MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION SALMAN R USHDIE 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 uni...