Front cover of a 1981 first edition of Midnight's Children.
Midnight's Children (ISBN 022401823X) is a multiple-award winning, best-selling novel by the Indian-British-American author Salman Rushdie that combines elements of fantasy, historical fiction, social, political and religious commentary. It was first published in 1981.
The novel's protagonist and narrator is Saleem Sinai, the widowed manager of a pickle factory in Bombay[1] whose large nose and blue eyes give him a distinctive appearance and who believes he does not have long to live. In a metafictional style, the novel is presented as a memoir that Sallem is writing for his young son. The memoir is read and commented on by Padma, a woman who works at the factory and is romantically interested in Saleem, while Saleem is writing it. Padma criticizes Saleem for taking to long to get to the point and not moving the plot along quickly enough (such as taking too long to get to the part in his life story when he is born), not following strict chronological order and writing about some members of his family in a manner that she considers disrespectful. Padma expresses disbelief at some parts of the story, although she readily accepts some of its more magical and superstitious elements. Having been born at the stroke of midnight, Saleem Sinai is officially the first person to have been born in Bombay on August 15, 1947, the day that India gained independence from Britain. He grows up in a wealthy Muslim family that has its roots in Kashmir. As a boy, Saleem discovers that he has telepathic abilities. At first, he hears many voices all talking at once, some of them speaking in languages that he does not understand. He soon learns to concentrate on certain people and ignore others and to understand the thoughts of people whose languages he cannot speak. He is able to read people's surface level thoughts with ease. Discovering someone's innermost secrets, however, requires much more effort and does not go unnoticed by the person whose mind he is attempting to read. Through his telepathic abilities, Saleem finds out that all the children born in India between midnight and one o'clock in the morning on August 15, 1947 are remarkable in some way. Those who were born closest to midnight have the strongest powers, two remarkable ones being the boy Shiva and the girl known as Parvati-the-witch. Through his telepathic abilities, Saleem is able to get all of those children born during the first hour of India's independence to communicate with each other in nighttime meetings that he calls the Midnight Children's Conference or M.C.C. The novel follows Saleem as he grows up in the newly independent India, loses his telepathic abilities but acquires an extraordinary sense of smell, moves to Pakistan with his family, puts his sense of smell to use for the Pakistani army, returns to India to live in poverty and becomes a political prisoner when the existence of the Midnight Children's Conference is discovered and is seen as a threat to the government.
Midnight's Children was adapted as a 2012 Canadian-American-British-Indian film of the same name. It has also been adapted for the radio and the stage.
Awards[]
- Booker Prize for Fiction, 1981
- English Speaking Union Literary Award, 1981
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1981
- The Best of the Booker prize (25th anniversary), 1993
- The Best of the Booker prize (40th anniversary), 2008
See also[]
Footnotes[]
- ↑ The city of Bombay officially changed its name to Mumbai in 1995.