Midnight's Children (Hardcover)
Salman Rushdie
From CitiRetail, Stevenage, United Kingdom
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
AbeBooks Seller since June 29, 2022
From CitiRetail, Stevenage, United Kingdom
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
AbeBooks Seller since June 29, 2022
About this Item
Hardcover. A history of India since independence seen through the eyes of characters born on that independence was granted. Often hailed as a classic of magic realism, this is a many-layered and entralling narrative in which the complexities of the sub-continent are projected through the minds of its many characters, comic, tragic and fantastic by turns, this is the novel which revolutionized English literature in one fell swoop. MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN was voted in the Booker of Bookers in 1993. A history of India since independence seen through the eyes of characters born on that independence was granted. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781857152173
Bibliographic Details
Title: Midnight's Children (Hardcover)
Publisher: Everyman, London
Publication Date: 1995
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: new
About this title
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.In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.
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. --Alix Wilber
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