Midnight's Children: Introduction by Anita Desai (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) - Hardcover

Rushdie, Salman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679444629 ISBN 13: 9780679444626

Publisher: Everyman's Library USA, 1995

Synopsis

A classic novel, in which the man who calls himself the "bomb of Bombay" chronicles the story of a child and a nation that both came into existence in 1947--and examines a whole people's capacity for carrying inherited myths and inventing new ones.

About this title

Review

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 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.

Review

FROM THE NEW INTRODUCTION BY Anita Desai:
"Rushdie's writing resembles a horse at full gallop that will not halt and wait. He creates an epic by turning his characters into symbols and archetypes so that their histories are lived out at several levels at one time-real and fantastic, metaphorical and symbolic . . . He is a writer of an epic-secular, irreligious, irreverent, subversive, both comic and profoundly serious . . . in short, an epic of our times."

"Huge, vital, engrossing . . . in all senses a fantastic book."
-THE SUNDAY TIMES LONDON

"In Salman Rushdie . . . India has produced a glittering novelist-one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling. Like García Márquez . . . he weaves a whole people's capacity for carrying its inherited myths-and new ones that it goes on generating-into a kind of magic carpet . . . Saleem Sinai . . . is dramatizing his past life as a prophecy, even universalizing his history as a mingling of farce and horror and matching it with thirty years of the Indian crowd's collective political history . . . As a tour de force his fantasy is irresistible."
-V.S. Pritchett, THE NEW YORKER

"One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation."
-THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

Edition details

• Publisher: Everyman's Library USA
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679444629
• ISBN 13: 9780679444626
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 632