“Saffron minutes and green seconds tick away on the clocks on the walls!”
—Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (All the elements of the Indian national flag are in it, notice!)

Author Kevin Ansbro invented the word ‘readgasmic’ to describe this novel, and I wish to borrow that word and sum up my conclusion of ‘Midnight’s Children’ thus:
High-in-the-sky readgasmic!
Oh! I love this book with every fibre of my body!
And, speaking metaphorically, I liken this astonishing novel to a labyrinthine spider's nest that glitters with the brightest diamonds.

Why would I like everyone to read Salman's ‘Midnight Children’? To discover its multilegged, diamond-like literary brilliance, the overpowering field of which, I tell you, can twist the very fabric of one’s reality into a haze of wild admiration of his descriptive imagery; to acknowledge the ooze of bigotry around so momentous an event in India as the partition in 1947, and furthermore to taste a sorcery of narration that leaves the reader inebriated from a richness of literary expression.

The book centres on a number of India's midnight’s children who were born around the twelfth hour of the nation's deliverance. My earnest urge is for everyone to discover how Rushdie's parenting of these fictional children has produced prodigies of utter matchlessness, most notably Saleem, the narrator himself.

Many, many thanks to author Kevin Ansbro, for inspiring me to walk unguardedly into this transfixing trap conceived by one of the most admirable authors I have ever come across!

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.

“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.”

Living different ways of grasping the meaning of man and the world should offer a deeper perspective than the usual reductionism that we oftentimes subject cultures that diverge from our own, and “Midnight’s Children” is a book that I lived rather than I read.
In deconstructing the concept of identity, Amin Maalouf tried to separate rootlessness from migration, the sense of belonging from nationalism, individual expression from collective duty, and it’s the Lebanese-born French journalist’s inferences that I hear as I turn the pages of Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece.

In the same way, applying the label of “magic realism” to “Midnight’s Children” is a blatant simplification. Do not misunderstand me, the narration fits the postmodernist tendency of Western metafiction, which includes abrupt changes in the chronological sequences told by an unreliable narrator that uses the language and spirit of a fairy tale. Those are indeed undeniable elements that distinguish this novel from more realistic and traditional approaches. But Rushdie goes beyond the generalization and creates a sui generis style with harmonious dialogue and sumptuous lyricism that entices the mind and warms the heart, blending myth and fiction with grotesque reality, rising the resulting hotchpotch to the level of colossal epic.
Likewise, this is not merely a novel on the turbulent historical events regarding the independence of India and its later partition from Pakistan, it’s the story of a man blessed or cursed with extraordinary gifts that is inexorably handcuffed to the making of a generation, descendant of a picturesque family lineage that paints an unorthodox portrait of the multifaceted culture of a certain era.
Rushdie has a very honest stance toward history. In his own words:

“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.”

The narrator, the Indian Muslim Saleem Sinai, doesn’t claim to possess the absolute truth of the events that shape the world he lives in, he doesn’t even claim to understand them and so he teases but never poses, he plays with his imagination but never lies about his erratic memory which, either real, inaccurate or both, ends up participating as another fictional character in the story.

“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.”

With that warning in mind, the reader is in for an intertextual journey where everything is loaded with allegorical gist.
Numbers and literary references; A Thousand and One children born at midnight on the day that India proclaims its independence?
Symbolical characters; a super-snooted child of destiny that smells the future?
A vivid tapestry of religions, Asian ancestry and folklore; a hit-the-spittoon heirloom as emblem of a vanishing era? A perforated sheet as a token of stolen glimpses and love?
Salman Rushdie’s spicy prose is the result of twenty-six pickle-jars, namely chapters, of specially blended ingredients, of which sarcastic humor is not the least important. Fable, but never superstition, personal history, but never collective grievance, and a certain amount of magic realism create a multisensorial experience that weaves together the vanguardism of the Western literary tradition and the most distilled portrayal of the Indian tradition. Thus, Rushdie’s novel emerges not only as a colorful allegory for the birth of a “new India”, but also as an iconic text that signifies the birth of a “new world” where literature brings cultures closer across borders and allows people to hold on to the optimistic belief that what we have in common will finally overweight what drives us apart. Call me naive, but I think that’s a beautiful dream to have. Indeed.

منذ الصفحات الأولى شعرت أنني موعودة بقراءة نص غير اعتيادي، وقعت تحت سطوة سحره فوراً، أسلوب الكتاب، المحتوى، طريقة السرد كانت مميزة بشكل لافت


نص الرواية خرافي وكأن كاتب الرواية أصيب بالبكم وبداخله الكثير الذي لم يبح به بعد، وعندما منحوه ورقة وقلم، تفجَّر القلم و خطَّ على الورق ما تضخم بداخله ليصنع لنا هذه التحفة الفنية من "الثرثرة اللامتناهية" .. .. نعم ثرثرة ولكنها ليست فارغة


ما هذه الثرثرة؟!! طوال 667 صفحة لم أشعر أبداً أن هناك حشواً زائداً يُثقل كاهل النص، بل كانت ثرثرة من الطراز الرفيع، ثرثرة فخمة، ثرثرة أقل ما يقال عنها أنها خرافية .. .. على رأي إخواننا في مصر إيه الهبل ده


سليم سيناء يحكي ويُحيي ماضية بطريقة سردية تعتمد الكشف عن الأحداث بطريقة متداخلة تكاد تكون عشوائية لنا، ممنهجه ذات أهداف له، تجعل الصورة لا تكتمل إلا في الصفحة الأخيرة وهذا ما زاد النص تشويقاً وإثارة غير عادية


لم أشعر أني مفصولة عن الأحداث، فالحوار موجَّه للقارئ/ة أيضاً بجمل تطلب منَّا أن لا نتسرع وأن هناك شيء سيحدث ولكن علينا أن ننتظر قليلاً لأن الوقت لم يحن بعد، وشخصيات يكشف عنها بشكل جزئي كأنها خيال شبح يؤدي دورة الجزئي فقط في تلك اللحظة قبل أن يحين دوره ( قد ننتظر لنهاية الرواية ليظهر) .. .. هذه الالتفاتات خلقت نوع من الارتباط الحميمي بالرواية، فطريقة الراوي جعلتني جزاءاً رئيسياً منها مثل "بادما" تماماً التي خصَّها "سليم سيناء" بحكايته


أيضاً:-رغم أن الرواية ترتبط بتاريخ دموي (فترة مهمة في تاريخ الهند والباكستان ) بالإضافة لتاريخ "سليم" البائس إلا أن في ذروة البؤس لا يبخل علينا الكاتب بالدعابة، فللكاتب حس دعابة عالي جداً فالابتسامة والضحك من الأعماق لم يفارقني طوال القراءة





ملاحظة مهمة:- الترجمة راااااااااائعة

This was an extremely good book; one which, for some reason, I couldn't quite fall in love with. I was, however, more and more impressed with Rushdie's mastery over his novel as I made my way through it.

Midnight's Children is as much a tale of history and nationhood as it is of a person. I think, in some sense, the book was a sort of authorial attempt to bring into the realm of substantial palpability everything that had happened to the Indian subcontinent since Independence in '47 (or thereabouts). In so doing, Rushdie had to deal with many of the themes that have been the standards of world literature in the passing decades: the richness of pre-modern superstition falling away to the antiseptic light of post-colonial progress, the upheavals of third-world political instability, magical realism, the individual as a link in the hereditary chain.

I don't know for sure, but I'm certainly willing to grant the benefit of the doubt to the notion that Rushdie (along with with Gabriel Garcia Marquez) was among the first to employ these literary devices. And in some ways, he does it best. I was repeatedly impressed by the fact that Midnight's Children didn't just talk about history, patterns, and the past and the future interlinking. No -- its author had done the hard and uncommon work of planning the book so that those patterns would really be there. So that images from the beginning of the book would effectively and reliably return to haunt at the apex and at the climax of the tale. I *often* lose patience (and Marquez is on this list) with books that make great promises (witness: Love In the Time of Cholera) early on, but end up meandering, without focus, robbing the book's conclusion of greater meaning and impact. Rushdie did not make this mistake.

I think that one of the problems I had with Midnight's Children is that I read it out of order. Clearly clearly clearly God of Small Things and Middlesex to pick two at random among many, were heavily influenced by this novel. But I read them first. And in some ways, you have to admit that they improved on the techniques that I suspect Rushdie pioneered.

Rushdie brings history to life in Midnight's Children, and he does it by adding magic. He weaves a personal, wonderful, and improbable life into the history of Indian independence, the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh. It is set in an even more charming, and considerably more personal (and personable) frame-tale narrative. The structure is not born of whimsy. The author is making a strong and cogent point about the nature of knowledge and history and experience. Official records contain one version of history. Rather than just smugly assert that there are others, he provides us a literary illustration. Who knows what could have happened? When Reasons swept its bright and ruinous hand over this part of the world, who can say what got lost? What was looked over? It is as if the thesis of the book (if there were one, other than that Indira Ghandi was a plague to the nation), was that within the cracks and crevices of official knowledge are rich seams of midnight-black possibility, a dark rainbow of being.

My final criticism: the book brought all of this history and insight beautifully to life. I felt the sacrifice was the actual protagonist. In the present, he is a charming reality. The versions of himself that he narrates feel like a frail sort of cipher. He rarely has strong attachments, we are not told much about his feelings, and when we are, they don't seem to be connected to the main thread of the narrative. He changes as needed to move the story forward, but, ultimately, the story is not a personal one. The person at its center has worked too hard to be a symbol, a nation, history.

Is Midnight's Children worth reading? Absolutely. Will it enter my list of most-beloved novels? I'm afraid not.

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British-American novelist and essayist of Indian descent. Midnight's Children is a 1980 novel by Salman Rushdie that deals with India's transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of British India. It is considered an example of postcolonial, postmodern, and magical realist literature. The story is told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual historical events. The style of preserving history with fictional accounts is self-reflexive.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: هشتم ماه سپتامبر سال1988میلادی

عنوان: بچه‌ های نیمه‌ شب؛ نویسنده: سلمان رشدی؛ مترجم: مهدی سحابی؛ تهران، نشر تندر، سال1363؛ در687ص؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان هندی تبار بریتانیا - ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م

بچه‌ های نیمه‌ شب رمانی نوشته ی «سلمان رشدی»، در سال1980میلادی است؛ «سلمان رشدی» در این رمان به دوران گذار از استعمار «انگلیس» به استقلال «هند» می‌پردازند؛ این رمان را می‌توان نمونه‌ ای از ادبیات پسااستعماری، و رئالیسم جادویی دانست؛ رویدادهای این رمان در بستر رخدادهای تاریخی رخ می‌دهند، و از اینرو می‌توان آن را رمانی تاریخی هم قلمداد کرد؛ «بچه‌ های نیمه‌ شب» جایزه ی «بوکر سال1981میلادی» و جایزه ی «جیمز تیت بلک مموریال» را، در همانسال از آن خود کرد؛ در جشن سالگرد بیست و پنجمین، و چهلمین سال برگزاری جایزه «بوکر»، در سال1993میلادی، و در سال2008میلادی، «بچه‌ های نیمه‌ شب» جایزه ی «بوکر بوکرها» و جایزه ی بهترین برگزیدگان «بوکر» در همه ی زمان‌ها را برنده شد؛ همچنین این رمان تنها رمان «هندی» است، که در لیست یکصد رمان برتر انگلیسی زبان «مجله تایم» از زمان انتشار در سال1923میلادی آن تاکنون، قرار گرفته است؛ جناب «مهدی سحابی» «بچه‌ های نیمه‌ شب» را به فارسی برگردانده، و در سال1364هجری خورشیدی برنده ی جایزه ی بهترین رمان خارجی کتاب سال «جمهوری اسلامی ایران» شده است

تاریخ نخستین خوانش 12/04/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 13/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

An important novel. Rushdie's narcissistic narrator, Saleem Sinai, achieves this narcissism from being the first child born on the day India won its independence from Britain. He got a letter from the prime minister making it official, and from this momentous, synchronous birth, the history of Saleem is twinned step-by-step to the history of India. This is what makes it An Important Novel, and I don't much care for Important Novels.

Saleem's point of view is a slippery, deceptive thing throughout the book. He and all the other titular children born between 12:00am and 12:59am that first day of India's nationhood all grow up to have X-Men-like powers. One can change its sex, one can warp between bodies of water. Saleem gets telepathy, and what this enables him to do is act in a classic 19th-century omniscient way in his narration, dipping right into other characters' heads at moments when its convenient for him and his narrative. At other times he likes to refer to himself in the third person. This becomes particularly interesting in the years he spends in the Pakistani army, when an accident causes him to forget his own name and answer only to the nickname "the buddha." For a hundred pages or so we hear Saleem tell the story of "the buddha" and only through certain physical details (Saleem was born with an extremely large nose) do we connect it with our narrator.

Oh, it's all too much. Saleem has telepathy for a while, and then he's able to smell so well he can smell people's fears and secrets. There are surely other superhuman powers I've forgotten by now. Reading Rushdie's big novel made me think a lot of Nabokov's great small one,  Pale Fire. Mostly because I kept wishing I could put Rushdie down and go back to something entertaining and not so overwrought and self-important. But really it's this idea of the narcissism of first-person narrators. All first-person narrators are narcissists on some level—here, listen, I have this story I have to tell you, even if I don't want to, and I'm the best person to tell it, so listen. And I don't have the answers here, not yet. But one thing I can't figure out is why the glorious, ridiculous self-absorption on the part of Nabokov's Kinbote is so glorious and ridiculous and engaging and genuinely funny, and why that of Rushdie's Saleem is so off-putting and grating and onanistic.

I think Rushdie intends for us to roll our eyes comically at his narrator, at least at times, and I'm sure many readers who love this book (which is like everyone alive) did as intended. And I'm sure when Saleem's aunt says he "[a]lways thought [he was] growing up to be God or what. And why? Some stupid letter the P.M.'s fifteenth assistant under-secretary must have sent [him]" (390-91), we're meant to dig in to such a passage as evidence that Saleem isn't the most reliable narrator he likes to pretend he thinks he isn't. But I don't buy it. Something about the politics behind the books shows otherwise.

Kimbote is from Zembla, a silly made-up place, and so he's easy to write off. But Saleem isn't just from India, he is India, and so we have to honor him, and it's exhausting work. It's like going to a family reunion, and that jackass cousin who always beat up on you and called you a faggot is now a disabled war veteran.

That's what reading this book was like.

Back in 2000, lit critic James Wood wrote a huge manifesto on the problem of "the 'big' novel" for the New Republic (disguised as a review of Zadie Smith). He basically attacked quirky novels like Underworld, Infinite Jest & White Teeth. There were a lot of things about it that I agreed with - particularly his point that a lot of cutesy things some writers tend towards are in place of good structure. One major thing I didn't agree with was his inclusion of Rushdie in this lot of wacky writers. He used Ground Beneath Her Feet as his case in point, but Midnight's Children makes a solid argument that a) Rushdie can create intricate, intelligent plots and characters, and any amusing characteristics are more of an aside, and b) everything Rushdie does is deliberate, even anything quirky.

Intricately connected by their time of birth, Midnight's Children follows Saleem Sinai, born at the exact time India gained its independence. It traces Saleem's life and family history - as well as India's - starting with his grandparents on down (much like Middlesex, for example, and, yes, yes, I know, also that Gunter Grass novel, the Tin Drum which was apparently the first novel to trace a character's lineage that way. Unlike Middlesex, Rushdie gets through it a lot more quickly, which I rather appreciated, so for those who couldn't get through Middlesex, don't be turned off).

Because I'm no Indian History scholar, I'm sure the subtler points of the satire were lost on me. Rushdie has no problem spelling things out, as he likely anticipated that, but beyond Saleem/India, there were only a few things I could connect from his statements and clues. It did help that some of the names in politics he used were real, in particular Ms. Indira Ghandi. At the same time, as someone who doesn't know much about it, I was interested in what I was learning. It's amazing how much dissent there was - and still is - both in terms of conflicts with/about neighboring countries (Pakistan, Kashmir), but also within, in terms of politics. I suppose it's no different than any other young independent country, but there's something very outwardly aggressive about their conflicts in comparison to ours, for example, which are a little more covert or passive aggressive. Since this is so intricately linked with India's history, it feels almost unfair to call this fiction. It'd probably be more fair to call it historical fiction, since most of the larger events are true. Although I know that label turns a lot of people off, too.

As one of Rushdie's earlier works, he experiments a lot with words and language. In the introduction, he says he was trying to exemplify "Hinglish" and "Bambiyya," the Bombay street slang, which, as far as my knowledge extends, he pulls off pretty accurately. It goes beyond that, though. He outright laughs in the face of "rules" of writing and grammar, occasionally ignoring punctuation, breaking out of linear structures, telling us what's coming before he gets there. This isn't a disregard for grammar like, say, Cormac McCarthy, or a random fucking with the timeline, like a Quentin Tarantino (I know, he's not literary, but whatever! Oh and this so isn't a Tarantino diss, because I love him). It's only at certain times, and each time he "breaks" a "rule," it serves a distinct purpose that, if not revealed immediately, is explained in due time.

This is something I love about Rushdie. He's a very deliberate writer, and of the works of his that I've read, Midnight's Children seems the most deliberate. There are few things he mentions that don't come into play at some point, and to help us sort out the most important, he doesn't have a problem telling us. Originally, I was going to say that this is a good place to start for people who are daunted by his works, Satanic Verses in particular, then I changed my mind, but now I've changed it back to what I originally thought. Because Rushdie is such a deliberate, careful, organized writer, Midnight's Children probably is a great place to start, because he gives the reader more of a field guide. In some of his later works you're kind of set free on your own, and this is kind of a hand-holder, in a way. Which isn't to say it's any less complex, dense, or interesting, or that he makes the reader feel like an idiot. To put it another way: I did a lot less going back to check who was who or what happened when in compared to how much I did with SV. I still feel like I need to read it again and take notes, but I've never felt any other way after reading a Rushdie novel, which is, again, something I like about him. His novels are the kind that unfurl. Like a good city, you can walk it for ages and discover new things every time.

In comparing it to Satanic Verses - my other fave Rushdie, if you haven't deciphered that at this point - I connected with this in a different way. While reading SV, I connected to specific characters (especially the female Mt. Everest climber, Alleluia Cone). With Midnight's Children, I didn't connect to any specific character, though I certainly did care about and was interested in many of them. Instead, I connected through emotions and mental states. For example, when the troop is lost and going crazy in the Sundarbans, I felt like I was going a little insane, myself. Everything I felt, the way I reacted, I think, was very deliberate on the part of Rushdie. There wasn't any emotion I experienced that wasn't part of what he was trying to evoke. Or so it seemed, at least.

Because of that, I'm relaxing on him a bit for Saleem's extensive self-pitying. I do agree with those on here who have said that it's a bit much. However, I think he's supposed to be a bit juvenile and irritating - he says as much in his introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition (which, by the way, I recommend reading before as well as after the novel). There were times when I was thinking, "Okay, get on with it, stop doing this whole 'No, I can't talk about it, it's too tragic,' shtick," because it did get redundant. But, then again, the character is incredibly redundant in many matters, and I don't think it's a shortcoming where writing is concerned so much as Rushdie succeeding - maybe even too much - at building Saleem's character. (He even refers to Saleem as though he's a real person in his intro, so that says something about his mindset when he was writing this.)

I don't know if I'd classify this as my favorite Rushdie work over Satanic Verses, only because personally, I'm generally more of a wanderer. Now that I think about it, the two novels take on almost exactly opposite themes. SV is about feeling like an outsider, MC is about being deeply connected to your place of birth. Of those two, I'm definitely more in the former than the latter, which is probably why I identify with SV a little more strongly. That said, with repeat readings and more time to gel, who knows. It's pretty neck and neck.

‘Midnight’s Children’ is one of the seminal novels of ‘magical realism’; a loosely built literary genre which isn’t so about magical events occurring in realistic, historical setting, but is more a completely new form of narrative technique, freed from the shackles of realistic, linear Western literary narrative, magical realism gives free reign to the artist’s imagination, in which the author’s pen is able to soar serendipitously over the repressive restrains of realism; magical realism opened our eyes to new narrative techniques, plots which would start at the end and end at the beginning, plots which are often left unexplained and characters whose actions are often inexplicable. In many ways, magical realism is influenced by the most archaic of literary techniques: oral literature. One can sense the sonorous voice of Homer or the Mahabharata beneath the modern veneer of novels such as ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ or ‘Midnight’s Children’; novels which are much influenced by myths and great epics than they are by modern literature, stories which juxtapose ancient oral histories with the novel form.

‘Midnight’s Children’ is the story of Saleem Sinai, who was born in the first hour of India’s independence and subsequently, along with all other individuals born in this hour, developed magical powers, which in Saleem’s case is telepathy. He uses his power to organise a conference with these children, a conference which eventually disintegrates into bickering and back-biting, as each character is caught up in the factitious prejudices which dominated Indian society. From the bellicose Shiva, to the beautiful Sundari and the incandescent Parvati, I am sure there is an allegorical meaning behind all of these characters powers, but political allegories don’t really interest me, instead I felt myself swept away by the broad stream of Rushdie’s imagination, whose endless array of characters spring forth from his mind onto the page, telepaths and demi-gods, time-travellers and conjurers, Rushdie is able to give free reign to his imagination.
Certain colours abound throughout the novel; the light blue of Aadam and Saleem Sinai’s eyes, resembling the mellifluous blue sky of Kashmir in which Aadam was born and Saleem longs to go, the white, orange and green of the Indian flag imprints itself on the characters and novel; a kind of irascible orange hue often hovers over the characters when they are in trouble or a more benevolent white, like the magic of Parvati, bathes over the characters during times of happiness.
Rushdie seeks to explore the so called liberation of India from the oppression of empire and how deeply entwined India was, and in many ways always will be, to the English culture which for so long oppressed it, but also influenced and was influenced by it. This is mirrored in Rushdie’s literary style; the novel abounds with neologisms and strange sentence structures, Rushdie twists and shapes the English language, transforms it, just as post-colonial India was in many ways a bastardised version of colonial India, except the oppression came internally rather than externally and even that oppression was a bastardisation of the deep-seated prejudices which the British left behind. For Rushdie, the very nature of India was false from the start; the idea of a nation state, the idea that a multitude of languages, culture and religions could somehow be combined into a single country or that democracy could exist in a country of illiterates; India was the parting gift of colonialism which only served to perpetuate and tighten colonial attitudes until India was left imprisoned beneath a more insidious form of oppression in the form of the populism, autocracy and intolerance which has mired India since its birth.

“Indian, the new myth-a collective fiction, in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and god”

Yet, beyond all of this, ‘Midnight’s Children’ is a brilliantly written and told story, with an astonishing array of characters, a truly original exploration of pre and post-colonial India, a story which, like all greater literature, can only be enjoyed in one way: ecstatically, and so the veins of the reader pulsate beneath Rushdie’s brilliant and original tale of Saleem Sinai and the children of midnight.

رئالیسم جادویی؟؟؟ جانمی جان...
شاید برای من که با خواندن کتاب‌های «صدسال تنهایی» عاشق قلم جادوییِ مارکز، «کافکا در ساحل» عاشق قلم مرموز و جذاب موراکامی، «مرشد و مارگریتا» عاشق قلم شیرین و ساده‌ی بولگاکف، «خانه ارواح» عاشق سادگی قلم آلنده و «آئورا» عاشق قلم پیچیده و کمی سنگین فوئنتس شدم، باعث شد شدیدا عاشق این سبک جادویی شوم که با فرهنگ‌ها و زندگی بسیاری از مردم دنیا نه تنها جدا نبود بلکه وصله‌ی محکم و عمیقی خورده... صدالبته در این میان، از نویسنده‌هایی هم که تلاش کردند گامی در مرز دنیای خیال و واقعیت بگذارند نیز خواندم که باعث گاردی در من شده بود که به سادگی به سوی هر نویسنده‌ای نروم، تا این‌که نام «سلمان رشدی» بار دگر پس از سال‌ها سال در رسانه‌ها به میان آمد و به پیشنهاد دوستی کتاب‌خوار، این کتاب را شروع به خواندن کردم.

صندلی داغ
سلمان رشدی چطور نویسنده‌ای بود؟
در پاسخ به این سوال از حرفی وام می‌گیرم که در خصوص «یوسا» به کار بردم: او نویسنده‌ای‌ست که از ابتدا تا انتهای داستانش، در هر سطر می‌دانست که چه دارد می‌نویسد و در کل کتاب با این حجمش به داستانش مسلط بود. وقتی از یوسا نام بردم به هیچ‌وجه نیت به مقایسه نداشتم و صرفا اشاره‌ام به خاطر تسلط خاص نویسنده به تاریخ و رخدادهای هند و پاکستان قبل و بعد از استقلال و تولد این دو کشور بوده است.

قلم سلمان رشدی چگونه است؟
ساده، شیرین و بی‌آلایش.

سلمان رشدی صاحب سبک است؟
به هیچ‌وجه... من او را تحت هیچ شرایطی صاحب سبک نمی‌دانم، از خواندن هر سطر از کتابش لذت بردم اما به شدت قلمش را تحت تاثیر اساطیر این سبک از جمله مارکز شناختم. البته بی‌انصافی‌ست که از تفاوت‌ها هم نگویم، اگر او را در دست چپ و مارکز را در دست راستم بگیرم، وزن جادوی قلم مارکز، همچون نشستن فیلی روی الاکلنگ رشدی را همچون موش به هوا پرتاب می‌کند و اگر قیاس را واقعیت‌ها بدانم بازی کاملا برعکس می‌شود، و این به طور حتم بر می‌گردد به موقعیت جغرافیایی و فرهنگ‌های متفاوتی که این دو نویسنده در آن‌جا زیستند.

گفتار اندر داستان کتاب
داستان ساده و سر راست است و اصلا نیت به ورود ماجرا ندارم و بجای نوشتن زیاد، توصیه می‌کنم خودتان کتاب را بخوانید و از آن لذت ببرید، اما فقط به این اشاره می‌کنم که داستان را از زبان «سلیم سینایی» می‌خوانیم... فرزند نیمه‌شب، فرزند هند، فرزندی که همانند تمام بچه‌هایی که در شب استقلال هند به دنیا آمدند دارای خصوصیت‌های مرموزی می‌گردد تا اینکه...

نقل‌قول نامه
"همان‌طور که در آشپزی مواد از هم مزه‌ می‌گیرند، انسان‌ها هم به نحوه در وجود هم رخنه می‌کنند و بر یکدیگر اثر می‌گذارند."

"در هر جنگی، میدان نبرد بیش از سپاهِ طرفین جنگ خسارت می‌بیند."

"اگر همه‌چیز از پیش مقدر شده باشد، آنگاه زندگی ما انسان‌ها تصادفی نیست و در آن‌صورت باید دست از هرکاری بکشیم، چون فکر و عمل بی‌معنی می‌شود، چون در هر صورت همه‌چیز از پیش تعیین شده و بود و نبود ما هیچ فرقی ندارد."

"هیچ سلطه‌ای پایدار نیست."

"هر بازی‌ای یک نتیجه‌ی اخلاقی دارد، و مار و پله بهتر از هر بازی دیگری به ما می‌گوید بالای هر نردبان یک مار منتظر آدم است و البته با هر ماری یک نردبان نیز هست که آدم خود را با آن نجات دهد."

"سکوت برای خود پژواکی دارد که از پژواک هر صدای دیگری طولانی‌تر و عمیق‌تر است."

"وقتی عمیقا به شخصی فکر کنید، ممکن است حضور شما را در نزدیکی خود حس کند."

"فرار از گذشته‌ امکان ندارد. آدم برای همیشه همانی می‌ماند که در گذشته بوده..."

"فقط در فیلم‌های بمبئی، عشق بر همه چیز پیروز می‌شود اما در دنیای واقعی تنها با یک جشن ساده‌ی عروسی نمی‌شود بر شکاف‌ها و دردها پیروز شد و در این میان خوش‌بین بودن نیز مانند سرطان است."

...
کارنامه
بدون هرگونه لطف، محبت و ارفاقی پنج ستاره برای این کتاب منظور و ضمن قرار دادن کتاب در لیست کتاب‌های مورد علاقه‌ام، خواندنش را اولا به دوستانی که همانند من عاشق سبک رئالیسم جادویی هستند و سپس سایر دوستان کتاب‌خوانم پیشنهاد می‌کنم.

دانلود نامه
با ذکر این نکته که این کتاب در سال ۱۳۶۳ توسط «مهدی سحابی» در ایران ترجمه گردیده، من فایل پی‌دی‌اف نسخه ترجمه توسط ایشان و فایل زبان اصلی کتاب را در کانال تلگرام برایتان آپلود نموده‌ام و در ادامه لینکش را قرار می‌دهم. فقط توجه داشته باشید که من فایل پی‌دی‌اف کتاب را مطالعه نکرده‌ام و از وضعیت کامل بودن محتوا و یا هرگونه سانسور بی‌اطلاع هستم اما با توجه به تاریخ ترجمه که بر می‌گردد به پنج سال پیش از تولد من، می‌تواند منبعی جهت تطبیق آن با متن انگلیسی برای شما عزیزان باشد.

لینک دانلود فایل پی‌دی‌اف که با ترجمه‌ی مهدی سحابی
https://t.me/reviewsbysoheil/453

لینک دانلود فایل ای‌پاب به زبان انگلیسی
https://t.me/reviewsbysoheil/454

بیست و نهم آبان‌ماه یک‌هزار و چهارصد و یک

می‌خواهید اثری بخونید که با تمام شدنش حیرت‌زده بارها تکرار کنید مگه خلق همچین اثری مهیبی ممکنه؟! این همه شخصیت، این همه داستان تو در تو در قالب یک رمان، این همه پیچیدگی و ظرافت، این همه کشش و ... . می‌خواهید به معنای واقعی درک کنید چطور رئالیسم جادویی، آدم رو جادو می‌کنه؟! می‌خواهید کاری بخونید که طنین صدا و افکار سلیم سینایی و هزار و یک کودک نیمه شب تا مدت‌ها در گوش و ذهنتون بپیچه و شما در رویای پایان ناپذیر خودش غرق کنه؟! معطل نکنید، برید سراغ بچه‌های نیمه شب! ببینید چطور رشدی قدرت و تاثیرگذاری ادبیات رو به گونه‌ای باور نکردنی در این اثر بی‌نظیرش به خوانندگانش هدیه می‌کنه و لرزه بر تن و روحشون فرود میاره. هنوز حیرانم از خوندن این اثر باورنکردنی. 5 امتیاز برای این اثر حق مطلب رو ادا نمی‌کنه.

Μαγεία! Μ-Α-Γ-Ε-Ι-Α !!!

Είναι από τις περιπτώσεις που τα πολλά λόγια είναι περιττά.
Είχα πάρα πολύ καιρό να απολαύσω έτσι ένα βιβλίο. Πραγματικά δεν έβλεπα την ώρα να τελειώνω με τις υποχρεώσεις μου για να το πιάσω στα χέρια μου.
Ένα έργο που τα είχε όλα, ότι μπορεί να ζητήσει ένας αναγνώστης από μια λογοτεχνική δημιουργία.
Σίγουρα το καλύτερο βιβλίο για φέτος μέχρι στιγμής, και - χωρίς υπερβολή - ένα από τα καλύτερα που έχω διαβάσει ποτέ.