Books and Cooks January 1999

Midnight's Children

Our rating: 4 cups of tea!

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Discussion date: Sunday, January 17, 1999, 4:00PM

Happy New Year!

Discussion place: Susannah's

Menu: Soups, soups and more soups, including chocolate soup for dessert!

Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981.

A large page of links on Salman Rushdie and his books is available.

A review in the New York Times Book Review is also available.

Amazon says:

Before Salman Rushdie had that problem with a certain religious-political figure with a serious need to chill out, he'd already shown he was an important literary force. Quite simply, Midnight's Children is amazing -- fun, beautiful, erudite, both fairy tale and a political narrative told through a supernatural narrator who is caught between different worlds. Though it's a big book, with big themes of India's nationhood and of ethnic and personal identity, it's far from a dry history lesson. Rushdie tells the story in his own brand of magical realism, with a prose of lyrical, transcendent goofiness.

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, April 1, 1995: Allegorical novel by Salman Rushdie, published in 1981. It is a historical chronicle of modern India centering on the inextricably linked fates of two children born within the first hour of independence from Great Britain. Exactly at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, two boys are born in a Bombay hospital, where they are switched by a nurse. Saleem Sinai, who will be raised by a well-to-do Muslim couple, is actually the illegitimate son of a low-caste Hindu woman and a departing British colonist. Shiva, the son of the Muslim couple, is given to a poor Hindu street performer whose unfaithful wife has died. Saleem represents modern India. When he is 30, he writes his memoir, Midnight's Children. Shiva is destined to be Saleem's enemy as well as India's most honored war hero. This multilayered novel places Saleem in every significant event that occurred on the Indian subcontinent in the 30 years after independence. Midnight's Children was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1981.

Last updated: November 21, 2000 .