On today’s date, August 15, in 1947, at midnight, India and Pakistan were born. The partition of mostly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan created decades of war and mistrust.
But that moment also opens Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s fabulous 1981 novel and one of the great books of our times –a tale of a boy born at the moment of partition, mixing a Dickensian life with magical realism, set against the story of modern India.
When I was starting out as a freelancer 30 years ago, I was a book reviewer for the trade journal Publishers Weekly. Most of the reviews ran about seven sentences long and bits of them sometimes turned up as blurbs in book ads. But then I reviewed Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. My unsigned review was printed in full on the back jacket of the first American edition. I always felt a secret glory in that anonymous connection to one of the great books of the 20th century.
In naming the novel one of the “Best 100 Books,’ Time describes Rushdie’s masterpiece:
Two [children} 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
Of course, Salman Rushdie went on to make international headlines for another of his books.
Lots of books are considered controversial, but few lead to death threats. When Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses hit bookstores in 1989, the author was forced to go into hiding—for nine years. Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, deemed the book an insult to Islam and declared a fatwa, or religious edict, calling Muslims to execute Rushdie (b. 1947). Only in 1998 did the Iranian Foreign Minister finally drop the official death threat against Rushdie.
What else do you know about this modern master of magical realism? Here are a couple of questions drawn from Don’t Know Much About Literature
1. What happens on midnight of August 15 1947 in Midnight’s Children?
2. While he was in hiding, what children’s book did Rushdie write for his son Zafar?
3. What honor did Rushdie achieve in 2008?
Here is the Time magazine list of Best 100 Novels
Note: This is a revised version of a post originally written published on August 15, 2009.
Answers
1. 1,001 children are born with supernatural powers.
2. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).
3. In 2008, Midnight’s Children was selected as winner of the “Best of the Booker” awards. Readers around the world voted the 1981 novel as the best of the prestigious prize winners.
