Midnight Children by Salman Rushdie— Book Review

A child is born with no state of mind, blind to the ways of mankind 🎵

[FRENCH Version below — First posted on Goodreads]

👉 Find this review in episode #17 of our KULT podcast (in French) on the theme of Night.

👉 All podcast links (Apple, Spotify, Instagram, Youtube,…)

A child is born (🎵 “with no state of mind, blind to the ways of mankind”🎵) on India’s independence day. The first steps of these two entities evolve in parallel, reminiscent of Gunther Grass’s The Drum.

Midnight Children is fast-paced, zany and messy.

• Magic realism à la Garcia Marquez,
• John Irving-style zany,
• It’s as messy as a lot of things — tons of unimportant characters, storylines that go nowhere…

Linguistic ingenuity is fun at first, and sometimes brilliant (like the metaphorical use of the perforated sheet that grandfather-doctor Aziz is forced to use to examine his future wife).

Some compare this novel to a hyperactive copy of Günter Grass’s Tin Drum. In this novel, we see a young man with special gifts, who is linked to the development of a nation, Germany.