Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

By Alix Wilber

Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.

Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:

I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.

We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book, and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not so different from a Bombay talkie, after all.

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"As a teacher of literatures in English I have found Midnight's Children the most appropriate novel to introduce my students to the anlysis of today's deepest and most violent war: the final clash of Western and Eastern Cultures as a result of the past imperialistic and arrogant presence of England in the world, and why not, of Christianity, as the only possible ways to lead the whole world to civilization. Salman Rushdie, and other writers of the post modernist age, has shown the world that the Calibans of yesterday have learned the language of the powerful and have mastered it so well as to make the entire panorama of English writers shut up. And this not only because they can even create and play that language, but because they can convey such a wide range of feelings and contents and situations, to remind us that Shakespeare himself was after all aiming at such a goal: make the human soul a subject of universal interest. Thank you Mr Rushdie." --redhead.maria

"What is the interpretation of the death of Ilse, the young German woman, in the beginning of the novel? "I didn't mean it," she says (34). The page number refers to the Everyman's Library publication in 1995. I am just curious to how this small scene might be interpreted. Thanks." --cowgirl77802

"While reading this book, I could'nt help but comparing it with another masterpiece "Forrest Gump". Both take humourous (often grim) look at characters' lives unfolding against the backdrop of thier country's his history. This books takes it a step further with somehow connecting the protagonist's destiny with the destiny of his country. The writer, for instance, metaphorically signifies the Indian loss of a part of Kashmir and north-east by introducing mutations in the body of lead character Saleem Sinai. This is fiction writing at its best." --Indieboy