I really AM fond of my treadmill...

A few weeks ago, I finally finished Salman Rushdie's epic (and I do mean EPIC) novel Midnight's Children -- I can't believe I haven't talked about it yet. As I've mentioned in the past, I am in awe of Rushdie's writing -- some writers are good storytellers... Rushdie not only tells amazing stories, but he masterfully weaves words together in a way that makes the simple comprehension of a sentence a moment to relish. (It might explain why it took me a couple of months to not only finish this one, but also The Satanic Verses... it's hard to speed read a book when every paragraph is a potential work of art...)

Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, and was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" prize in 1993, when it was voted the best of all the prize winners between 1969 and 1993. And it was also awarded the "Best of the Booker" prize in 2008, when it was again voted the favorite of all contenders. Basically, a whole lot of people have loved this book for several decades, and have considered it superior to novels that have come before AND after. So now that I've read it, I feel like a smug literary genius who is totally qualified to give you a knowledgeable review... or maybe I just needed something to write about today. Whichever...

One thing Rushdie loves to do (at least in the vast lexicon of work I've read so far -- all two books), is create a very fine line between reality and fantasy. In The Satanic Verses, it was often difficult to tell what was real/what was a dream/what was a metaphor/what was some kind of drug-fueled hallucination... And in Midnight's Children, Rushdie just takes the line away altogether. The story is told from the point of view of Saleem Sinai, who tells us at the beginning of the book that he wants to recount his life before he inevitably succumbs to a bizarre bone-pulverizing affliction. He is convinced that his time is coming to an end, and, therefore, must put all his thoughts to paper...

We read about his grandparents, and then his aunts and uncles, and then his parents, who settle in a rather wealthy area of Bombay... and then the reason for the book's title finally becomes clear: Saleem is born at midnight on August 15, 1947 -- the day of India's independence, and the partition of India and Pakistan. And also born at exactly the same time, in the same hospital, is a boy born to poor parents, who have little chance of giving their son a well-to-do life. But there's a twist: a nurse at the hospital sees these two babies -- one born into privilege, one born into poverty -- and takes it upon herself to swap their name tags, so the poor boy will have the chance to grow up wealthy. So Saleem, it turns out, is not the biological son of his wealthy parents. And Shiva, the true son of Mr. and Mrs. Sinai, is doomed to a life of poverty...

But things get REALLY interesting when Saleem discovers, sometime around his eleventh birthday, that he can read minds. What's more, he soon discovers that ALL children who were born around midnight on the day of their country's independence have various powers -- it's sort of like the Indian Avengers, except none of them really know what to do with the powers they've been born with. Saleem can speak to everyone telepathically, including Shiva -- who, even at a young age, is heading down a much darker path than Saleem. They are night and day, black and white, good and bad -- mirror images of each other. Saleem forms the Midnight Children's Conference, and every evening, hundreds of other kids all over India are telepathically linked, discussing their own futures and the future of their country... 

The second half of the book delves into detailed descriptions of Indian/Pakistani history, which metaphorically parallels Saleem's own life as he grows from boy to man. Parts of this took me longer to read than others... not because I don't find history fascinating, but because Rushdie references so many political parties -- like Hindu Mahasabha and Majlis-e-Ahrar-ul-Islam -- and historical figures -- with names like Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad and Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan -- that I, as a stupid American, have little hope of ever pronouncing correctly. And I tend to be a bit of an obsessive compulsive reader -- I feel a need to read (and, in my head, pronounce) every single syllable of whatever I'm perusing. So you can imagine my frustration as I worked my way through some of the sentences in this book...

I will, however, give Rushdie credit for teaching me the meaning of "janum," which, if I comprehended the book correctly, means something akin to "life" or "my life" and can be used as a term of endearment... (I also spelled it incorrectly when I first published this post... or, at least, I failed to spell it the way Rushdie spelled it -- whether or not HE spelled it correctly is up for debate. But like I said -- I'm a stupid American... :)) And because I occasionally read the book on my treadmill, and because I basically can't live without my treadmill, somewhere around halfway through the book I started calling my treadmill "janum." Don't laugh. (Okay, go ahead and laugh... :))

Midnight's Children was pretty much on my list of all-time-favorite books before I even finished it. According to IMDB, the movie version is supposed to be out sometime in October -- I'm hoping I can actually see it somewhere, since I'm really curious how the detailed, fanciful, metaphorical, epic story in the book translates to film. But I imagine I'll wait until it shows up on HBO or another movie channel -- since I probably don't know anyone who would see the movie with me, let alone read the book.

But that's okay -- we can't ALL be smug literary geniuses... ;)