Midnight's Children
Rushdie, Salman; Anita Desai (Intro)
From DogStar Books, Lancaster, PA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
AbeBooks Seller since May 3, 2011
From DogStar Books, Lancaster, PA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
AbeBooks Seller since May 3, 2011
About this Item
Everyman's Library; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 632 pages; 1995 Alfred A. Knopf / Everyman's Library. HC/DJ 1st Everyman's printing. Snugly bound and clean in original pictorial dust jacket with publisher's $20 issue price intact to unclipped front flap. Prior owner's small circular ownership stamp to front flyleaf; otherwise clean and unmarked. Mild toning to page block edges; superficial shelf evidence to jacket edges and surfaces. VG+/VG+. Seller Inventory # 55084
Bibliographic Details
Title: Midnight's Children
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Publication Date: 1995
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good+
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good+
Edition: First Edition Thus.
About this title
A classic novel, in which the man who calls himself the "bomb of Bombay" chronicles the story of a child and a nation that both came into existence in 1947—and examines a whole people's capacity for carrying inherited myths and inventing new ones.
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
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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