The most difficult, rewarding, funny book I have ever read. ( )

Brilliant, extraordinary, Rushdie is a storyteller par excellence and he truly dazzles in this epic tale.

The novel begins at the stroke of midnight 15 Aug 1947, we are in Bombay and witness to the birth of one Saleem Sinai which coincides with the exact moment of India's independence from British colonial rule and the creation of the new state, Pakistan. Within that magical hour of midnight a thousand other children were born. Gifted with extrasensory powers, they are midnight's children, and as destined, their fate will be intertwined with that of their country. Sinai's own gift is his oft-ridiculed ugly nose through which he can “smell”his way into other people's thoughts. This is how he learns about many things including certain dark secrets such as the realization that he was not who he thought he was.

Sinai here, is a storyteller and from him, we travel across time, from his grandparents' romance up to his own 31st birthday, and across India and Pakistan during this tumultous and exhilarating infancy phase of the two nations. We are carried away in a hallucinatory and dizzying fashion into the midst of great events and conflicts, into the minute but never boring details of people's lives --- his own family's, his neighbors, into the minds of politicians and millitary leaders, into the enlightened conferences he holds mentally with the other magical children, into his roller-coaster incredible life when he leaves for Pakistan and later, on his return to India. Rushdie's prose is vivid and intensely sensory, with a stark humor that is underlined with sensitivity, and throughout, characterized by rich metaphor and an extreme and superb playfulness with words and expression which only the best of writers dare or are able to do.

This book is a grand celebration, an indictment, a history, a biography, a metaphor, a literary tour de force. Rushdie, in this tale, brings magico-realism, as well as non-linear narration to another level. Either you will love this book or hate it, and intensely either way. I loved this book even better than One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I thought was difficult to top when I read it two decades (!) ago. Why I waited this long to read this book, I honestly don't know. ( )

This is my third encounter with Salman Rushdie, and this book is a much harder read than Haroun and the Sea of Stories, but it's not quite as bad as The Satanic Verses, thankfully. Being able to read it in long chunks probably helped, too. There's probably not much I can say about this book that hasn't already been said than wiser men than I, so I'll just stick to one small point: Midnight's Children is hilarious. I wasn't expecting that, though I should've known Rushdie was capable of humor after Haroun. The jokes come fast and furious, especially during Saleem's childhood; I think my favorite is about the man who kills his wife and her lover, but frightens off the traffic cop he tries to turn himself in to. I laughed so hard at that one.

There's lots of good lines, too, such as this one about a growing fetus: "What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book--perhaps an encyclopedia--even a whole language..." And a whole language is exactly what Rushdie has created here.

Midnight's Children has been a challenge to read for the last few weeks. At times I wondered how a novel full of children blessed with varying magical powers for being born at midnight on the day of India's birth as a post-colonial nation, the history of a family fraught with its own destinies and secrets, the very history of India, a burgeoning love story and a story of an obsession with pickles could really ever meld together.

How? It's an alchemy of magical realism, a narrator who carries with him a certain amount of admitted unreliability and a character who serves to remind our narrator that there are interested readers attempting to get through a story. Painted on the canvas of postcolonial India with a brush under the direction of Salman Rushdie, this all comes together and becomes a worth-while endeavor. ( )

awesome book

The man can write, I certainly won't argue that. There were several things about this novel that really struck me - the passage where a young Saleem exposes the infidelity of Commander Sabarmati's wife, the ghost of Joe D'Costa, etc. In many ways, Rushdie is genius.

As much as I wanted to enjoy this book though, most of the time I didn't. I'm not sure why - was the style that threw me off, or something else? I found myself finishing it for the sake of finishing it. ( )

In Midnight’s Children, magic realism has this kind of function, to highlight the absurdity of the political scene in post-Independence India, and to expose the complex nature of the relationship between the individual and their position in history. The central project of the novel is to answer this question: How, in what terms, may the fate of a single individual be said to impinge on the fate of the nation? And it does so with an astonishingly bravura performance, in which the extraordinary events of modern Indian history are related while at the same time examining the acts of writing, language, of memory, story telling, and the forging of identity, both personal and national. These issues are foregrounded in three main ways.

First, the narrative voice. The narrator, Saleem Sinai, is writing/telling his story to his assistant and friend, Padma, in a pickle factory. Rushdie’s/Saleem’s writing is intense and vivid and very beautiful: Like scraps of memory, sheets of newsprint used to bowl through the magicians’ colony in the silent midnight wind. Most of the considerable pleasure in reading the novel comes from the texture of the sentences and language.

Read the full review on The Lectern:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2009/0... ( )

Outstanding read....moving, funny, filled with great characters and wonderful perspective on India's transformation. ( )

My feelings for Midnight’s Children ebbed and flowed throughout my reading much as the tide.

Akin to the piece of modern art adorning the wall of a local gallery, on first sight there is dislike and confusion, I cannot connect with the artist. What are they saying, what language are they speaking.

Over time I move closer, I start to see the individual brush strokes that make the whole. I gain appreciation for each artistic stroke; in fact I’ve seen none better. No artist I’ve seen has such mastery of their palette subtly placed in each stroke. I step forward, the closer my nose to canvas, I become enthralled. I am part of the canvas; it’s become part of me. I feel it, I smell it, I visualise it, it is India.

Stepping back I again view the whole, the tide ebbs once more. I’m left with those impressions of close examination; the humour, the message beneath the message, the masterful stroke construction, the evocative taste of the underlying canvas and my introduction to magical realism.

As I walk away though, there is no need to give it that lover’s admiring over the shoulder glance. I appreciate its construction and the skill of the artist but don’t connect with it.

Art is very personal experience. ( )

For the first 250 pages or so, I was loving this book - so colourful, such strong characters, such pace, so evocative of India (even though I've never been)! But then, I thought it sort of lost steam - and as I lost interest in the story, I started to notice that Rushdie's prose is irritating. And once I'd noticed, it got more and more annoying. He's constantly, on every other page, doing a quick recap of what's already happened and a foreshadow of what's to come - as though he thinks you've got a woeful attention span and must have forgotten what you've only just read. And in constantly pointing out all the previous events that this new event mirrors, he saps much of the fun out of reading. For instance, you're denied the pleasure of noticing that women changing their names is a motif in the book, because Rushdie comes crashing in shouting OH LOOK, SHE'S CHANGED HER NAME JUST LIKE THESE THREE OTHERS BEFORE. And there's lots of interesting symbolism, but instead of leaving it to be found, he all but clubs you over the head with it. So for the last 400 pages of this book, I was too frustrated to really enjoy myself. Booker of Bookers? Really? Not in my book, I'm afraid. ( )

The Booker of Bookers indeed ( )

Enjoyed reading it but it has not lingered with me as much as Mistry's " a fine balance" has. ( )

A masterpiece. A work of genius. One of my favorite books. ( )

Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize winning novel Midnight’s Children is the story of a nation narrated by Saleem Sinai who embodies the history of India by being born at the exact moment of India’s independence (August 15, 1947). Other children, also born between midnight and one o’clock on this day, discover they are able to telepathically communicate with each other.

In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents - the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream. - from Midnight’s Children, page 132 -

The novel is allegorical, narrated in the first person, and spans more than sixty years from before Saleem is born until he is thirty years old. Saleem’s voice is arrogant, satirical and tangential.

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted press on. - from Midnight’s Children, page 62 -

Although difficult to follow at times, Rushdie’s sense of humor was one of the aspects of the novel I enjoyed.

Poor Padma. Things are getting her goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough, since her mother told her, when she was small, that she had been named after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation amojngst village folk is “The One Who Possesses Dung.” - from Midnight’s Children, page 20 -

Despite these light moments, Midnight’s Children is not a light read. I really struggled to finish this book - and my feelings about it are mixed. Rushdie’s prose is full of symbolism, analogies, magical realism and the complex history of India. The book has multiple themes (the individual vs. the masses and destruction vs. creation to name two). It is also full of numerous characters - some minor, some major and everything in between. I often found myself scratching my head trying to understand it all.

Important to concentrate on good hard facts. But which facts? One week before my eighteenth birthday, on August 8th, did Pakistani troops in civilian clothing cross the cease-fire line in Kashmir and infiltrate the Indian sector, or did they not? In Delhi, Prime Minister Shastri announced “massive infiltration…to subvert the state”; but here is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, with his riposte: “We categorically deny any involvement in the rising against tyranny by the indigenous people of Kashmir.” - from Midnight’s Children, page 387 -

Rushdie is obviously brilliant. He knows how to tell a story. And yet I did not really enjoy reading this book and there are very few people to whom I could recommend it. If you are a person with some understanding of Indian culture and history and who loves symbolic stories filled with elements of magical realism, you might want to give Midnight’s Children a try. I am told it is one of his more accessible novels. If that is true, I don’t think I’ll be reading any more Rushdie in the near future. ( )

Indian literature isn't for me and it's not the fact they use way too many words to express their thoughts, I just find it dull and out of magic - okay, I haven't given Indian literature so many chances and I'm not saying I won't, but it's definately not going to be Rushdie. ( )

After recently finishing Mistry's 'A Fine Balance' I planned to give myself a break from Indian lit for a while, but finding myself without a book on the other side of the country, the only books in the shop that called out to me were Indian - so I bought three!

Midnight's children is regarded as a classic, and deservingly so. I cannot help but contrast it with 'A Fine Balance' which I so recently read. Both are brilliantly written, inspiring books that intricately intertwine with India's tumultuous history. Yet they are as different as night and day. Midnight's children, although similarly passing through some quite dark hours of history, does not have the deflating, depression quality that the other book has. If anything Rushdie's writing shows symptoms of the 'disease of optimism' that his characters and his country so often succumb to in the novel. Despite the flawed narrator Saleem's neverending series of mishaps and his sense of inevitable doom, I couldn't help but feeling upbeat throughout this novel.

Part of what makes this book so interesting is that it combines history with fantasy. Not just in the usual sense of historical fiction, but in a more magical, mystical sense. I won't go into detail but this makes this book a delight to read. The first person narration is quirky, racing forwards and backwards and admittedly suffering from errors of memory and chronology but never too off-beat so as to get confusing (or rarely so).

Yet another book I highly recommend. Look forward to reading more of Salman Rusdhie's work in the future. ( )

The protagonist and narrator of Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai, is the bastard child of a British colonialist father and a poor Indian mother. He is switched at birth with another child and raised by well-off Indian Muslim parents in Bombay (with some short stays also in Karachi and elsewhere). After reading this book, I think Rushdie might himself be the secret offspring of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, raised by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He uses the kaleidoscopic jumble of stylistic devices found in Ulysses, the self-reflective meditations on the art of novel-writing that structure Malone's Dead, and the magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude (though with more pop-culture sensibility and less mytho-poetic feeling than Marquez brings to bear; I suppose Bollywood movies would be his true adoptive cultural parent). Rushdie's own bastard offspring would have to be Paul Beattie of White Boy Shuffle, who transports Rushdie's fantastically diverse--and superficially drawn--range of characters to inner-city Los Angeles (and, Rushdie-like, endows some of them with magical powers).

The book was an enjoyable read, especially when I could devote some time to it and immerse myself in its fictional world. Saleem is an engaging narrator, and the device Rushdie uses of writing the book as if Saleem is writing it--as his partner, Padma, reads the manuscript over his shoulder--creates interesting effects. Sometimes I wish Rushdie's characters were more well-rounded and that he would concentrate on depth of depiction rather than continuous invention of characters. But it seems that he's not aiming for a Victorian-style exploration of egos but rather a depiction of a country's history. Read for this subject, the novel is very rewarding. ( )

I have to start this review by admitting I love Salman Rushdie’s work. I fell in love when I read Shalimar the Clown back in July of 08. The Satanic Verses which I read next remains one of my all time favorite books. Haron and other Sea Stories was next on my list and once again Rushdie wooed me with his words. When I finished Haron I had to make a hard decision; what of Rushdie’s do I read next?

As I researched which of his titles I wanted to tackle next his book Midnight’s Children won the Man Booker of all Booker prizes http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news... This I had to read so I did. It took me a month, but it was well worth the time.

Midnight’s Children is a very rich (often too rich) metaphor on the birth of India as a nation. Saying the tale centers on one particular child, Saleem Sinai, who is born at the stroke of midnight of India’s independence, would be doing Rushdie injustice. Every character in this book could easily be the protagonist. This is the magic and genus of Rushdie; all his characters’ are fully developed and have amazing back stories. My favorite character was Aadam Aziz, Saleem’s grandfather. Rushdie starts the tale, as he often does, in Kashmir, (Kashmir seems to be a magic place for Rushdie) with Aziz coming home with a medical degree. Aziz is called upon to look at a local sick girl who is veiled behind a curtain. Aziz can only view her ailing body part but over time he views her body bit by bit and as he does he falls in love. This is a lovely metaphor showing the physical aspect of how we tend to fall in love; by seeing in the other person that which we want to see and ignore the rest.

Eventually they marry and move to Bombay where most of the tale takes place. The reader is introduced to Saleem’s mother, father, aunts ,and uncles before Saleem is born so that by the time he is the reader is emotionally involved in his family and their secretes.

As India is born so too is Saleem, who along with all the other midnight children, is born with a gift or curse depending on how one looks at it. Saleem is born with the gift of mind reading. This leads Saleem to learn many of his family’s secretes and discover the other midnight children. These children deserve a book of their own, I am still thinking of many of them , wondering what happened to them.

The tale weaves in and out of real events both past and present. Saleem is put in the middle of many political events and causes quite a bit too! This is the one caution I would pass on to anyone thinking of reading this book; if the only think you know about India is where to find it on a globe, this book may not be for you. Rushdie assumes the reader knows the events and people he is writing about. I am very versed in India history but even I had to look up a few names to better understand what Rushdie was talking about.

Rushdie can write like no other. Every page is full of prose, metaphors, and stories. Rushdie is the only writer I can think of who can span two life times in just a couple of pages, or write as if each word was a poem unto itself. Reading him can be exhausting at times because of this, but if you stick with him he will whisper magical verses to you and tell you a story that will stay with you for a long, long time. ( )

Hauntingly beautiful prose. ( )

One of the richest, most transcendent books I've ever read. I felt that I became better acquainted with India and her culture. Wonderful. I'm going to read another of his books in the near future. ( )

The book that put Salman Rushdie on the map. A big rambling magical tale of the birth of the Indian nation. ( )

The book that put Salman Rushdie on the map. A big rambling magical tale of the birth of the Indian nation. ( )

The book that put Salman Rushdie on the map. A big rambling magical tale of the birth of the Indian nation. ( )

I think that this novel may very well be the best piece of contemporary literature that I have EVER read. In fact, it ranks in the top ten books from ANY time period. Rushdie's ingenious plays on words and unbelievable prowess and originality in storytelling is unrivalled in this century. The character of Saleem is one of the most human characters in all of literature, and his imperfect, or errata, narration only helps the reader see just how human he is. I have never read a novel in which the narrator explicitly says that what he is saying may be mistaken or even completely made up, because memory is in no way a reliable source for facts and historical happenings. In hindsight, we look back on a world that in many ways has been made up in our heads, that we have made better (or worse) without even realizing that we have added our own spin on reality. This book even caused me to realize things about myself, and my reality, and to understand the absolute fallability of memory and, consequentially, the absolute objectivity of history. There is no one history, but instead as many histories as there are people in the world. As someone who hopes to one day publish their own work, I can only hope to learn from Rushdie's genius, and if I am ever compared to him in any way, I couldn't be anything but gratified. ( )

Great book, but I think the Rushdie fairy kept adding pages to it when I was asleep. The narrator talks on and on so much that you can read for an hour and still feel like you've made no progress. The long-winded ramblings definitely get old, and the book certainly could have been shorter, but there's so much great writing in such great form that it is a complaint I find easy to dismiss. ( )