Midnight's Children: A Novel
by Salman Rushdie
|
List Price: Our Price: $9.10 You Save: $6.90 (43%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.08 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Midnight's Children: A Novel
Book Review: Substantial Intellectual Inquiry
Summary: 5 Stars
In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie integrates self-awareness with national identity. He demonstrates brilliantly how the national events in which we live influences our perceptions and worldview, and how our subsequent reactions (emotional, actual) become integral to ourselves. As when Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, and India becomes a free nation, each of us experiences the midnight effect of being born into a nation at the moment of our birth. We are very much the product of our culture and consequential political envelope. We devise our own interpretation of events and distort them in memory to serve an (ever-changing) identity that drifts in an illusion of permanence and reality. The intentional distortion of historic events by a multitude of political factions adds to the illusionary veil of reality so that our assertions of truth and fact are further clouded. Rushdie's mystic reality is a perfect method to portray the mysticism of India, yet surely serves as a cross-cultural illustration of the deep mysticism of the human condition. We are all a chimera of our conscious/unconscious perceptions, associations, emotional reflections, and memory. The outward manifestations of change due aging are held together by the content of our surroundings; a history of events and experiences, some verifiable by supporting accounts, others more fraught with illusion and fantasy.
Midnight's Children carries the reader through a mirage of associations, reoccurring themes, and events - self-evolved by the selective recall of the author/character - in an intense reenactment of Saleem's life, a life portrayed within changing national backdrops, family, friends, loves and enemies, desires, fears, dreams, all melded in meaning and illusion. Are we the same at nine years old as at ten, or thirty, or sixty? Is vacillation in actions and convictions apparent, evident? The flow of existence is a continuity, a continuity of recalled events, external markers, and physical evidence; but of internal perceptions, beliefs, we have little empirical evidence to fall back on other than memory, a fallible proposition at best! We, like Saleem, are constantly adrift between these states.
Saleem is gifted, as a result of his magical moment of birth coinciding with his India's independence, with "...the greatest talent of all - the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men." This telepathy at an early age, however, leads to a combination of uncertainty, disillusion, and an unfocused call to action that ultimately results in a sort of observational existence, more a life of commentary and evasion than direction or goals. But maybe that's the point, direction itself is an illusion. The steps we take must surely be connected, yet the path that results is as much chance as fortitude. How were the hands dealt at birth determined? Why an estate rather than a slum, or a slum rather than an estate? It all seems real enough, until you read Midnight's Children and explore those assumptions.
Book Review: Get rid of the gimmicks, just tell the freaking story
Summary: 2 Stars
A novel must do two things: it must entertain, and explain. It is through stories - delivered through mythology, literature, movies or just plain gossip - that humans meet their most fundamental need (besides food) for tools to help understand the world and their role in it.
I could care less if Midnight's Children was judged the 'Booker of Bookers', but it does not tell a compelling story nor it does it explain India's history or its society in any relevant way.
There is no need for a plot synopsis here, but Rushdie invents a thousand or so children born at India's independence at midnight of August 15 1947, who are gifted with magical powers - which presumably could have been used to intervene and help in their Nation's halting advance into modernity.
Saleem Sinai - the hero - instead immerses himself in a world of feckless friends and relatives, whose concerns and ambitions seem seem completely out of phase and magnitude with the history unfolding around them.
He invents a Bombay where nearly everyone is a Kashmiri Muslim, a Parsi or an upper class Gujarati - who live in the Methwold's Estate, shop at Breach Candy and, of course, the children go to the Cathedral and John Connon school. They are all charmingly European in their sensibilities (or at least light-skinned!).
Now Parsis and Kashmiris are a nice enough people, but they make up less than 1% of India's (Mumbai's) population. Rushdie still wants to use the history of the remaining hundreds million Indians - many or most of whom are like the 'black South Indian fisherwoman' that, except for the servant Padma, never seem to become part of the story. How does he attempt to pull this off, and still write a novel meant to reach the (Western, not Indian) reader?
Through 'magical realism' of course. Why deal with a real, compelling story when you can have magic whenever you like. The novel is not only full of numerous nicknames, metaphorical titles, but every page seems to have a character being transmigrated, transmuted or just plain transported somewhere or into something else. This makes it impossible to follow enough of the hero's story in order to care what becomes of him (or his country). You are trying to follow a family or nation's drama - and there are jugglers, acrobats and magicians pulling silly tricks all the time.
There was a reason why Shakespeare split up his plays in to tragedies, comedies and histories. He realized that it was not possible to mix up the three and still entertain and explain, and Salman Rushdie is unable to succeed here.
Book Review: Flying over India
Summary: 5 Stars
It is hard to categorize or pinpoint this novel's style. "Magical realism" comes to mind as a label, referring to the succession of supernatural and absurd situations, tightly enclosed within the cold reality of society and politics. But that same frame, as well as the personalized and introspective tone of the book, tie it too much to its specific context. For the same reasons, the adjective "epic" would be inadequate, even if Saleem Sinai's story is, playfully, the direct or indirect cause of modern India's historical landmarks. It reads like a novel from the Latin American "Boom" movement of the 1950's and 1960's, but it's not. In any case, it is a hard to follow novel but one that richly rewards the reader.
The plot is most original and witty: Saleem Sinai is born exactly at 00:00 hours on August 15, 1947, at the same time as independent India. Within the following hour, some 500 kids are also born, who will be called "Midnight's Children" and who also will, each of them, posess a specific supernatural power. Saleem is born the son of a poor, wandering English musician and an Indian woman, but for mysterious reasons he is changed places with the heir of a rich Muslim family, the Sinais. Saleems carries, then, an original sin. He is malformed and reclusive, a seemingly natural born loser form who, however, great wonders are expected, as the result of an omen given to his "mother", as well as a portrait in the newspaper and a letter from Nehru.
The novel traces the history of Saleems's family, his wealthy childhod, and the moment of coincidence between his adolescence and his magical power: the ability to listen to people's thoughts, and so to influence, deliberately or not, the history of India.
There are to many characters, anecdotes, and suplots to be summarized here, but it is worth remarking the general sense of self-flagellation, the vocation for sordidness, and the unhappiness of History. Kind of an anti-Harry Potter, or more like a tropical Oskar Matzerath ("The Tin Drum") or unhappy Tristram Shandy, Saleem is a memorable character, and the story is very rich, funny, sad, political, intimate, and many things more. Do not expect, of course, a strict chronological line, nor things making realistic sense. Go with the flow and enjoy a very good piece of literature.
Book Review: Too literary for me
Summary: 3 Stars
This book won the Booker of Bookers, so when I saw it sitting on the shelf, it said, "I must be good, take me home!" After all, I've adored some other Booker winners.
Not this one.
Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight, August 15th, 1947, at the same moment that India becomes an independent nation. He knows that he must be special - he even receives a letter from the Prime Minister for such a fortuitious birth time. This book isn't just about him, though, it is about several generations of his family and the history of his country, all of which makes it into a lengthy literary saga.
I didn't like Saleem. He drove me crazy with his dodging of topics and endless diversions. I wasn't interested in his relationship with Padma and I got completely fed up with his self-important attitude. I understand that his condition is reflected by India throughout the novel, but that didn't mean I enjoyed reading about it just because it had literary value. His connection with the other midnight children was interesting, but once again his arrogance ruined it. He's an unreliable narrator to an extent, but not in the way that I like, if that makes any sense at all. He's just trying to make himself sound good. Maybe because he is, apparently, not very attractive.
India, as a country, was by far the most compelling character throughout the book. I loved reading about the different regions, about Bombay and Delhi, about how rapidly India was changing. I'd certainly recommend this book for insight into the culture and that is easily the best part of it. I wouldn't mind seeing the Kashmir region for myself, now, after reading about it so many times.
So, in the end? I think Midnight's Children was too literary for me. I can tell that I'd get more enjoyment out of it if I went through in a class and then had to write a paper on it to pick it apart. As I was going through, I actually picked out paper topics that would illuminate the subject matter better. I'm not quite crazy enough to go out and write a paper just now, though. If I ever have fewer TBRs waiting for me, I might pick it up again and see if I can catch some of the threads that I missed this time, but I don't anticipate that happening for a long time.
Book Review: a momentous feat of the imagination
Summary: 5 Stars
This is my second experience with Salman Rushdie. I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories awhile back. I believe that I chose to read this after seeing it highly recommended in Nancy Perl's "Book Lust" lists. I am looking for novels that will engross me with a story, give me a characters that I care about, and have a narrative voice that I trust. Like Ellison's "Invisibile Man", one of my favorite novels, I found Rushdie's Midnight Children to create a compelling narrator whose voice lingers and reveals great truth about his nation and culture.
Some readers may not care for Saleem Sinai. He's unreliable as a narrator. He's loose with time and sequence and foreshadows. He meanders. He is struck with his self-importance. I found all of the digressions and explorations of Saleem Sinai to give the book its character and spice.
The premise of the novel is extraordinary. The concept of the magical Midnight's Children who are both all powerful and powerless in and India that is not accomodating to their powers is a potent allegorical device. Saleem's relation to his own gifts and his own connection to the fate of his nation is especially profound and I wish that I had more knowledge of history, especially the history of Pakistan, to be able to fully appreciate the scope of Rushdie's nation revealing efforts.
Ultimately, this is a book that is as much about a family and for those readers who are not into the allegorical and political dimensions of the book I still feel that it is worth giving the book 25 pages or so and seeing what you feel about it. If you can appreciate Saleem's voice and the story of his grandfather that begins the novel, you will certainly appreciate the book when Saleem enters his story and the plot moves more consistently through his life. Even missing the political and allegorical dimensions of the book, this can be read as a meditation on how a supremely gifted child succeeds and fails to be fully embraced by his family.
Midnight's Children sucked me in and was worth the effort to get through. I hope that you will be similarly blessed by this ambitious book.
5 stars