Midnight's Children

Midnight´s Children

Midnight´s Children is a novel written by Salman Rushdie in 1980 and considered his masterpiece. With this novel, Rushdie won the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize both in 1981. Years later, Midnight´s Children was also awarded with the Booker of Bookers prize as it was considered the best Booker-winning novel from the first twenty-five years of the competition.

The author

Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born to a affluent muslim family in Bombay, India, on 19 June 1947. He was born just two months before India got its independence from Great Britain. When he was 14 years old, he was sent to the United kingdom to study where he graduated in history in the King´s Collage of the University of Cambridge. His major works are Midnight´s Children(1980) and The Satanic Verses(1988). His style has often been compared to the Latin American magical realism. Usually his novels take place in the Indian subcontinent. Other of his works are Grimus(1975), The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey(1987), Haroun and the Sea of Stories(1990), East, West(1994), The Moor's Last Sigh(1995), The Ground beneath her Feet(1999), Fury(2001), Shalimar the Clown(2005), The enchantress of Florence(2008) and his last novel Luka and the Fire of Life(2010) which is for children.

Plot and Analysis on the novel

Midnight´s Children takes place in India. The main character, Saleem, is a boy that was born in the midnight that the country gains its independence from Great Britain, August 15, 1947. Some magical elements happened that night, that is why all the children born on that day have special powers. The novel is a bildungsroman where we see the development of the protagonist as well as his life story through the flashbacks that picture the past events and help to understand the story. Also considered a postcolonial fiction work, the novel portraits the controversy and the character of the country in the years that followed the independence.

Sources

http://www.salman-rushdie.com/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7499495.stm

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/midnightschildren/