Being an Indian, I have always been drawn to Indian or Indian origin Authors as the language was much amicable and the setup (that’s mostly Indian cities or town) was something that I could relate to.
I was a little intimidated to read “Midnight’s children” as Salman Rushdie is one of the finest and famous authors of today’s time. So one fine lazy Sunday morning I downloaded the book from Kindle and started reading it.
To my surprise, although being an Indian Origin Author, Salman’s command over English is impeccable. For the first couple of chapters, I had to keep looking up for the meaning of certain words (Kindle makes it easy though but still). But soon I got a hang of his style and got invested in the story.
Salman Rushdie’s greatest skill in this book is the magic he plays with words and the kind of weird quirky situations he creates. For example, In one of the chapters, the protagonist dad gets slapped by a hand that falls from the sky. Apparently, a Vulture had accidentally dropped it from above. There are so many such quirky weird situations that make you laugh as well as makes you wonder the depth of the Author’s imagination.
But mind you, its a serious book with a lot of things happening, right from Independence to the development of Mumbai that we know today, Bollywood, religion and even Pakistan.
The story and the wordplay keep you hooked till the end & you want to know what happens next. It even tests the lines of relation between a mother & son, sister & brother and other things.
Salman is a bold writer and writes his heart out with wit, humor and creating dreamy sequences.
Its the first book I have read of him and there is no doubt I would be grabbing his other books very soon.
I highly recommend this book if you are looking for an out of the box story embedded in post-Independence India that has those old world charms. As a bonus, you will come out adding a significant amount of new words in your vocabulary.
