Midnight’s Children in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Jun 18, 2017 neil rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Book 2/11 of Rushdie's novels, which I'm trying to get through this year. (And a twelfth novel comes out in September!)

Midnight's Children was (is?) an important book to me. As a high school graduation gift, a teacher gave me a Borders gift card. For reasons I no longer remember, I bought this book. I tore through it, and it set the course for books I'd read and write about during college. It was the first book I read that meshed the sci-fi (Asimov, Clarke, Star Wars, etc.) I'd loved for years w Book 2/11 of Rushdie's novels, which I'm trying to get through this year. (And a twelfth novel comes out in September!)

Midnight's Children was (is?) an important book to me. As a high school graduation gift, a teacher gave me a Borders gift card. For reasons I no longer remember, I bought this book. I tore through it, and it set the course for books I'd read and write about during college. It was the first book I read that meshed the sci-fi (Asimov, Clarke, Star Wars, etc.) I'd loved for years with the literary fiction (Joyce mostly, but also Ginsberg and other Beats who overflowed with words) I started to read later in high school. This was a lot more fun than Joyce. Before this book, I don't think I'd heard of Garcia Marquez or Allende or Borges, but this book set me on a path straight for those authors, and I tore through them.

I've come back to the book a couple times since then, but have never read beyond the first portion of the book.

Coming back now, it's still a magical, totally ridiculous book. Rushdie creates so many memorable characters (the Brass Monkey, who'd set shoes on fire as an act of childhood rebellion; Shiva, who could kill with his knees; Amina Sinai and her silences; the Widow and her castrations; Parvati the witch), but also persists in introducing new characters almost endlessly, even after 500+ pages have gone by. One gets the feeling that he might have never stopped writing this book, if not forced to in order to publish it.

The plot flows through a huge amount of Indian history (since I first read this, I've learned a bit more about that history; I still ended up lost--relying on wikipedia or giving up--during the history heavy sections of this read). The sheer amount of history covered by this book would overwhelm and sink it if not for cucumber-nosed Saleem. He's our guide--chatty, self-effacing, a bit of a liar and a braggart--and he continues to be a total joy to follow, even if the milieu around him is confusing.

Rushdie's prose--jam-packed with smells and flavors and the concrete life of these cities, and also with jokes (so many poop jokes) and magic--also moves the book along. He is one of the few authors I know who can write a sentence that's longer than a page, but still fun to read.

I love this book, and it's an easy five stars. Reading it again, there are obvious issues with it (why is Padma so boring? why must new characters pop up after 500 pages? why is the jungle section such a slog? why can't the midnight's children use their powers, instead of just being referenced?), but, god, what a fun read. I've now read a lot of magical realism, and there's so little that's at this level (100 Years of Solitude is the only book that immediately comes to mind). Saleem's voice has been stuck in my head for about 15 years, and I can't see it leaving anytime soon. ...more

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