saya pada ruang perenungan tentang harga sebuah identitas.

Oke, dari gaya bahasa saya memberi acungan jempol pada Salman Rushdie (walaupun setelah membaca review dan forum2 mengenai bukunya yang "The Satanic Verses", rasa hormat saya padanya sedikit berkurang persis seperti rasa hormat Rushdie pada dunia sastra, karena ia telah atau sempat terjebak pada kedangkalan rasialis yang begitu fatal). Dari segi cerita, saya juga memberikan rasa salut (bahkan bisa dibilang kecemburuan) terhadap kepiawaian dalam meracik sejarah, mitologi, tragedi, drama, dan ironi dalam dunia fiksi-nya yang luas. Tapi bukan itu yang ingin saya ulas, karena dua aspek di atas rasanya sudah cukup 'di-review' oleh tiga kali penghargaan Booker Prize.

Yang membuat saya tertarik pada buku ini adalah tokoh utamanya,Saleem Sinai, yang kisahnya merupakan sebuah potret sosial dari sebuah bangsa, sebuah potret metaforis dari bangsa India, bangsa dunia ketiga, atau kalau boleh mengait-ngaitkan, bangsa Indonesia.

Saleem yang dilahirkan tepat pada proklamasi India, menandai proses kehidupan yang diawali oleh harapan, mimpi-mimpi, dan ambisi. Sebuah kelahiran yang telah dinubuatkan dan dirayakan dengan do'a berbunyi "menjadi apa pun yang kauinginkan kau akan bisa", disambut oleh kegembiraan kolektif yang melenakan seketika. Dan pada akhirnya, Saleem tumbuh dalam kenikmatan menjadi bagian dari kekayaan sampai ketika ia menyadari sesuatu. Sebuah kemampuan. Sebuah anugerah. Potensi. Sebuah mukjizat yang dikirimkan Tuhan padanya sebagai salah satu dari anak-anak tengah malam, di mana ia mampu melihat apa yang tidak bisa dilihat oleh manusia biasa, mendengar apa yang tidak biasa, memasuki pikiran-pikiran manusia yang dipenuhi oleh segala macam, dan kemudian, kemampuan hidungnya untuk mendengus perasaan-perasaan manusia yang tersembunyi.

Sebuah bakat luar biasa, yang dengannya ia mengetahui sejarah keluarganya, sejarah kakeknya, neneknya, orangtuanya, sejarah nama-nama, yang menghubungkannya (atau membentuknya) dengan masa kini. Namun ironisnya, Saleem adalah sosok yang lebih memilih 'pasrah' pada keadaan. Ia membiarkan rentetan nasib buruk menerjang hidupnya dan membawanya pada kejatuhan, kenyataan pahit, sebuah perkampungan kumuh yang tidak sedap dipandang mata. Saleem, pada masa hidupnya, mewakili sebuah harga yang harus dibayar oleh kemerdekaan, di mana kesadaran akan potensi dan bakat yang luar biasa tidak menemui arah yang tepat dalam pencapaian sebuah tujuan atau cita-cita. Saleem melihat keluarganya sebagai bagian dari India; pengkhiantan, perselingkuhan diam-diam, kebangkrutan, perseteruan tiada akhir antara nilai-nilai tradisional dengan modernisasi, amnesia, impotensi, dan cinta yang bertepuk sebelah tangan; sedangkan Saleem, dengan bakatnya, justru dihantui oleh rasa takut akan identitasnya sendiri dan berusaha untuk hidup dalam kepalsuan itu. Dan karenanya Salman Rushdie menggambarkan bahwa Saleem dan India telah dikutuk oleh ketidakpastian dari sejak kemerdekaan dan kelahirannya.

Maka, bila saya kaitkan lagi dengan bangsa Indonesia, adalah bahwa kita mewakili nasib yang sama dengan Saleem sebagai bayi miskin yang tertukar dan ditakdirkan untuk hidup dalam kekayaan dan anugerah yang dengannya kita menghabiskan waktu dengan menyusun mimpi dan cita-cita dari balik identitas yang tidak pernah bisa kita akui; bahwa kita telah dari sejak awal menjadi bagian dari kemiskinan.(less)

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Nov 06, 2012 Lubna ALajarmah rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: موجود-في-مكتبتي, booker, صالون_الجمعة

في أكتوبر 2012 ، قرأنا رواية "أطفال منتصف الليل" ضمن القراءات الخاصة في صالون الجمعة وهذا موضوع القراءة: أطفال منتصف الليل | 10-2012

description

حقيقةً هذا الكتاب من الكتب التي لم أستطع أن أكتب له مراجعة، وحذفت نجمة من التقييم ليس قصوراً من الكتاب، بل هو قصورٌ ذاتي منّي بسبب عدم التركيز في عدة أماكن فأفقدني ذلك بعض المتعة .. هو من الكتب التي تشبه عصيراً ثقيلاً ومركزاً وبه طعمٌ لاذع، لا تستمتع بطعمه إلا إذا شربت الكوب كاملاً على نفسّ واحد ..

سليم سيناء .. من تدور أحداث الرواية حوله وهو الراوي للأحداث أيضاً ....more

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Jan 06, 2013 David rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: magical-realism, literary, 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die, audiobook, indian-fiction, historical, fantasy, poc-author, poc-protagonist

Salman Rushdie's narrative tone in this book is jovial and humorous, even when he's describing pretty horrific things. It sneaks up on you that the first-person narrator, Saleem Sinai, is not just a little unreliable, but also whiny, self-justifying, and arrogant. In the end, it's hard to tell how much of the "magic" in this novel of magical realism was real and how much was the narrator's own megalomania. The history of India ran parallel to his own personal history, with events happening in sy...more Salman Rushdie's narrative tone in this book is jovial and humorous, even when he's describing pretty horrific things. It sneaks up on you that the first-person narrator, Saleem Sinai, is not just a little unreliable, but also whiny, self-justifying, and arrogant. In the end, it's hard to tell how much of the "magic" in this novel of magical realism was real and how much was the narrator's own megalomania. The history of India ran parallel to his own personal history, with events happening in synchronicity, really? And the war between India and Pakistan was actually History's attempt to get him and his family? Saleem Sinai is sometimes likeable and sometimes a real jerk. He spends the entire book telling his life story to an unseen nurse/lover, Padma, who seems to be a long-suffering woman who loves him despite his determination to literally make everything all about him.

But there really are magical elements in this book, in which the thousand and one "Children of Midnight" born during the midnight hour of India's independence are all given supernatural gifts. If this were a genre fantasy novel, we'd see them running around India engaging in feats of heroism and villainy. But this isn't a superhero novel, it's a literary historical novel with a touch of the fantastic, so the Children of Midnight never do much at all, and Saleem's amazing telepathic abilities are used only as a plot device to connect them and include them in his narrative.

As a modern history of India (told irreverently and one-sidedly and in a self-involved way by Saleem), Midnight's Children is funny, tragic, interesting, and a grand epic that Rushdie's storytelling device makes extremely personal. Rushdie's writing style is full of asides and interjections and laugh-out-loud metaphors, and he brings all the characters, even the bit ones, to life in amusing detail. He reminds me a bit of Stephen King in that respect, though Rushdie is far more of a literary prose-smith than King, and his book, while a little bit wordy and tangential at times, nowhere near as bloated as a King epic.

The history of Saleem Sinai's family is also a great family melodrama, and much funnier than the history of India, while often just as tragic. Maybe history really does resonate with Saleem and his family.

An interesting and entertaining book, but ultimately it didn't quite satisfy me because I was reading it as a Westerner. Rushdie's introduction to this Booker prize winner points out that Westerners usually think of Midnight's Children as fantasy, while Indians tend to read it as a historical. So, again, adjust your genre expectations. Even though all these people have superhuman abilities, they ultimately have little to do with the plot. It's Rushdie's writing and the national and family melodrama that keeps you listening.(less)

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Oct 16, 2009 Marieke rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2007, booker-prize-winners, authors-of-color, oban-library

PART 1

I finished the book yesterday--but before I describe my overall response I have to start with this entry I wrote in my notebook while I was partway through.

I last opened this book ten years ago. This was the book that destroyed our little book club in college, my first year. A small group of avid readers, aspiring to read high and mighty works of literature. We made it through Snow Falling on Cedars successfully--I don't remember any discussion we had about it, but I liked the book.

Midnig...more

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Aug 06, 2010 K.D. Oliveros rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Joselito, Jzhunagev and all the other brilliant people who appreciate great literary works

Recommended to K.D. by: TIME Magazine's 100 Best Novels, Man Booker, Best of Booker, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006 to 2010)

Shelves: 1001-core, booker, india

Now, I am beginning to like Salman Rushdie.

Last year, I read his controversial novel The Satanic Verses and I hated it so I gave it a lone star.

Here in Midnight's Children, his playful and I-don't-care-if-you-like-me-or-not writing style is still very much around. This is a long read and it took me the whole week to reach up to its last word on page 647. It started strong, interesting and clear. Once details, too much of them, are introduced, I dazed off and became an outsider watching the pass...more

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Mar 08, 2013 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more

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Sep 29, 2008 Pete rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There is a quote in Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children," spoken by the protagonist and narrator Saleem Sinai: "To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world."

This is one of those brilliant books that is easier to appreciate than enjoy. It is an allegory about India's history around the time of independence and partition, told through (and explained by) the life and ancestry of Saleem, who was born at exactly midnight of India's independence day in 1947.

Rushdie's prose is dialed...more

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Aug 12, 2008 Dusty Myers rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An important novel. Rushdie's narcissistic narrator, Saleem Sinai, achieves this narcissism from being the first child born on the day India won its independence from Britain. He got a letter from the prime minister making it official, and from this momentous, synchronous birth, the history of Saleem is twinned step-by-step to the history of India. This is what makes it An Important Novel, and I don't much care for Important Novels.

Saleem's point of view is a slippery, deceptive thing throughout...more An important novel. Rushdie's narcissistic narrator, Saleem Sinai, achieves this narcissism from being the first child born on the day India won its independence from Britain. He got a letter from the prime minister making it official, and from this momentous, synchronous birth, the history of Saleem is twinned step-by-step to the history of India. This is what makes it An Important Novel, and I don't much care for Important Novels.

Saleem's point of view is a slippery, deceptive thing throughout the book. He and all the other titular children born between 12:00am and 12:59am that first day of India's nationhood all grow up to have X-Men-like powers. One can change its sex, one can warp between bodies of water. Saleem gets telepathy, and what this enables him to do is act in a classic 19th-century omniscient way in his narration, dipping right into other characters' heads at moments when its convenient for him and his narrative. At other times he likes to refer to himself in the third person. This becomes particularly interesting in the years he spends in the Pakistani army, when an accident causes him to forget his own name and answer only to the nickname "the buddha." For a hundred pages or so we hear Saleem tell the story of "the buddha" and only through certain physical details (Saleem was born with an extremely large nose) do we connect it with our narrator.

Oh, it's all too much. Saleem has telepathy for a while, and then he's able to smell so well he can smell people's fears and secrets. There are surely other superhuman powers I've forgotten by now. Reading Rushdie's big novel made me think a lot of Nabokov's great small one, Pale Fire. Mostly because I kept wishing I could put Rushdie down and go back to something entertaining and not so overwrought and self-important. But really it's this idea of the narcissism of first-person narrators. All first-person narrators are narcissists on some level—here, listen, I have this story I have to tell you, even if I don't want to, and I'm the best person to tell it, so listen. And I don't have the answers here, not yet. But one thing I can't figure out is why the glorious, ridiculous self-absorption on the part of Nabokov's Kinbote is so glorious and ridiculous and engaging and genuinely funny, and why that of Rushdie's Saleem is so off-putting and grating and onanistic.

I think Rushdie intends for us to roll our eyes comically at his narrator, at least at times, and I'm sure many readers who love this book (which is like everyone alive) did as intended. And I'm sure when Saleem's aunt says he "[a]lways thought [he was] growing up to be God or what. And why? Some stupid letter the P.M.'s fifteenth assistant under-secretary must have sent [him]" (390-91), we're meant to dig in to such a passage as evidence that Saleem isn't the most reliable narrator he likes to pretend he thinks he isn't. But I don't buy it. Something about the politics behind the books shows otherwise.

Kimbote is from Zembla, a silly made-up place, and so he's easy to write off. But Saleem isn't just from India, he is India, and so we have to honor him, and it's exhausting work. It's like going to a family reunion, and that jackass cousin who always beat up on you and called you a faggot is now a disabled war veteran.

That's what reading this book was like.(less)

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Oct 22, 2008 Samantha rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Hm. Where to start??? Okay... first of all, the book took me months to get through, about 2, but that could also be because of moving, etc etc. However, this is not a book that you could get through quickly or easily. A variety of colorful characters appear, disappear, and reappear later on, so you're constantly going back and checking who is who and how they're related! If i'd known that at the beginning, i would have listed everyone as they came up and kept track of all of them, :)

Rushdie is a...more

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Dec 24, 2007 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was my first venture into his works - I picked it mainly on the recommendations on here and Amazon. I was not disappointed in the least.

Rushdie's mastery of his craft is impressive. His storytelling style reminded me very much of John Irving at his best - a series of vignettes, some overwhelmingly meaningful, some seemingly inconsequential with their purpose to-be-realized-later. He implements this style in an effective way too, with a narrator telling his au...more Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was my first venture into his works - I picked it mainly on the recommendations on here and Amazon. I was not disappointed in the least.

Rushdie's mastery of his craft is impressive. His storytelling style reminded me very much of John Irving at his best - a series of vignettes, some overwhelmingly meaningful, some seemingly inconsequential with their purpose to-be-realized-later. He implements this style in an effective way too, with a narrator telling his autobiography without becoming too overbearing. And, as Irving, he makes an excellent package of his individual stories as the novel progresses. This creates a very fun experience for the active reader as he utilizes foreshadowing and allusion to their fullest.

The subject of his novel also impressed me. His protagonist, as he says, was born on the exact instant of Indian independence and his fate is thereby inextricably tied to the fate of nation, and vice versa. Through the vehicle of a boy growing into maturity (wow is that an oversimplification) he provides some very interesting commentary on the infancy of India and Pakistan. Politics, religion and modes of social interaction are all indirectly scrutinized through Saleem Sinai's character. Again, Rushdie uses this mechanism very effectively without ever being tiresome with it.

I have a very tough time explaining this book to my friends. Apparently Rushdie's typical genre is called 'magical realism', and I can definitely buy this. But trying to convince someone that thinks he is a so-so writer who was made famous by an entire religion who wants to kill him by saying "Oh, they are sort of stories about ordinary people with extraordinary abilities - how regular people would function if they had supernatural powers" does not effectively draw them in. I have read more than a few books of the Fantasy sort, where wizards where hats and warlocks are always dressed in black, and can say most definitely this is not that. I suppose what kept me interested was the vivacity of Rusdie's India. Never once did I believe that telepathy or conjuring was an out of place talent in a world of political insurrection, language riots, Hindu gods, snake charmers and chutney. And that is the difference I suppose. Rushdie never asked me to suspend my disbelief, merely to look into his world. And what an enjoyable world it was.(less)

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Mar 06, 2007 Michael Preston rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classic

The best of Salman Rushie's novels, in my opinion. Sort of autobiographical, and sort of the story of Indian independence (and partition). The fifth paragraph is one of my favorites in English literature:

One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, tr...more

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May 20, 2008 Erik Simon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is so good that as I was reading it, I couldn't believe how lucky I was to be reading it. I've not been able to like much of anything else Rushdie has written, but this one sang to me like few books have. And it's not for nothing that of all the books that have won the Booker, this was voted the best of the Bookers. One of my favorite quotations in the book went something like this: "In order to understand just one human life, you sometimes have to swallow the entire world." My quote i...more

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Dec 20, 2008 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

The winner of the Booker of Booker Awards (voted the best Booker award winner from the last 25 years) this book is considered Rushdie's masterpiece. Following the life of a boy who was born on the stroke of midnight on the day India formally gained its independence from Great Britain, the boy's life and the growth of the new nation twist and turn together through 31 years. In sort of a Forrest Gump type plot line (or perhaps Forrest Gump has a Midnight's Children type plot line) major events in...more

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Jan 04, 2010 Imas rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: award-winner, manbookerprize

penasaran dg buku ini...mudah2an bagus sesuai penghargaan yg diterima...ternyata mengecewakan saudara2..kontroversi penulisnya membuat rasa ingin tau seperti apakah karya beliau ini..alurnya melompat-lompat dengan liar, bercampur baur dengan pemikiran,cerita, latar belakang kisah dan entah apa...sampai kapan aku bisa menyelesaikan buku ini...hate this book..mahal pula..hiks..

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Mar 18, 2013 Arun Singh rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: india, fiction, history

Pick up important historical and political events from the 20th century India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh), combine them with the famous exotic and destitute elements of the subcontinent (pickles, witchcraft, snake charmers, soothsayers, sadhus, religious gurus, slums - to name a few) and use a beautiful language (loved the language, for sure!) to describe the complicated inter-connected story - BANG! You have a Booker! And oh, guess what, even the Booker of Bookers!

While I found the novel to b...more

1 like · like · see review

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