Gelezen: Middernachtskinderen

'Midnight's Children is a 1981 novel by Salman Rushdie. It centres on the author's native India and was acclaimed as a major milestone in postcolonial literature.

It won both the 1981 Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the same year. The book was later awarded the 'Booker of Bookers' Prize in 1993 as the best novel to be awarded the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. Midnight's Children is also the only Indian novel on Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels since its founding in 1923.

Midnight's Children is a loose allegory for events in India both before and, primarily, after the independence and partition of India, which took place at midnight on 15 August 1947. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, a telepath with a nasal defect, who is born at the exact moment that India becomes independent. Saleem Sinai's life then parallels the changing fortunes of the country after independence.'

Time's 100 review:

"Rushdie's version of The Prince and the Pauper becomes a cartwheeling parable about the fate of modern India. At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the date on which India proclaimed itself independent from Great Britain, 1,001 children are born with supernatural powers. Two are switched at birth, the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman and the offspring of wealthy Muslims. Rushdie follows them through 30 years of partition, violence and Indira Gandhi's iron-fisted rule. The personal is the political here with a vengeance, as history becomes farce, becomes legend becomes memory becomes history again"