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LITERATURE ACADEMY: Focus on Midnight's Children
Page Title
About Midnight's Children
SYNOPSIS
Midnight’s Children is Saleem’s memoir, written during his thirtieth year. The shattered, impotent, prematurely aged resident manager of a Bombay pickling factory, he writes with his plump, illiterate mistress Padma as his only audience. Born precisely at midnight on August 15,1947, the moment of the creation of the independent countries of India and Pakistan, Saleem is dubbed “The Child of Midnight” by an exuberant press. His fortunes and those of one thousand other midnight children are mystically linked with the fate of India during the following thirty years.
The Rushdie Effect
The making of Midnight’s Children began, by Rushdie’s own account, when he travelled to India in 1975, a return home sponsored by a £700 advance for his first novel Grimus, a quasi-science fantasy experiment that flopped badly. But his next novel would be different. “I had wanted for some time to write a novel of childhood,” he said in 2005. But it was not until this trip that he began to conceive “a more ambitious plan”. He would take Saleem Sinai, a minor character from an abandoned novel entitled The Antagonist, and link him to the totality of Indian independence by somehow making the history of modern India “all his fault”.
In its own time, it has been an acclaimed prizewinner, winning both the Booker prize in 1981, and “the Booker of Bookers” in 1993 and again in 2008. Chosen for the BBCs “Big Read” in 2003, its status as a contemporary classic seems assured. Rushdie himself has written, with appropriate modesty, that “if it can pass the test of another generation or two, it may endure”. Posterity awaits.
Midnight's Children legacy
The Guardian, 2015
Additional Resources
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/15/100-best-novels-midnights-children-salman-rushdie-
https://www.enotes.com/topics/midnights-children-salman-rushdie
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