Midnight's Children
First published 1981 · English · 674 pages
- Novels
- Historical fiction
- Science fiction
- Fantasy
A novel narrated by Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment of India's independence in August 1947. Because of that timing he is linked to a thousand other children born in the first hour of the new nation, each with unusual gifts, and he can hear their thoughts. Through his own family story, told in a playful and crowded style, the book follows India and Pakistan across several decades of hope, partition, war and political turmoil. It blends memory, comedy and fable, and is widely seen as a landmark of modern fiction and of postcolonial writing.
Quotes
No people whose word for "yesterday" is the same as their word for "tomorrow" can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
You be respectable, sister," she said, "Me, I'll be alive.
And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.
What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop, had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encyclopedia - even a whole language ...