Published 1981 / Length 463 pages
‘To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.’
Born at the very instant when India achieves its independence from British colonial rule, Saleem Sinai is a cipher for a country, a ‘mirror-of-the-nation’. This central metaphor permeates Rushdie’s magic-realist tour de force. Sinai’s family, too, is an extension of his nation; both are bound together into ‘imagined communities’ by shared memories. Making masterful leaps through time and space, the novel is dizzying in scope. Rushdie splits narratives into fragments and forces them to fuse again in endlessly surprising ways. Pace is not necessarily his strong point, but the tension is sustained throughout with the device of count-downs to momentous events. The luxuriant exuberance and lusty ambition of Rushdie’s unashamed love affair with words also keeps you hooked. He is fearless about diversions, parentheses, and what look at first like irrelevances. A refreshing concession to the reader’s sense of exhaustion as we plough through this imposingly dense doorstopper comes in the shape of Padma, an impatient listener constantly demanding clarification and driving the narrative along with her ‘what-happened-nextism’.
‘The Tin Drum, 100 Years of Solitude and 1,001 Nights all rolled together, this allegorical, encyclopaedic journey of a book left me wondering if I was reading a story of personal events and private beliefs or the public history of post-colonial India.’ – SYLVIA, 57
• The narrator talks the reader through the writing process as if we are by his side. What do we gain from being party to his reflections on what he is writing?
• Do you think Rushdie believes we should try to ‘think our way out of our past’? How do the characters cope with the past’s presence in every corner of their lives?
• What might Rushdie be trying to tell us by underlining the physical limitations of Saleem’s body? And why the recurring metaphor of physical fragmentation?
• The formal partition of India occurred on 15 August 1947. Hundreds of thousands of people died as massive population exchanges took place across the new border between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.
• In 1989, Rushdie was forced to go into hiding when he was made the subject of a fatwa, exhorting his killing for blasphemy, by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, in response to Rushdie’s depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses. The fatwa controversy was renewed in June 2007 when Rushdie was knighted.
• Midnight’s Children won the 1981 Booker Prize, and went on to be named the ‘Booker of Bookers’, the best book to have won the prize in its twenty-five-year history, in 1993.
• Heart of Darkness by JOSEPH CONRAD (see here) – a classic study of the way colonial rule corrupted both colonizer and colonized.
• The Inheritance of Loss by KIRAN DESAI (see here) – when Desai won the Booker for this 2006 novel, the judges noted Rushdie’s influence. How does Desai’s perspective on the colonial legacy compare to Rushdie’s?