Midnight's Children by Salman RushdieMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
His life is an allegory for the post-colonial history of his homeland, but is it real? is he insane? is he suffering from PTSD? Yes. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie follows the life of man born at the exact moment that India became an independent nation-state and how his life reflected that of the nation.
Rushdie writes the book from the perspective of its protagonist, Saleem Sinai, whose origins are as muddled as that of the nation itself at the time of independence. Throughout the book, the magical elements of Saleem’s familial—hereditary attributes and emotional pollution—and personal life are related by the character himself but instead of simply not mentioning the illogicalness of this Saleem addresses these magical connections directly at several points. As I said above Saleem’s life mirrors that of India’s from its independence in 1947 through the 1980s even though he himself doesn’t stay in India the entire time—living in Pakistan almost a decade until the Bangladesh Independence War of 1971—but that doesn’t stop their connection. Unlike Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, this magical realism novel kept me engaged throughout whether because Rushdie’s actual references to historical events compared to Allende’s allusions to Chilean history thus getting to the history addict in me or simply me liking Rushdie’s writing style over Allende’s. Not only was this Rushdie’s first novel, but it was also my first exposure to his writing, and it makes me interested in others of his work.
Midnight’s Children is an engaging read of how not only a nation, but individuals related to the end of the British Raj and an independent nations early history handled the chan
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