Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

At the beginning, I thought I might just be getting into an Indian version of Tristram Shandy. But Saleem Sinai, the first-person narrator, was eventually born. And he was born at the stroke of midnight on the day of India’s independence, so that he and his country would be precisely the same age. The novel, in mystic departures from Western reality, recounts the unrest and political turmoil of India in the mid-20th century. Rushdie conjures an entire world of clashing and sloshing traditions, the swirling influences of Muslims and Hindus colonized by the British.

Saleem relates the events of his life in the enigmatic rhythm of an Indian spun tale, making completely understandable events into vague prophecies, telling fortunes both backwards and forwards: “There was a washing-chest and a boy who sniffed too hard. His mother undressed and revealed a Black Mango. Voices came, which were not the voices of Archangels. A hand, deafening the left ear. . . . And love in Bombay caused a bicycle accident; horn-temples entered forecep-hollows, and five hundred and eighty-one children entered my head. . . . There was the question of purpose, and the debated between ideas and things. There were knees and nose and nose and knees” (348). The convention lends legitimacy to the actual prophetic utterings of a turbaned lower-caste seer, making his presaging remarks seem quite plausible after the explanations.

Saleem, typing up his life story as the novel progresses, stops to try and comprehend all that has happened to him. “[N]ow, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. 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 me. 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” (440-41).

I was daunted by the length but I became transfixed by the rich sensory universe of the novel. Alteratively ridiculous and tragic, Rushdie's novel in its wide-ranging scope encompasses India and what it was as it began its movement toward the rising global presence that it is today.