Midnight\'s Children

Do not, I repeat DO NOT read if you are young or a beginner. I'm just 15 and was getting cocky at my collection(which includes the godfather,a few by crichton,all of dan brown and chetan bhagat,and a few classics from here and there,not to mention a couple of agatha christies).
So I thought,hey!let's enter the big time and read the white tiger.It was easy enough.So why not step up the difficulty,and hey presto, there I was sitting excitedly with Midbight's dear Children for company.And weren't they tiresome!
I stopped it after a while and read two or three others in between,and when the schools closed,I thought I'd give it another try and somehow finished it.
An excellent book,certainly improved my language,but nonetheless,what can you say to a person who refuses to use commas?(forgive my ignorance,as I am not aware if it is an approved technique,as it is the first time I've come across such a style of writing,and was quite confused in the beginning)
Again,DO NOT RECOMMEND to any beginner or teen reader.This is a book for the experienced reader,and when I finished the book I swore to myself that I would read it again when I've reached a stage where I've read many great books.
By the way, this book seems to rip itself of pages at certain points(just like the protagonist,who is to become 600 million pieces of voiceless dust)but then again,it could be because I am a lousy handler of books.

1993 Man Booker prize winner, and Best of the Booker really deserved that. Perfectly crafted beads converted into a great story. And the way Salman tells the story is really marvelous. The story has its own turns, ups and downs but everything creates more interest than earlier. As soon as you start feeling comfortable with the story and start guessing the next, story turns and take you to whole new world of Saleem Sinai's (main character of the book) life.

With approximately 100 books in my shelf, I can say one of the best so far. Real thumbs up, a must read.

PS: For new readers, size of the book can be intimidating and tough to go through 400 pages but its worth the pain. This read will convert you in serious reader for sure.

When reading the book for the first time, I had to resort to a word dictionary at my side, despite the intricate language the conveyed story as the shared history of India through the protagonist Salim Sinai was the best fiction reading I had at the time. If he doesnt eventually get a Nobel prize for this book, who else will get it?

Well, if Saleem Sinai were a living contemporary of mine, I would have been as ashamed of having to live along with him as would have been with living in that sort of a land itself. But the very cruelty of this thought comes pinching you in the ass when you realize that what Saleem Sinai was cursed into becoming was not the result of Salman Rushdie’s pessimistic view of an India or his convulsive magically realistic blasphemy of its dogmas, but because of the very truth that, this originally is contemporary India and you cannot discard the epiphany. Salman Rushdie is the mesmerizing author and Saleem Sinai is the ill-fated protagonist of this book called ‘Midnight’s Children’, so painfully and ironically named after India’s poetically vivid Independence at Midnight.
The Author has cast on paper a seemingly diabolical view of a damp India as has he seen on his sightings when he toured through India. India through the interesting times of nation building to India as when he finished the book. When Indira Gandhi had the reins to the chariot of post-independence India and was being hailed by her party with slogans as “Indira is India and India is Indira”. Well, anyone who hears of Indira would not dare forget the Emergency period that even a two year old infant can relate her to. The same Indira who though imponderably but obsequiously had been under the clutches of her own son who girdled her across the whole of India like an incarcerating whip to summon under her file the very subjugates of democracy. The very Indira who had the largest army of sycophants at that time than the flattering count of pious Gandhians in post independence India. Though it cannot be proved to be a substantive statement, but the effect of her quiver of slaves as seen in the pages of history will never leave us dubious. Well, that's only one among the destinations through the timeline of life that Saleem Sinai fatefully gets entrapped in.
To remark on the entire travelogue of the protagonist will be against my rectitude, as I would be spiritually spoiling the fecund thirst of the future readers of this masterpiece. Yes, I still stay to the fact that it is an exhilarating and spiritually quizzical episode. Now, to cut it short, and to describe with limitations would only rarify the intrigue of the prospective and aspiring readers. The language is marvelous, the plot crafty, the dais more spectacular and the execution even more flamboyant which leaves a cinch on the reader as strong as the bigotry of the racist. Saleem Sinai born at the stroke of midnight, when the whole world slept, when India woke to life and freedom, will take you into a surge of ominous circumstances and consequences that changes the destinies of India and his, forever. You get to read through the life of the fatalistic twins of the midnight, Saleem Sinai and India and their life from infancy to the shambles of Emergency period. I like to believe that, had Salman Rushdie waited 20 years more to consolidate his views of my mother country, I would have been dragged away from my incest for this life, this Indian life, and would have vomited the very Indian soul out of my brooding body. He came close to that with this venture. Eagerly waiting for the on screen version of the book directed by Deepa Mehta.
Bifurcations of opinions are inevitable when it is a human mind reading the thoughts of another human mind. The writer, I would say, have not touched upon the very aspect of goodness and faith of India and its people, but has taken the route to sarcasm of its antagonistic forces, but he has hit the right chords and it does not turn bleak at any point of time throughout the read. Read if you want an exciting, blasphemous and provocative read and rather not because you want to mourn the failure of a lethal civilization.

I read the book and as I titled it, it's an excellent lesson in perpetual story-telling. How this man interconnects seemingly insurmountable dots through the prism of a protagonist, who is a shrewd tactician of life at best and a benign, laid-back, if somewhat confused character at worst, is a lesson in writing a story. Salman Rushdie has perfectly captured the essence of pre-independent and independent India through the refraction of the protagonist Salim Sinai. Must say, not a book for the beginners or the fickle-minded, and you need a zeal for something new in order to continue flipping through it's pages, because at the beginning, you'll not probably be interested too much in the story, for I atleast found the first three chapters rather bland, but as I went through to the next chapters, I became slowly engrossed into it, and found out those so-called "bland" chapters also have their importance in the larger scheme of things. All in all a first class book.