Midnight's Children

What books should everyone read before they die?Add Book

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie

Literature

Aug 12, 2018

Imagine a literary love child of Charles Dickens and The Arabian Nights, and you’ll have some idea of the human interest and narrative ingenuity of Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece, one of the most admired, acclaimed, and enjoyed novels of the second half of the twentieth century. Like Dickens, Rushdie draws indelible characters and sets them in a swirling social context; he similarly shares a gift for exaggeration that gets closer to the truth about people than observational exactitude, illuminating his caricatures with a sense of justice and a sense of humor, often entwined. Like The Arabian Nights, Midnight’s Children leavens the world it depicts with magical capabilities and coincidences, thereby evoking the intense devotion our emotional lives demand of us, no matter our circumstances. Rushdie’s unshakable belief in the regenerative power of telling stories, a faith given form in the unrelenting narrative energy of Midnight’s Children, is a legacy of both forebears. The force of Rushdie’s prose is so propulsive, the currents of story-within-story so transporting, that each page is a further winding of the crank on an enormous jack-in-the-box that explodes again and again with the wonders of living that history can never contain.

Add Reply