Midnight's Children
Rushdie, Salman
From timkcbooks, Penzance, United Kingdom
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
AbeBooks Seller since September 7, 1999
From timkcbooks, Penzance, United Kingdom
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
AbeBooks Seller since September 7, 1999
About this Item
First edition, first printing of the Booker Prize winning novel. Printed by Jonathan Cape but using American sheets and boards. Very good but marked boards in very good price clipped and ill fitting and thus very scarce first state dustjacket with the usual fading to the spine. (I believe the first batch of dustjackets were slightly too small for the American imports and were replaced). The book was previously the property of a BBC journalist, so the book was probably a review copy, hence the first state dustjacket. Seller Inventory # 36907
Bibliographic Details
Title: Midnight's Children
Publisher: London; Jonathan Cape;
Publication Date: 1981
Binding: Hardcover
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Edition: 1st Edition
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
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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