IT is impossible to resist a novel that contains the sentence 'My
sister the Brass Monkey developed the curious habit
of setting fire to
shoes.' Or one that will pause to observe, as it considers an unhappy
India, 'Sacred cows eat anything.' According to 'Midnight's
Children,' guilt is a fog, optimism is a disease, freedom is a myth,
fried spiders cure blindness and 'Gandhi will die at the wrong time.'
Nevertheless, Salman Rushdie chortles. We have an epic in our
laps. The obvious comparisons are to Gunter Grass in 'The Tin Drum'
and to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude.' I
am happy to oblige the obvious. Like Grass and Garcia Marquez, Mr.
Rushdie gives us history, politics, myth, food, magic, wit and dung. He
adds, in no particular order, a blind art lover, a poet who is verbless
and impotent, some vultures and cobras, a peep show and many clocks,
telepathy and the nose as a genital organ. His children of
midnight were born on Aug. 15, 1947, at the stroke of independence for
India. Saleem Sinai tells us, 'From the moment of my conception, it
seems, I have been public property.' And why not? Didn't Nehru himself
send a personal letter of congratulation? Won't Saleem himself be a
'mirror' of the new nation? 1,001 Gifted Children Of course,
there are two new nations, whether they like it or not. One of them is
Pakistan. And Saleem understands himself to be a Moslem. And when, at
the age of 9, in a laundry hamper, he comes to appreciate his
telepathic powers, he comes also to understand that there were 1,000
other babies born on that same stroke of midnight. Each has a secret
resource which consorts with the occult. Notice: 1,001 gifted children;
we have enough tales for Scheherazade. And those siblings, India and
Pakistan, would murder in the crib.Fragmentation is the theme of the novel, from the sheet with the
hole in it through which Saleem's grandfather is permitted to glimpse
portions of the body of the woman he will marry, all the way to a
dismembering of history. 'We are a nation of forgetters,' Saleem
says, and he isn't even sure of his own father. He is reading aloud,
like Scheherazade, his dreams, as if to impress a departed wig. Mr.
Rushdie isn't nice, although he is funny and vulgar. The world of
'Midnight's Children' is not at all genteel, as the world of Anita
Desai tends to be. It is the shadow in Paul Scott's mirror or, perhaps,
what E. M. Forster heard in the cave, with a lot of symbolic curry
added - the clocks, the dreams, 'the ambiguity of snakes,' the moon
and the silver spittoon, the fishermen and the clowns. He is asking:
who broke us apart, and why must we die, fragmented, for a failed
India? And 1,001 Plots Why failure? Mr. Rushdie plays many
games; the reader needs to be a loyal modernist. 'Midnight's
Children,' with its 1,001 plots, is an exercise in criticism. Saleem
is at once Superman, Sindbad and Pinocchio, not to mention Buddha.
Eating, he speaks of 'pickled chapters.' We are reminded that 'no
audience is without its idiosyncracies of belief.' Unspoken words
cause bloat. His ear, the woman Patma who must listen to him read aloud
his autobiography, deserts him for a while, and he is unmoored. Of
himself, he says:'I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I
could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will,
switch off my newly discovered ear.' The signals he is receiving are
from the children of the midnight clock; they will die with the nation;
they will burn like shoes. If I understand Mr. Rushdie, he is
equally outraged by (1) the English imposition on India; (2) Indira
Gandhi's 'emergency,' which did away with liberal democracy in Indiale, and laugh while clenching fists. I wish Mr. Rushdie's children,
all of them orphans of history, would take over the world at dawn. This
novel - exuberant, excessive, despairing -is special.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.