Starting with Midnight's Children

Some novels begin as laser beams--one narrative thread that hits you right between the eyes and carries you forward, compelling you to turn page after page.  Other novels begin like shotgun blast, scattering you in a thousand different directions at once, creating a spiderweb of thematic, symbolic, and plot threads like cracks in a shot car window.

Midnight's Children is a shotgun.

Rushdie begins by throwing all sorts of flashes at you, forward and back, while introducing multiple characters and themes.  Most importantly, it drags us into a historical context that will actually be the most important character in the novel, the lead-up to and aftermath of India's independence in 1947.  Unfortunately, I don't know much about that history, so I find this opening a bit confusing, but my guess is that part of the novel's purpose is to introduce Western readers (namely Americans) to that history and England's involvement in it.  Of course, there are minor players, like Gandhi and the Islamic minority in India, and, perhaps most crucially, the dispute over Kashmir.  The latter conflict will, no doubt, serve as a macrocosm for the novel's dramatic microcosm.

My last comment will be about Rushdie and what I already know about him.  As you can tell from my comment on Satanic Verses, which I read for my survey of British Literature, I have problems with Rushdie's generic style (not his use of language, which I find lush and at times poetic), which in that novel is described as "magical realism."  To my surprise, this novel is much less magical realism and more straight-forward epic family romance or bildungsroman.  (It could also be called a Künstlerroman, because it's about the artist himself, but I'll dispense with the literary terms for now).  Lots of novels start with previous generations in order to set the stage for the protagonist's development and importance.  Needless to say, the fact that the narrator/protagonist is literally "cracking up" is bothering me a bit, because of the magic shit implied behind it.  I'll be interested to see where Rushdie goes with it.

But for now, I'm enjoying the character development of the grandfather and have already looked up several of the figures and events in Indian history that Rushdie refers to.  Clearly, this guy is a formidable voice in world literature, and this novel in some sense started the entire postcolonial anglophone fiction craze that dominates my profession (and the Nobel prize) today.