My Take - Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie is simply an amazing phenomenon. However it would be an injustice to use the word ‘simply’ while describing this book. It is one of the most complex and enjoyable book that I have ever read. Midnight’s Children encompasses the history, politics as well as social mores of the Indian subcontinent through 1915 to 1977. In doing so it employs all kinds of genres starting from fable, magic realism, mock epic, poetry, farce, history, autobiography, and many more.

The novel shuns all the conventions of a traditional novel and employs unconventional techniques such as time shifting narrative, highly unreliable narrator in order to drive home the fact that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and history is a mere narrative which may very well have alternative versions. The novel is highly symbolic and unpredictable. You can never guess what will be thrown at your face in the very next line thereby echoing life in its unpredictability.  What I liked best about the novel is the flippant manner in which Rushdie treats the ineffable and extremely serious matters. He portrays the stupidity of humanity without being preachy or snobbish. He makes fun of the human follies yet underlines them for the readers to take note.

The novel dismisses the authority of the metanarratives and embraces wholeheartedly the multitudinous and fragmented reality (if there is any). The tropes such as pickling of history, Bollywood talkies-techniques are effectively employed by Rushdie to ‘spice up’ the narrative. The novel is fast paced and will surely keep one hooked but it demands absolute attention of the reader in order to make sense of the khichdi cooked by Rushdie or should I say the pickle prepared by him? The novel renders itself to thousand and one (or perhaps infinite) interpretations thereby endorsing its multifarious view of reality. It is truly a one-of-a-kind novel because of its pioneering employment of the genre-truth-reality bending narrative. Midnight’s Children is a magnum opus from which one must not deprive oneself for long. Read it and let it weave its magic upon you.

My rating – 5 ⭐

I will end my review with two of my favourite lines from Midnight’s Children:

“… Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

“We must live, I’m afraid, with the shadows of imperfections.”



 

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