After promising myself, year after year, that I would read Midnight’s Children, I finally made good on my word. Rather than finishing with a sense of contentment or enjoyment, I feel utterly defeated by Rushdie’s relentlessly digressive, figurative, contradictory, allegorical style of writing. I can’t help but admire the narrative – as elaborately and gleefully bloated as it is with Rushdie’s sense of self-infatuation – but I resent the bombardment. It’s difficult to read this without the persistent feeling that you’re probably missing something.
On the face of it, this is a biography of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947: the moment of India’s official independence from the British Empire. His destiny and India’s are thereafter closely linked, and partly through magical realism, partly through childish naivety (sometimes it’s unclear which), Saleem is a disproportionately significant catalyst to various better-known historical affairs and incidences. At one point, Rushdie cleverly jams in even more references when Saleem painstakingly arranges a ransom-style note by selecting single letters and needed punctuation from a series of newspaper headlines, therefore nodding to the crises of the time (“After Nehru, who?”).
Over the course of the story, Saleem chattily meanders through 31 years of Indian history, merrily taking up subjects from religious division, the repression of Indira Gandhi, painful memories of Partition, the horror of Emergency measures, linguistic variation across the subcontinent, all interjected within memories from his childhood and the people surrounding him (the eccentric, the indulgent, the – whatsitsname – repetitive, self-contained, and sometimes vulgar).
Within the first hour of India’s independence, 1,001 of midnight’s children are born with successively reduced but persistent magical powers, including his birth twin, Shiva (‘of-the-knees’). Through their stories, portals to the fantastical open. Inner monologues take over. Recurring references are boundless.
I’m glad to have finally read this, but I never managed to settle into Rushdie’s style of writing. A grinding marathon of a read with no ensuing endorphin rush.
Book Reviews 