This will sweep you off the floor!

Title: Midnight’s children

Author: Salman Rushdie

First Published In: Britain 1981

Rating: 5 Stars



Midnight’s children: The best book I’ve ever read and perhaps, ever would . . . When I began reading this book I was surprisingly overwhelmed by the cleverness with which the prose was carried out. The writing exuded wit, and his amusing description got me cracking with the word go. It’s so brilliantly written that it is all set to reduce to rubble my reading experience, for I know other books will look utterly ordinary in the absence of the riveting style that Rushdie has deluged me with.



This is a demanding book, and probably a little too complex, but once I was drawn into the plot I found it rather easy to discern the characters and their motives. Saleem Sinai, the protagonist, born at the stroke of midnight at the precise moment of India’s independence narrates his biography in the most spell-binding and entertaining style, if there ever was one. The narration goes back and forth on more occasions than you’d imagine and it’s unnecessary to say that the author has set the benchmark for non-linear storytelling. Every page takes you by surprise, each sentence is magically written, as if devised for perfection; it has transgressed beyond the boundaries of imagination.



Although, initially, after completing few chapters, it looked as if the author is trying to persuade me into believing his version of a tale that, at that point in time seemed unbelievable, later on as the sub-plots unfurled and began to tie themselves with significant events, I didn’t bother questioning. Saleem, narrating his story to his lady love Padma, begins his story in the most uncanny way possible, which goes way before his birth, in a startling depiction of faiths and beliefs of the bygone era of pre-independence, who, born with a weird and snotty nose, at a very young age, after an accident, acquires telepathic powers to connect with other midnight’s children and after a forceful drainage of the snotnose attains a strange ability to sniff out thoughts and dangers that others can’t perceive, finds himself in the middle of two India-Pakistan wars, bearing the life, as fate would take him, into different worlds, one in a mansion and other in a slum. That’s about as much as I can give out, unlike an Indian movie review. So I must stop. And that’s that. It’s as much a journey of Saleem and his inner and outer conflicts as it is of India. Because his fate is inextricably entwined with India.



What begins as a random read turns and takes you in a world where you don’t want to return from. What’s extraordinary is that, for a book of such gigantic proportions (647 pages, paperback), you wouldn’t want the narrator to stop. Seldom in the history does a book come along that has the power to enthrall the reader and takes him into a captivating joyride to the moon, and keep him there; so when he looks down at the earth from there, everything, including Himalayas, appears miniscule. Rushdie is my god of writing . . .

Read it for its originality, for its grandiloquent prose, for its unrestrained candor, for its stunning perspicacity, for its absorbing plot, for India’s convoluted history, for the awe-inspiring read that you’ve denied yourself so far.