Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [0]
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
“This brash, knowing, massive, aggressive novel is to modern India what Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum is to modern Germany.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous epic novel … Rushdie’s prose snaps into play-back and flash-forward … stopping on images, vistas, and characters of unforgettable presence. Their range is as rich as India herself—a most extraordinary book.”
—Newsweek
“I haven’t been so continuously surprised by a novel since I read One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
—The Times (UK)
“In combining past with present, nostalgic realism with mythic overtones, specific detail with complex and binding narrative devices, Rushdie has achieved a magnificent and unique work of fiction.… Dazzling.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“We have an epic in our laps.… I wish Mr. Rushdie’s children, all of them orphans of history, would take over the world at dawn. This novel—exuberant, excessive, despairing—is special.”
—The New York Times
“Awakening feelings of such excitement and pleasure as only a few writers are capable of inducing in a reader, this novel marks the brilliant debut of a writing talent to be reckoned with.… The novel is filled with magic and mysticism; a thousand dancing images; biting satirical humor; politics; characters who transcend ordinary life; and human frailty.… An extraordinary universe.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A brilliant and endearing novel … remarkable.”
—London Review of Books
Also by Salman Rushdie
FICTION
Grimus
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Fury
Shalimar the Clown
NONFICTION
The Jaguar Smile
Imaginary Homelands
The Wizard of Oz
Step Across This Line
SCREENPLAY
Midnight’s Children
PLAYS
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
(with Tim Supple and David Tushingham)
Midnight’s Children
(with Tim Supple and Simon Reade)
ANTHOLOGY
Mirrorwork
(co-editor)
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2006
Copyright © 1981 by Salman Rushdie
Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition copyright © 2006 by Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006. Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of The Random House Group, Limited, London, in 1981. This edition published by arrangement with the author.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rushdie, Salman
Midnight’s children / Salman Rushdie.
Originally published: London : Jonathan Cape, 1981.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36775-4
I. Title.
PR6068.U757M5 1997 823′.914 C97-930652-3
v3.1
for Zafar Rushdie
who, contrary to all expectations,
was born in the afternoon
Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition
IN 1975 I PUBLISHED my first novel, Grimus, and decided to use the £700 advance to travel in India as cheaply as possible for as long