Midnight’s Children

I’ve never been to India, but Midnight’s Children does a great job of representing the country as I imagine it: big, sprawling, loud, colorful, chaotic, and impossible to take in all at once. While reading, I kept alternating between “Wow, this book is incredible” and “Holy shit, this book is annoying, are we almost done?” But by the end, it’s hard not to recognize it as a certain kind of grand achievement.

As the winner of the “Best of the Booker,” Midnight’s Children has already been summarized and analyzed in a million places, so I don’t have anything especially new to add. It is the history of a country told through the story of one fantastical man. That man narrates the book in a voice so distracted, rambling, and self-satisfied that it occasionally made me want to throw the book across the room. The prose is as impressive as it is exhausting. It is maximalist storytelling taken to the extreme. But it is also clever, insightful, ambitious, grand, and dense with historical and political meaning. Between reading the book itself and googling things along the way so I could understand it better, I learned a ton about India.

That said, I admit I have a habit of reading books way too fast, and this is not a book that can be fully appreciated at high speed. I’d like to revisit it when I have the patience and energy to dedicate more time to it.

Book author: Salman Rushdie