Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie · 1981
Voted the best Booker Prize winner of all time. Twice (1993 and 2008). Rushdie's panoramic novel of Indian independence, told through a narrator born at the exact moment of partition, fuses magical realism with postcolonial history in a voice of astonishing exuberance.
The case against
Saleem narrates like a man who cannot finish a sentence without promising three more. The digressions, the constant foreshadowing, the nose: Rushdie's exuberance runs a few hundred pages past charming. And the allegory is rigged; every birthmark and accident must mean India, which leaves the characters doing double duty as people and as provinces, and the people lose.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
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