How to describe this book before passing judgment on it? The more neutral terms baroque, grotesque, extravagant, frenetic, and sprawling come to mind. So do the less neutral terms, unfocused, clamorous, unrestrained, repellent and disappointing. I don't know whether melodramtic is neutral or not, but it applies.The story no doubt had it's virtues - it never felt laboriously drawn out, or tedious (with the exception of that whole metaphorical/literal-passive/active nonsense); the action seem to proceed for the most part flowingly, haltlessly, in a fecundity of invention. And yet the very inventiveness of the book was in a large way fouled by what I consider the biggest drawback of the story: the grating, self-aggrandizing, and charmless voice of the narrator, Saleem. Not only was his constant analysis of his own narrative themes patronizing to the more advanced reader as well as indicating the mass appeal and intended audience of the book, but it served only to demystify the book - to flatten it out. As if this retrospective meta-story were not deflating enough, it is coupled with an equally repetitive and eventually eye-roll inducing foreshadowing technique. In the end, Saleem comes across as a failed man, a neurotic desperate to tell his story, but whose grating tone (imagine the emphatic and overly expressive tones of a mother telling her children a story; or a magician: now you see it....(gasp!!) now you don't!) refuses to let the story unfold with any kind of unity. His heavy hand turns the first page of each chapter, and is waiting at the end of each to interpret the very symbolism with which he (with that same heavy hand) told his story in the first place. And there would be more...that hand would become like a fist...and smash us square in the face more than once...but that story will have to wait (oh there is so much to tell and so little time! Nose! And Knees! Knees! And Nose! THE WIDOW FOR CHRISSAKES!).
Midnight's children is not so much about characters as it is about the elemental, earthen forces that permeate and ultimately erode the boundaries that our common sense metaphysic tries to maintain. It inelegantly grapples with the notions of personal identity through time, of history, nationalism and postcolonialism, family, intersubjectivity, and perhaps as much as anything else, with connectedness - the way things surpass, or fail to surpass, their boundaries. (Indeed, all the above themes involve questionable boundaries; but then again, all concepts just are boundaries.) People leek into each other. People move from dreams to reality (D'Costa) and from reality to dreams (Nadir). The boundaries blur, between fact and fiction. And of course, this is Saleems's own gift - creating a connection between things that are supposed to be most private and cloistered - the inner monologues of others. At stake is none other than our ability to make (limited) sense of our (limited) experiences. Literarily, this takes not only the form of discovering past facts, but of finding symbolic significance, and of seeing the fatedness of history. This very activity is as central to the book as what actually happened in the past, and this accounts for, on the one hand, the heavy handed presence of grieving old Saleem, and on the other, of the almost complete absence in the of truly moving, memorable interactions and events. For a novel, this story has virtually no dialogue - which is the narrator directly quoting the speech of characters. Instead, there is indirect discourse, the narrator paraphrasing, or more commonly, simply a quick description of what-things-were-like-at-that-time. The narrator is ambitious in the amount of time he wants to cover (three generations), so the reader often finds themselves in a period of time (when Nadir was living in the basement) months reduced to paragraphs, a narrative set in the imperfect tense, which lacks the small details and nuance that lend a story its verisimilitude along with its ability to connect with us and move us.
But verisimilitude is obviously not the rubric under which Rushdie operates. So far away from the texture of brute facticity, the story itself is dangerously supposed to be subsumed under the allegory of the post-colonial growing pains of India. Rushdie is compelled to unfold the action in a way that mirrors the history of his India, and given his rather unflattering perspective on that history, the story ends up being a melodramatic bemoaning, from which we quickly revoke our suspension of disbelief and our sympathies and empathies. Name a character that isn't hopelessly selfish. Name an event that doesn't end in disaster.
So what is the final effect of the book, beyond our personal preferences being satisfied/dissatisfied? I think contained in the book is a stoic vision about being an individual. Individuality - the simple concept of a boundary that separates an inner - "me" - from an outer "not-me" -- is not something that exists as such - it is a regulative an ideal (and perhaps a corrupt one), one that, on the personal level, is taking place in a person's self-defining choices, one that, on the geo-political level, is guiding the causes of war. Individualization - on what ever level - is a painful, never finished process. We try, often violently, to maintain the boundaries that we believe to be most real. Saleem's own attempt to make sense of himself, to give his life the unity of Purpose, ends in renunciation. For his final prophecy is more a fantasy than prediction - more under the sway of Thanatos then Apollo. Wouldn't it be nice, befitting of an ending, to yield to all the familiar old forces of dis-integration? As he points out, at the end, isn't the original lie, told to us in the cradle, Anything you want to be you can be? There are two ways to read the negation of this statement, viz., You cannot be anything you want. The first is that there are things that you want to be that you cannot be. The second, is that, of all the things you want to be, you cannot be any of them. And this is because "you" really cannot be any single "thing" at all.
Would I reread it? No. Would I recommend it? No. My excerpt on the cover: "Midnight's Children fails to engage readers either stylistically or emotionally. I will take away very little from this experience"
Midnight's children is not so much about characters as it is about the elemental, earthen forces that permeate and ultimately erode the boundaries that our common sense metaphysic tries to maintain. It inelegantly grapples with the notions of personal identity through time, of history, nationalism and postcolonialism, family, intersubjectivity, and perhaps as much as anything else, with connectedness - the way things surpass, or fail to surpass, their boundaries. (Indeed, all the above themes involve questionable boundaries; but then again, all concepts just are boundaries.) People leek into each other. People move from dreams to reality (D'Costa) and from reality to dreams (Nadir). The boundaries blur, between fact and fiction. And of course, this is Saleems's own gift - creating a connection between things that are supposed to be most private and cloistered - the inner monologues of others. At stake is none other than our ability to make (limited) sense of our (limited) experiences. Literarily, this takes not only the form of discovering past facts, but of finding symbolic significance, and of seeing the fatedness of history. This very activity is as central to the book as what actually happened in the past, and this accounts for, on the one hand, the heavy handed presence of grieving old Saleem, and on the other, of the almost complete absence in the of truly moving, memorable interactions and events. For a novel, this story has virtually no dialogue - which is the narrator directly quoting the speech of characters. Instead, there is indirect discourse, the narrator paraphrasing, or more commonly, simply a quick description of what-things-were-like-at-that-time. The narrator is ambitious in the amount of time he wants to cover (three generations), so the reader often finds themselves in a period of time (when Nadir was living in the basement) months reduced to paragraphs, a narrative set in the imperfect tense, which lacks the small details and nuance that lend a story its verisimilitude along with its ability to connect with us and move us.
But verisimilitude is obviously not the rubric under which Rushdie operates. So far away from the texture of brute facticity, the story itself is dangerously supposed to be subsumed under the allegory of the post-colonial growing pains of India. Rushdie is compelled to unfold the action in a way that mirrors the history of his India, and given his rather unflattering perspective on that history, the story ends up being a melodramatic bemoaning, from which we quickly revoke our suspension of disbelief and our sympathies and empathies. Name a character that isn't hopelessly selfish. Name an event that doesn't end in disaster.
So what is the final effect of the book, beyond our personal preferences being satisfied/dissatisfied? I think contained in the book is a stoic vision about being an individual. Individuality - the simple concept of a boundary that separates an inner - "me" - from an outer "not-me" -- is not something that exists as such - it is a regulative an ideal (and perhaps a corrupt one), one that, on the personal level, is taking place in a person's self-defining choices, one that, on the geo-political level, is guiding the causes of war. Individualization - on what ever level - is a painful, never finished process. We try, often violently, to maintain the boundaries that we believe to be most real. Saleem's own attempt to make sense of himself, to give his life the unity of Purpose, ends in renunciation. For his final prophecy is more a fantasy than prediction - more under the sway of Thanatos then Apollo. Wouldn't it be nice, befitting of an ending, to yield to all the familiar old forces of dis-integration? As he points out, at the end, isn't the original lie, told to us in the cradle, Anything you want to be you can be? There are two ways to read the negation of this statement, viz., You cannot be anything you want. The first is that there are things that you want to be that you cannot be. The second, is that, of all the things you want to be, you cannot be any of them. And this is because "you" really cannot be any single "thing" at all.
Would I reread it? No. Would I recommend it? No. My excerpt on the cover: "Midnight's Children fails to engage readers either stylistically or emotionally. I will take away very little from this experience"
I missed writing about a final takeaway of the book in my own review but that is a good idea -- I found it to be more pointedly about the postcolonial effect in India and would not necessarily make the broader claim you did, something like "not only did the country suffer from lack of identity but look at how these individuals are unable to make anything of themselves even when endowed with magical gifts."
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