Midnight's Children
I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.
Why read it
Saleem Sinai is born at the exact moment India becomes independent, and his life turns out to be handcuffed to his nation's fate. He is also, it emerges, one of a thousand children born that midnight hour, each gifted with an impossible power.
Rushdie's exuberant epic tells the story of modern India through one man whose personal history mirrors the country's, in the mode of magical realism. It is a novel about how nations and individuals invent themselves through story, and about the messy, teeming, unreliable act of remembering.
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and later was twice voted the Booker of Bookers, the best winner in the prize's history. It launched Rushdie to international fame and is widely credited with reshaping English-language fiction from the Indian subcontinent.
- 01
History as personal destiny
You experience the birth of a nation as one man's biography, blurring the line between private and political memory.
- 02
Magical realism as method
The midnight children's powers turn the impossible into a lens for real historical trauma and hope.
- 03
The unreliable chronicler
Saleem admits his errors and exaggerations, so what awaits is a meditation on how all history is shaped storytelling.
- 04
The chutnification of the past
Memory is preserved and distorted like pickled fruit, a governing metaphor for how we can and cannot keep the past.
The swapping of two newborns at the stroke of midnight, which gives Saleem a life and lineage that were never biologically his.
The Widow's Emergency and the forced sterilization of the midnight's children, draining away the magical generation's powers.
