“I was born in the city of Bombay once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date. I was born on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. On the stroke of midnight as a matter of fact. Clock hands joined palms in a respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps, and outside of the window fireworks and crowds. Thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I was handcuffed to history, my destiny chained to those of my country. For three decades there was no escape. Soothsayers prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival and politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left without a say in the matter.”

“A thousand and one children were born; and there were a thousand and one possibilities which had never been present in one place at one time before; and there were a thousand and one dead ends. Midnight's children can represent many things. According to your point of view they can be seen as the last throes of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth ridden nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing twentieth century economy; or as the hope of freedom, now forever extinguished. What they must not become is the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind.”

“Shiva, my rival, my changeling brother, could no longer be admitted into the forum of my mind; for reasons I admit were ignoble. I was afraid he would discover who I was and could not conceal from him the secrets of our birth. Shiva, for whom the world was things, for whom history could only be explained as the continuing struggle of oneself against the crowd, would certainly insist on claiming his birthright. I was aghast at the notion of my antagonist replacing me in the blue room of my childhood while I walked morosely off the hill to enter the northern slums.”

- Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981)

“On February 14 1989 a fatwa ordering Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, calling his book ‘The Satanic Verses’ a ‘blasphemy against Islam’. A bounty was offered for his death, and he was forced to live under police protection for years. On March 7 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke off diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy. When Rushdie was asked for a response to the threat he offered: "Frankly, I wish I had written a more critical book.”

- Wikipedia article about Salman Rushdie

************

Saleem, born at midnight of Indian independence in 1947, narrates his family history as an allegory of India. It begins with the Kashmiri boatman Taiji who has lived for many centuries, representing old India, and dies in the Kashmir conflict of 1947 as Saleem is born. Saleem is a stand in for Salman Rushdie, also born in the summer of the Partition, but moved to Britain at age seven. Saleem’s grandfather Dr. Aziz was schooled in Heidelberg, Germany and returns to Kashmir during WWI. He brings home independent views that conflict with pious values of Muslim Indians. Saleem’s grandmother Naseem is a young woman from a wealthy traditional family who becomes Aziz’s patient and wife. He moves her to Agra to take a university job as professor and is almost killed in the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 by the British Brigadier Reginald Dyer.

Saleem Sinai’s story of the Independence is told to his lover Padma, who is enthralled as was the King of Persia in ‘1001 Nights’. Rushdie is a modern day Scheherazade, who writes as if his life depends on it. In Delhi Dr. Aziz meets a Muslim activist for a unified India, Mian Abdullah, later murdered by Muslim League separatists. His secretary, the rhymeless poet Nadir Khan, has been attacked and hides out in the basement of Dr. Aziz, who now has three daughters. Khan becomes Mumtaz’s first husband while entombed underground, like Shah Jahan and his wife in the Taj Mahal. When it has been discovered that she remained a virgin she remarries with Ahmed Sinai, moving to Delhi as Saleem’s future mother. The young and pretty sister Emerald weds General Zulfikar, a district commissioner of Agra, who pursues Nadir Khan as Emerald reveals his hiding place.

Ahmed runs a business and is extorted by the Ravanas, a Hindu gang of anti-Muslim thugs. In the winding alleys of Chandni Chowk sectarian violence rears its ugly heads in a prologue to Partition. A Muslim mob chases a Hindu street vendor and Mumtaz, pregnant with Saleem, shelters him in her house. A fortune teller predicts her unborn child’s link to all children of the Independence. Ahmed moves to Bombay with Mumtaz, now renamed Amina, soon after acquiring abandoned British flats. As the Partition arrives Saleem is switched at birth and grows up in a Mumbai slum, while Shiva a slum boy is raised as Saleem by Ahmed and Amina. He discovers that all children born during the midnight hour of August 15 1947 are telepathically connected. The story continues through the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s in widespread locations of India and Pakistan.

I’m not a fan of magical realism or fantasy, but this novel has enough reality to cut through the magic, and it clearly demonstrates Rushdie’s creativity and wit in juggling scores of characters. ‘Midnight’s Children’ was his breakthrough novel, winning the Booker Prize in 1981, and the best of the Bookers by public vote twice, in 1993 and 2008. His works have had a significant influence on writers worldwide. Sadly Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa resulted in a vicious attack in 2022 that nearly ended his life. It might be time for the Nobel Prize committee to consider an award based on his literary achievements and steadfast advocacy for freedom of speech. The only thing that may stand in the way is a fear of religious violence as visited on the staff of Charlie Hebdo and Theo van Gogh. When theocracies rule nations it’s as stifling to public discourse as autocracy is.

"...to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world."

Born at the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world slept, and India awoke to life and freedom, Saleem is the mirror of the life of India. In a sense, all Indians are, even though not all of us were born at the dawn of India's Independence. Why? Because midnight's children or not, we are all destined to break into as many pieces as there are citizens in India. We are not individuals. We are India. We're meant to "be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes." Every single Indian is born with such a wild profusion of inheritance that it is only inevitable that he embody this diverse nation, that he encapsulate this entire country within himself.

Saleem struggles to contain the whole of India within himself only to disintegrate and collapse in the end. But we Indians do have this disease, "this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality" I don't think we can help it. I'm the most lonesome person I know and even I cannot resist it at times. It's just who we are. Even though there are so many religious riots in this country, there are also so many people who regardless of their caste, creed, religion, language, love each other. Because we're all Indians. And we might end up crashing but we still won't ever stop trying to connect in some way all the plurality we're made of. And I love Salman Rushdie for putting all of this in words more beautiful and poignant than the ones I would ever be able to sputter out.

I also loved the way Rushdie chose to write this history. There can be so many perspectives to history that it's not fair to let one be heralded as the truth. There's no truth. There's only the perspective that memory preserves. And Saleem's perspective of his history and India's history is full of flaws, and yet it is one that I loved reading. It doesn't matter that he muddled dates or that he doesn't filter through other inaccuracies, because that's the way he remembers it, and I can be satisfied with that. This is the version of history that he believes in, and isn't that what history really is - a version of the past that you believe in?

And then there is snakes-and-ladders, Saleem-and-Shiva, creation-and-destruction. There's no clear-cut line between them; there's only ambiguity. They are inextricably related. Two sides of India that will probably always go hand in hand.

The fragmentation of the story itself and the cracks that keep appearing on Saleem's body are so very heartbreaking. It's been so long since the Partition but we'll never completely be over it, I reckon. We are a little cracked. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Like Saleem's leaking nose, the past would never stop leaking into the present, but at one point you have to let go. It doesn't matter. We will all turn into specks of dust that is both Indian and Pakistani. We were family once. We're not anymore. But most people would agree that we will always be...something, because in all our pluralities there are so many singularities too.

To conclude: I loved this book. I finally have one more book to call a favourite, and that's the most I can say considering the fact that I find it terribly difficult to decide which book should be given entry into the pile of favourites.

Saleem Sinaí, el protagonista de esta historia, nace exactamente en la medianoche del 15 de agosto de 1947, coincidiendo con el preciso momento en que la India deja de ser una colonia y se independiza de Gran Bretaña. Y es a partir de este hecho que de alguna manera el destino de Saleem queda ligado al de la India, y el autor utiliza esta conexión para narrarnos en paralelo tanto la historia de Salem y su familia -con pequeños relatos que recuerdan mucho a las mil y una noches- como lo que fue la vida política y social de la India desde el proceso que la llevó a su independencia hasta principios de los años 80, cuando finaliza el convulsionado gobierno de Indira Ghandi que finaliza en los años 80.

Es un libro para leer con calma y sin apuro, porque en sus 630 páginas hay momentos donde la lectura se hace un poco lenta, pero está muy bien narrada y me parece muy interesante la mirada del autor -nacido en Bombay en 1947- sobre la vida política de la India durante esos agitados primeros años como nación independiente.
Muy recomendable.
4,5


n  "La memoria es verdad, porque la memoria tiene su forma de ser especial. Selecciona, elimina, altera, exagera, minimiza, glorifica, y difama también; pero, en definitiva, crea su propia realidad, su versión heterogénea pero normalmente coherente de los acontecimientos; y ningún hombre en su sano juicio confia mas en la versión de otro que en la suya propia."n

Midnight's Children is not at all a fast read; it actually walks the line of being unpleasantly the opposite. The prose is dense and initially frustrating in a way that seems almost deliberate, with repeated instances of the narrator rambling ahead to a point that he feels is important--but then, before revealing anything of importance, deciding that things ought to come in their proper order. This use of digressions (or, better put, quarter-digressions) can either be attributed to a charmingly distractable narrator or a vehicle for (perhaps cheaply) tantalizing the reader... or both.

I'll admit that at first I didn't appreciate being so persistently manipulated. Many times in the first few chapters I found myself closing the book in anger, thinking to myself "If the story is worth it, this tactic is utterly unnecessary."

The tactic, it turns out, is unnecessary. The book--the story--is stunning. It's stunning enough that the frustrating aspects of the telling are forgivable and actually retrospectively satisfying (which I suspect is what the author wanted). While the fractional digressions, on the one hand, can have you groping around for a lighter--they, on the other hand, work to accustom you to the novel's epically meandering pace. Also, they effectively allow you to feel a certain urgency near the end of the book, as the narrator "runs out of time."

The imagery is lush; the characters are curiously, magically lopsided; the language is complicated and beautiful; the chapters are nicely portioned despite the initial plodding pace; the narrative is deliberately allegorical, which perhaps suggests an enhanced enjoyment of the work after studying a bit of Indian history. Elements of the story's frame (the narrator writing in a pickle factory with sweet Padma reading along) are particularly amusing, and the chapter entitled "In the Sundarbans" is nothing short of breathtaking.

The book will go slow in the beginning; the book means to; give it patience--it's worth it, I think.

I got a comment on this review today hinting at the fact that it is taking me months to finish the last 5% and that sounds like a bad deal . . . so, I figured it is about time I finally write my review. I did finish this book back in October, but I have not been all that inspired to write a review. That is partially a product of a year+ long book slump I have been going through. It is also partially because this was a very big book with lots to absorb and, because I was slumping, I am not really sure I can do it justice. So, you may want to take my review of this with a grain of salt as I am not sure it would reflect my experience with it during a better year.

Overall – I would give this book 3.5 to 4 stars.

I don’t really know a lot about the history of India, so it was interesting to learn about mid-20th Century India through this book. I cannot say that I know if Rushdie did a good job of being historically accurate – but, it sure feels like he did and I have not seen any complaints hinting at the contrary.

There was a lot of magical realism and mysticism in the story. In general – I tend to really like magical realism. There are a few authors who use magical realism a lot that do not click with me - the main one that comes to mind is Gabriel García Márquez. And, having read One Hundred Years of Solitude recently, Midnight’s Children had a very similar feeling to it. In fact, I would not be surprised if I were to hear that Rushdie was trying to write this book in the same vein. However, and not that I can quantify it in any particular way, I liked Midnight’s Children more than Solitude . . . maybe I just found it more accessible?

Should you read this book?

If you are working your way through the classics and are ready for an epic and complex book – definitely!

If you are not ready for something heavy, extensive, a bit odd, and requiring focused thought, you may want to wait. I go back to the fact that I read this for a book club during a slump – if it was not for that, I think I would have stopped and saved this until my head was in a better and more focused place.

Have you ever been to a Hindu temple? It’s a riotous mass of orange, blue, purple, red, and green. Its walls seethe with deities. In one corner, Ganesha--the god with a human body and elephant head--sits on his vehicle, a rat. In another, a blue Krishna sits on a cow wooing cow girls by playing his flute. Durgha wearing a necklace of skulls kills a demon in another corner. Jasmine-decorated devotees stand around chanting. The press of people, the incense and the noise all combine and you lose your bearings. That’s what reading Midnight’s Children is like.

In many ways, it’s apt that it’s like that. This is a country of 330 million deities and about as many languages and dialects. It’s large, messy, contradictory, and bursting with people. As with the country, so with the book. Like the nation whose birth it writes about, Midnight’s Children strains at the seams to hold its contents in one whole. Its language is as spicy and pungent as one of south India’s curries. Its plot packs a punch as potent at its toddies. And being set in a country where film stars are venerated as incarnations of Shiva and Brahma and Vishnu, reality often takes a rain check.

Rushdie’s plot ends somewhere in the 70’s. A key theme in the novel is fragmentation: of our hero, and of the country. At time of writing, India’s Congress Party led by a scion of the Ghandi dynasty has won the national elections. Technological wiz-kids work in Bangalore while their cousins labour in rice fields. Modern Indian women dance in jeans in clubs while nationalist conservative Hindus plot to bash them for immodesty. The country is being forcibly pushed into a capitalist 21st century and the tensions show. And yet for all that it doesn't all fly apart.

One wonders what a sequel to the novel would be like. Would we see a son of our hero fly off to study in the United States and return to start a technology company and engage in a tumultuous love-hate relationship with an American woman while keeping a Chinese lover on the side? And what would happen to the 1,001 children of midnight? India faces as many possibilities at this juncture of her history as at the time of her bastard incarnation (don’t flame me, it’s in the book). How can we even begin to grasp what she is about? One visit will not be enough. And as with the country, so with the book.

Fantastic, intelligent, hilarious, profound, and historically illuminating. And the narrator is deliciously unreliable too! Need I say more? I will. His sentences are the kind of energetic super-charged masterpieces that I could quote endlessly. Here's one plucked utterly at random:

"Into this bog of muteness there came, one evening, a short man whose head was as flat as the cap upon it; whose legs were as bowed as reeds in the wind; whose nose nearly touched his up-curving chin; and whose voice, as a result, was thin and sharp--it had to be, to squeeze through the narrow gap between his breathing apparatus and his jaw...a man whose short sight obliged him to take life one step at a time, which gained him a reputation for thoroughness and dullness, and endeared him to his superiors by enabling them to feel well-served without feeling threatened; a man whose starched, pressed uniform reeked of Blanco and rectitude, and about whom, despite his appearance of a character out of a puppet-show, there hung the unmistakable scent of success: Major Zulfikar, a man with a future, came to call, as he had promised, to tie up a few loose ends."

n  

The children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream.

nMidnight's Children was an unexpected pleasure for me. Maybe that is the reason it took me so long to write down my thoughts on it. Yes, I read some reviews before starting it, but could never have imagined Salman Rushdie’s symphony that is no short of a magnificent blueprint of a labyrinthine palace of fantasy. Let me just say simply that my mind was smitten and my heart crumbled at its every page. What did I read through the days that I was taken by it? Was it magic or history? A family saga? Was it a coming of age story not only of Saleem but of India as a nation with all its subtleties? Rushdie’s sublime prose is all that and much more. It is rich in its allegories, in its unimaginable creativity.

n  

Who / What am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been / seen / done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone / everything whose being-in-the world affected / was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone, which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

n
I am not Indian and have to confess ignorant about its history. Nevertheless, exactly the little I knew about it before opening Midnight Children's first page could have allowed me to dream along with Salman and Saleem as I learned some of what happened. I am not completely sure what more to say, but through all its pages I amazed by its beauty and some of the ugliness and suffering it contains. Yes, independence never comes easy to any country and the case of India seems to be one more example of the price that has to be paid. Besides all the pitfalls of politics that have been revealed through history.

n  

When the Constitution was altered to give the Prime Minister well-nigh--absolute powers, I smelled the ghosts of ancient empires in the air ... in that city which was littered with the phantoms of Slave Kings and Mughals, or Aurangzeb the merciless and the last, pink conquerors, I inhaled once again the sharp aroma of despotism. It smelled like burning oily rags.

n
And:
n  

Such things happen. Statistics may set my arrest in context; although there is considerable disagreement about the number of "political" prisoners taken during the Emergency, either thirty thousand or a quarter of a million persons certainly lost their freedom. The Widow said: "It is only a small percentage of the population of India."

n
From the creative perspective of the world of children born at midnight of India’s independence, through Rushdie’s magic and digressions enters a world where destiny rules over reason, where truth is twisted, and history transforms itself, contorting into a reality that is burdened with pain, love, and miracles. His stories and narratives bent and entwine around each other:

n  

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end, it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

n
Our memory is our past, can it be that what we do not remember didn't happen? That what happened, can be understood? Perhaps this are merely nonsensical rambling but it is all I can come up with. So different from Salman’s and Saleem’s reality, I was not born in at a time of magic and I am free of special gifts bestowed upon me upon my birth. Given all that, can I understand Salman’s magic? Maybe not, but I can imagine or dream about it, an all encompassing aura that hints and glimpses and leads me on endlessly. And I have to say once more that I was fascinated by it all.

n  

Nothing but trouble outside my head; nothing but miracles inside it.

n_______

Other quotes:

~@~ ...to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

~@~ History is always ambiguous. Facts are harsh to establish, and capable of being given many meanings. Reality is built on prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and knowledge.

~@~ Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

~@~ ... and still so much remains to be told ... Uncle Mustapha is growing inside me, and the pout of Parvati-the-witch; a certain lock of a hero's hair is waiting in the wings; and also a labor of thirteen days, and history as an analogue of a prime minister's hair-style; there is to be treason, and fare-dodging, and the scent (wafting on breezes heavy with the ululations of widows) of something frying in an iron skillet) ... .

~@~ One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth ... that they are, despite everything, acts of love.

~@~ When the Bombay edition of the Times of India, searching for a catchy human-interest angle to the forthcoming Independence celebrations, announced that it would award a prize to any Bombay mother who could arrange to give birth to a child at the precise instant of the birth of the new nation, Amina Sinai, who had just awoken from a mysterious dream of flypaper, became glued to the newsprint.

~@~ ...; and this year--fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve--there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quiet imaginary; ...

~@~ So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents--the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream.

~@~ In those days, my aunt Alia had begun to send us an unending stream of children's clothes, into whose seams she had sewn her old maid's bile; the Brass Monkey and I were clothed in her gifts, wearing at first the baby-things of bitterness, then the rompers of resentment; I grew up in white shorts starched with the starch of jealousy, while the Monkey wore the pretty flowered frocks of Alia's undimmed envy ...

~@~ So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry ... but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight, Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose ... to Shiva the hour had given the gifts of war (...) ... and to me, the greatest talent of all-the ability to look the hearts and minds of men.

~@~ So, from the earliest days of my Pakistani adolescence, I began to learn the secret aromas of the world, the heady but quick-fading perfume of new love, and also the deeper, longer-lasting pungency of hate.

~@~ ...; in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite ceases to exist ...; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence-that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

~@~ In the basket of invisibility, a sense of unfairness turned into anger; and something else besides--transformed by rage, I had also been overwhelmed by an agonizing feeling of sympathy for the country which was not only my twin-in-birth but also joined to me (so to speak) at the hip, so that what to either of us, happened to us both.

~@~ ... something was ending, something was being born, and at the precise instant of the birth of the new India and the beginning of a continuous midnight which would not end for two long years. My son, the child of the renewed ticktock, came out into the world.

~@~ Test and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves ... but that was only a side-effect, because they were truly extraordinary doctors, and they drained us of more than that: hope, too, was excised, and I don't know how it was done ...

~@~ Today I gave myself the day off and visited Mary. A long hot dusty bus-ride through streets beginning to bubble with the excitement of the coming Independence Day, although I can smell other, more tarnished perfumes: disillusion, venality, cynicism ... the nearly-thirty-one-year-old myth of freedom is no longer what it was. New myths are needed; but that's none of my business.

~@~ Sometimes, in the life's version of history, Saleem appears to have known too little; at others times, too much ... yes, I should revise and revise, improve and improve, but there is neither the time nor the energy. I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because that's how it happened.

Midnight's Children is the tale of someone "mysteriously handcuffed to history, with multiple destinies chained to his country, a clock-ridden, crime-stained birth", who as if by decree, will never be older (or younger) than his country. Or, as India's Prime Minster Nehru puts it, "Your life will be in a sense the mirror of our own."



For, in Salman Rushdie's epic novel, Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai, born at midnight on August 15th, 1947, at the precise moment that India becomes independent from the British Empire, along with an independent Pakistan established to the north, becomes a conveyor of memory, in search of his own identity while straddling 3 countries (including the erstwhile East Pakistan, later Bangladesh) & the divisive territory of Kashmir. Always self-reflective, at one point Saleem comments to the reader:

There have been illusions in my life; don't think I'm unaware of that. We are coming, however to a time beyond illusions; having no option, I must at last set down, in black & white, the climax I have avoided all evening. Scraps of memory: this is not how a climax should be written. A climax should surge towards its Himalayan peak; but I am left with shreds, & must jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings. This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

If I began again, would I end in a different place? Well then: I must content myself with shreds & scraps: the trick is to fill in the gaps, guided by the few clues one is given. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence; I must be guided by the memory of a once-glimpsed file with tell-tale initials; & by the other remaining shards of the past, lingering in my ransacked memory-vaults like broken bottles on a beach...like scraps of memory, sheets of newsprint used to bowl through the magicians colony in the silent midnight wind.

This long passage near the novel's end acts as both a kind of summary of the narrative & is just one rich sample of Rushdie's memorable prose. There are countless other characters beyond Saleem Sinai, "a 9 fingered, horn-templed, monks-tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, castrated, premature-aged man with one good ear."



Among the complex cast of characters are Aadam Aziz, in Srinigar, Kashmir, an M.D. via 5 years in Heidelberg, blue eyed, red-bearded & with a large nose in the middle of his face, rather like Ganesh, who feels that his fate represents "an educated, stethoscoped return to a hostile environment." Aziz is the grandfather of Saleem Sinai & someone who has "contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism." Mrs. Naseem Aziz, known as "Rev. Mother", is a tyrant in the kitchen & according to proper dietary laws, the family is supposed "to swallow & digest only the permitted parts of the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness & their blood."

One of the more memorable characters within the novel is inanimate, "hidden beneath dowry in a green tin trunk, a forbidden, lapis-lazuli-encrusted, delicately-wrought silver spittoon, brought by train on the "Frontier Mail" when my ill-matched parents left for Bombay." In fact the spittoon becomes almost legendary & not just for "paan-chewing, spittoon-hitting men" but as a kind of iconic symbol of our itinerant main character.



Central to the story is an event that occurs at the hospital via a midwife when Saleem Sinai & India are born but the details of which which I am withholding rather than enshrouding my review with a "spoiler alert". However, at one point early on & with Rushdie's frequently humorous touch in relating the tale, a voice declares to our main character: "You'd better get a move on or you'll die before you get yourself born." The novel was written 30 years ago, but in my view Salman Rushdie represents a perpetually precocious literary force.

There are 1,000 others born at the moment of India's birth, including the mystery child "Shiva", a focal point within the novel & by turns, Saleem comes to know & bond with many of them, hence the novel's title. At age 4, Saleem & family move to Pakistan but later, 581 of the children would gather at midnight in 1958. Eventually, Indira Gandhi begins to fear the "children of midnight" & wants to incarcerate or otherwise eliminate them.

Always, the relationship between India & Pakistan is tense but also ambiguous & even at times incestuous in spirit, like that between Saleem & his sister Jamila, who has become a famous pop singer in Pakistan. In time, Saleem is drafted into the Pakistani army & sent to the eastern frontier in a vain attempt to suppress Bangladeshi independence but he flees with his silver spittoon across the Sunderbans, an area of mangrove swamps into India's West Bengal.

Here is another example of Rushdie's prose:

As much as any living being, I am telling my story so that afterwards when I've lost my struggle against cracks, my son (by way of "Parvati the witch") will know. Morality, judgement, character...it all starts with memory...& I am keeping carbons. Green chutney on chili-pakoras, disappearing down someone's gullet; grasshopper-green on tepid chapatis, vanishing behind Padma's lips.

I say again, "memory's truth", because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies & vilifies; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own. Chutney & oratory, theology & curiosity: these are the things that saved me.

There are also magicians & conjurors, full of amazing tales. Often, things are not what they seem, as by way of one example, a paan wallah (sweet vendor) who gave off the aroma of poverty but who was in fact a person of substance, owner of a Lincoln Continental motorcar, someone with important contacts who paid the salaries of 2 policemen to look the other way as he sold contraband imported cigarettes & transistor radios. And above all, "never underestimate a spittoon", a talismanic vessel in Rushdie's novel.



It is mentioned that "to understand me (Saleem), you'd have to swallow a world", or at least be familiar with the Indian subcontinent. In fact, I read Rushdie's epic novel with 2 books as rather constant reference points: the Insight Guide to India and also The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger, finding both quite helpful.

*There is an extraordinary, illuminating introduction to Midnight's Children by Anita Desai. At one point, she describes Rushdie's prose as like a "galloping horse" & I concur. It can be at times be a very wild ride for the reader but the novel is really quite amazing--complex in scope & detail but ultimately, absolutely rewarding for its wondrous language & memorable characters!

**Images within my review: Author Salman Rushdie; trains carrying people between India & Pakistan at time of independence from Britain in 1947, resulting in great violence; Nehru & Gandhi at independence; copy of novel & poster of the film version of Midnight's Children.

أطفال منتصف الليل

أنهيت الكتاب قبل سفري بيوم، لهذا أجلت الكتابة عنه حتى أعود، وعندما عدت جعلت أؤجل الكتابة تحاشياً لكل تلك الكلمات التي يمكن لها أن تتدفق تحت تأثير سلمان رشدي وجنونه الذي جعله يحصد جائزة البوكر عن هذا الكتاب سنة 1981 م.

كان هذا كتاب رشدي الثاني، الأول مر بلا صيت، رواية خيال علمي غريبة، ولكن هذه الرواية أخذته إلى القمة، كان هذا طبعاً قبل فضيحة (الآيات الشيطانية) وفتوى الخميني اللتان جعلتا اسم رشدي تابو في الأدب المترجم للعربية.

كل من سيقرأ هذه الرواية سيميز وبسرعة تيار الواقعية السحرية، وستقفز إلى ذهنه (مئة عام من العزلة)، وربما سيحاول استحضار ماكوندو ماركيز ليبحث عنها في هند رشدي، ولكن رشدي برأيي ليس متأثراً بسحرية أمريكا الجنوبية، وإنما - ربما بحكم إقامته في أوروبا - متأثر بواقعية سحرية أوروبية أسبق، هي الواقعية السحرية التي صنعها الألماني (غونتر غراس) في تحفته العملاقة (الطبل الصفيح).

والتشابهات الكثيرة بين طبل غونتر غراس الصفيحي وأطفال رشدي لا تقلل من أصالة وجمال عمل رشدي، بطل كلا العملين طفل غريب، يحدثنا عن تاريخه الخارق للعائدة، عائداً بالتاريخ إلى جده، وكلا البطلين له قدرات خاصة، فأوسكار ماتسيرات يمنع جسده من النمو ليبقى طفلاً بطبله الصفيحي حتى يقرر في لحظة ما أن ينمو، فيما يكتسب سليم سيناء القدرة على سماع أفكار الآخرين، وكلاهما يولدان في لحظة تاريخية مهمة، هي بالنسبة لأوسكار مرحلة النازية وما قبلها وما بعدها، وهي بالنسبة لسليم مرحلة ما قبل استقلال الهند وما بعدها، كلاهما يكونان شاهدين على لحظة تاريخية مهمة، هي بالنسبة لأوسكار حادثة البريد البولندي، وهي بالنسبة لسليم لحظة التخطيط لانقلاب ذو الفقار بوتو، ويمكن لدراسة مدققة أن تظهر تشابهات أوسع في بنية كلا الروايتين وأحداثهما وربما حتى أسلوبهما، ولكن هذا لا يمنع أن كلا العملين هو تحدي لذيذ لأي قارئ عاشق للأدب.

إن قصة سليم سيناء الذي ولد لحظة إعلان استقلال الهند في منتصف الليل سنة 1947 م، مع ألف طفل آخر بحيث كونوا المصطلح الذي منح الرواية اسمها (أطفال منتصف الليل) هي قصة الهند، إن أطفال منتصف الليل هؤلاء خارقون، فلكل منهم قدرة ما، سنتعرف على هذه القدرات ولكن من خلال حكاية طويلة تبدأ من الجد آدم سيناء والذي درس في بريطانيا وعاد للهند ليعيش ويعمل في كشمير، سنتنقل بين مدن الهند لنكون شهوداً على مذبحة أمريستار التي ارتكبتها القوات البريطانية حيث قتل قرابة الألف هندي بالرصاص، كما سنشهد كيف كانت الحياة في بومباي آخر أيام الإنجليز، وسنرحل مع سليم إلى إسلام أباد بعد الإنفصال، ثم سنعود للهند بعد حرب هندية باكستانية أخرى، كل هذا من خلال قصة مجنونة، محبوكة بدقة، لا يمكن لأي مراجعة أن تفيها أو تعطيها حقها، وحدها قراءة متأنية، مع ورقة جانبية يسجل فيها القارئ ملاحظاته وملخص ما يمر به من أحداث، حتى لا يضيع في جنون رشدي وأحداثه وشخصياته ومدنه، إنها رواية لا تقرأ مثلها مرة أخرى، إنها رواية من الروايات القلائل التي يجود بها الزمن.

Midnight’s Children is an n  absolute masterful piece of writing.n

It is entertaining, intelligent, informative, progressive and even funny: it is an astoundingly well balanced epic that captures the birth of a new independent nation. I hold it in such high regard.

The children are all fractured and divided; they are born into a new country that is yet to define itself in the wake of colonialism: it has no universal language, religion or culture. The children reflect this; they are spread out and unconnected to each other. As such Rushdie raises a critical question: does India even exist? These children are born on the night of India’s independence, but what exactly are they born into? The mass of land they occupy is yet to establish what it now is: it is something new, a place with an internal battle raging between modernisation and tradition. It’s not the India it was the day before, and it’s certainly not the India it was before the colonisers came.

n  “What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.” n

Saleem, our narrator and protagonist, reflects this. He is a hybrid, born into two worlds. He has powers, powers that allow him to connect telepathically with the other children born into the new nation. They all have their own gifts and they all represent an infectious optimism, a powerful hope that things will start to get better. Their progress in the story, their successes and failures, reflect the development of the new India. As Saleem begins to fall apart, as he begins to lose himself, the optimism begins to shatter and things go terribly wrong: war approaches, death approaches.

Rushdie plays around with reality, warping it and twisting it to the point where its very nature becomes an allegory for the failings of society. The India he has created is both removed and part of the real world. He has used human terms, and human emotions, to personify a country. Through this he demonstrates how it can waver and falter and how it can fail and become a victim to its own passions. It’s an exceedingly clever device. Saleem is egotistical and unreliable, but his life is a physical manifestation of post-independent India. On a character level he actually thinks he is altering events, though he only ever mirrors it.

“Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.”

All great literature should be subjective. All great literature should have a multitude of ramifications. If we go away with one single clean cut meaning or interpretation then the author has failed to some degree. Literature needs to make us think; it needs to make us question the world and our place within it. And Rushdie certainly does that. You may disagree with my reading. I think Midnight’s Children can be seen in a number of different ways, and I’d love to hear what other people thought it all meant.

There’s just so much going on in this book, I could literally write several essays on it. Rushdie draws heavily on Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude by recreating the long drawn out family saga told in the magical realist mode to represent reality in a more truthful way than standard story telling would allow; however, Rushdie transcends it in so many ways. I will be reading The Satanic Verses very soon I think, and I will definitely be writing on Rushdie for my university work.

n  This is clearly one of the most important novels written in the last fifty years. n

جائزة البوكر , جائزة جوائز البوكر, جائزة الأفضل بتاريخ البوكر, جائزة جيمس تيت بليك التذكارية للأدب.
هل تستحق هذه الرواية تلك الجوائز كلها؟. ..أرى أنها تستحق بالتأكيد
إنها رواية من تلك الروايات التي يسعدك الحظ بأن تقرأ مثلها كل بضع سنوات مرة.
لغة هذيانية تتشابك مع بعضها بشكل حلزوني ومحموم, سرد مجنون وعبقري, شخصيات مذهلة وغير معقولة, أحداث متشابكة, روائح متداخلة, قصص مربكة, ذلك كله في مزيج ساحر ومدوّخ من الواقع الحقيقي والواقعية السحرية الباهرة.
سلمان رشدي أستاذ بارع في كتابة الواقعية السحرية, ولكنها ليست تلك الخاصة بأمريكا اللاتينية ولا حتى تلك الأوروبية المميزة لأدب غونتر غراس مثلاً (مع أنها تتقاطع معهما كثيراً) بل واقعية سحرية ذات كيان خاص, تستلهم التراث الإسلامي وأساطير الشرق وخرافات آسيا وسحر ألف ليلة وليلة, بطعم لاذع وحرّيف يميّز شبه القارة الهندية, ذلك المكان العجائبي.
أكثر من ستين سنة تحكي عنها الرواية بطريقة مذهلة وخرافية ومرمّزة, مؤكدةً مرة جديدة (الروائيون العباقرة كلهم يؤكدون ذلك بأعمالهم المدهشة مراراً وتكراراً) أن الرواية هي الفن الذي يستطيع أن يضم ضمنه الفنون جميعها, وأنها الفن الذي يستطيع أن يعبّر حقاً عن الحياة وأن يتجاوز الحياة نفسها.
قراءة هذه الرواية مرهقة, وتحتاج إلى وقت وتمهّل وصبر, لأن صفحاتها التي تناهز السبعمائة تغصّ بالسحر والهذيان وكل صفحة منها تطفح بالدهشة والإبهار, وتحتاج إلى وقت (أطول من المعتاد ربما) لهضم كل شيء.
رواية كبيرة لروائي كبير, يجب أن تقرأ.. وأكثر من مرة.