MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

-

MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION
SALMAN RUSHDIE
FIRST PUBLISHED: 1981

Salman Rushdie was knighted due to his literary work and this career of his started with Midnight’s children, his second novel. It was ground-breaking in its treatment of history, memory, and fantasy. Rushdie used all three avenues in a compendious effort to grapple with the history of India just before and thirty years after it gained independence from the British.

 It is the biography of Saleem Sinai, a child with psychic and (later) olfactory powers, born on the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. His destiny is inextricably linked with that of India (this gets reflected in the entire story), the country that gained independence at the exact same time as he did. Saleem quickly establishes himself as an unreliable narrator; he makes factual errors and tells lies. However, he is a very engaging and endearing storyteller because of his humor, his sense of foreshadowing, his unique power and his fallibility.

 But the narrative is so jammed with contradictions, digressions, deliberate false steps and insinuations, that it makes it a pretty hard read. It takes in religious issues, Indira Gandhi's repression, the tragedies of partition, the painful birth of Bangladesh, and also, jungles, spices, chutneys, eccentric aunts and uncles, slums, palaces, snake charmers, soldiers and many more mad, bad, dangerous and delightful characters. The women in the book play an important role in Saleem's life and hence become the de-facto architects of Indian history too.

The last two chapters are my personal favorite - bringing out the pain which you must have felt all along for Saleem, in yourself. Some of the best analogies and allegories are included and it is surprising how Saleem’s later life has an uncanny resemblance with that of his former.

 The book ends with-
“..it is the privilege and the curse of Midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER

-
Image
THE YELLOW WALLPAPER CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN FIRST PUBLISHED : 1892 “ The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story about a woman, written in a diary form, who has a mental illness but cannot heal due to her husband’s lack of belief. We here get inside the mind of a troubled lady who soon enters a state of madness. "I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write_ a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.But I find I get pretty tired when I try.It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work."  The use of imagery and setting helps illustrate this theme throughout the story. The setting of the vast colonial mansion and particularly the nursery room with barred windows provides an image of loneliness and seclusion experienced by the protagonist. The way the wallpaper of the room is described throughout the story fills the reader with a sense of eeriness. "The color is repellent, almost revolting ; a smoldering
Read more

THE LOTTERY

-
Image
THE LOTTERY SHIRLEY JACKSON GENRE : HORROR FICTION FIRST PUBLISHED : 1948 When I first read Shirley Jackson's chilling story "The Lottery", I was curious, almost uniformly bewildered and disgusted in the end. And maybe this unprecedented, unexpected shock the story presents before its readers, makes it a so very popular read. Although, when the story was released, it gave rise to a very strong avalanche of negative reaction and backlash, it is, with a number of literary devices, a story that is almost impossible to forget. Before you proceed on with the review, I would seriously recommend you to read the story, if you haven't yet.  "The Lottery" takes place on a beautiful summer day, in a small rural village in America, where all the residents are gathering for their traditional annual lottery. Though the event first appears festive, it soon becomes clear that no one wants to win the lottery. Tessie Hutchinson seems unconcerned about the traditi
Read more

THE GREAT GATSBY

-
Image
THE GREAT GATSBY GENRE : SATIRE, TRAGEDY, BIOGRAPHICAL FICTION F. SCOTT. FITZGERALD FIRST PUBLISHED : 1925 "This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air." The Great Gatsby, The Great American Novel, is F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist novel about jazz-age America. The novel tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth, which ultimately led to his own destruction. It's highly unreliable protagonist is Nick Carraway, who recounts his story of the two years he spent with Gatsby. Almost 90 years later after its publish, The Great Gatsby is regularly named one of the greatest novels ever written in English, and has annu
Read more