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Midnight's Children is a rich and fascinating book. Rushdie channels dreamy visions of Kashmir and Mumbai, but his real masterpiece is the cast of characters -- mostly the narrator's family. In a variety of magical realist encounters, Rushdie manages not to let that fantasy unravel the dysfunctional, tragic and sometimes touching human dramas surrounding his narrator.
The narrator is one of the Midnight's Children, a child born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the day of India's independence. These thousand babes grow to earn supernatural powers. The narrator can read thoughts, which accounts for much of his storytelling, and he assembles the thousand children into a kind of telepathic congress. He's not alone -- his "twin" has supernatural knees. Yes, knees, between which he can crush and kill.
The twin is actually a family friend, but there's a critical twist. An English nursemaid switches the two boys at birth, and the narrator himself is born a bastard of a renegade Englishman and his servant Indian mother. But, because of the switch, he's raised instead in a wealthy family of unusual characters. Meanwhile, the other boy grows in the poor family and becomes a violent killer then war hero, all hinted at a distance through the narrator's tales.
That narrator is an untrustworthy fellow. He is -- or claims to be -- the catalyst of so many of the affairs and deaths and dramas surrounding him. The narrator often refuses to admit his responsibility, or to downplay his involvement. The effects are often tragic.
What his story crafts amid the web of magical realism and shady retelling is a strange and sometimes beautiful menagerie of tales that stab at the heart of India in the modern world. It's not a subject I know much about, but Rushdie brings alive India of the 1950s and 1960s in personal detail, from the toothpaste brands to the wars in Kashmir. Mumbai in particular percolates with color and colorful characters.
It's a challenging book, dense in its sometimes feverish prose and thick with layers of filtered tales. The book trails off into oblivion as modern India -- and it's pickled curries -- grow beyond the reach of the narrator's arms. He falls apart, literally, and the reader realizes there's one thing he didn't lie about: "To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world."
Midnight's Children: A- ]]>
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Matt
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