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Midnight's Children  By  cover art

Midnight's Children

By: Salman Rushdie
Narrated by: Lyndam Gregory
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Publisher's summary

Man Booker Prize Winner, 1981

Salman Rushdie holds the literary world in awe with a jaw-dropping catalog of critically acclaimed novels that have made him one of the world's most celebrated authors. Winner of the prestigious Booker of Bookers, Midnight's Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of India's independence.

©1981 Salman Rushdie (P)2009 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

“Burgeons with life, with exuberance and fantasy . . . Rushdie is a writer of courage, impressive strength, and sheer stylistic brilliance.” (The Washington Post Book World)

“A marvelous epic . . . Rushdie’s prose snaps into playback and flash-forward . . . stopping on images, vistas, and characters of unforgettable presence. Their range is as rich as India herself.” (Newsweek)

“Extraordinary . . . one of the most important [novels] to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation.” (The New York Review of Books)

Featured Article: Totally Tubular—The Best Audiobooks of and About the 1980s


When you think of the 1980s, what comes to mind? Big hair? Shoulder pads? Ronald Reagan? Madonna? The 1980s were a big time of change in politics and pop culture, and that time remains fresh in our minds because of the iconic moments that mark its importance in history. Whether you're nostaglic or curious, this list of listens will immerse you in the decade that brought us Pac-Man, MTV, Madonna, Ronald Reagan, and the Rubik's cube!

What listeners say about Midnight's Children

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Outstanding book, superb narration

Salman Rushdie is a writer's writer. I have been hooked on his fiction ever since I discovered Satanic Verses - All of his books are full of humour, contemporary culture and some of the best prose since James Joyce & Marcel Proust. The narration is masterful - but the language is dense and requires the reader's full attention. The narration resembles that of "I Claudius" in that it wavers between 1rst & 3rd person points of view. The history of modern india at the moment of its independence is collapsed into the life-story of the narrator, born at the stroke of midnight of independence.

In short I love this book and have thoroughly enjoyed it's narration.

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109 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Historical with a touch of the fantastic

Salman Rushdie's narrative tone in this book is jovial and humorous, even when he's describing pretty horrific things. It sneaks up on you that the first-person narrator, Saleem Sinai, is not just a little unreliable, but also whiny, self-justifying, and arrogant. The history of India ran parallel to his own personal history, with events happening in synchronicity, really? And the war between India and Pakistan was actually History's attempt to get him and his family? Saleem Sinai is sometimes likeable and sometimes a real jerk. He spends the entire book telling his life story to an unseen nurse/lover, Padma, who seems to be a long-suffering woman who loves him despite his determination to literally make everything all about him.

But there really are magical elements in this book, in which the thousand and one "Children of Midnight" born during the midnight hour of India's independence are all given supernatural gifts. If this were a genre fantasy novel, we'd see them running around India engaging in feats of heroism and villainy. But this isn't a superhero novel, it's a literary historical novel with a touch of the fantastic, so the Children of Midnight never do much at all, and Saleem's amazing telepathic abilities are used only as a plot device to connect them and include them in his narrative.

As a modern history of India (told irreverently and one-sidedly and in a self-involved way by Saleem), Midnight's Children is funny, tragic, interesting, and a grand epic that Rushdie's storytelling device makes extremely personal. Rushdie's writing style is full of asides and interjections and laugh-out-loud metaphors, and he brings all the characters, even the bit ones, to life in amusing detail. He reminds me a bit of Stephen King in that respect, though Rushdie is far more of a literary prose-smith than King, and his book, while a little bit wordy and tangential at times, nowhere near as bloated as a King epic.

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100 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Good listen

Midnight's Children isn't an easy book to listen to first time around; and it certainly took me many hours of listening before getting a grip (that, too, somewhat tenuous) on the story line, which is full of twists, and exceptions, and clarifications, and which jumps back and forth in time and points of view.

Nonetheless, it is a really funny story. I must have laughed out loud at least few times. The text and the narration easily capture the irony and hypocrisy one finds in India (and Pakistan).

As to the narration, well ... I think Lyndam Gregory has put in a lot of effort to get it right. To bring the text to life. Unfortunately he didn't succeed. He simply couldn't pronounce any of the Indian names or terms properly. At times I had to refer to the text (which, thankfully, was available for download online) to understand what was being read.

I plan to listen to again.

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89 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Made Me Feel Shockingly Stupid

Looking for a way to ease the monotony of the daily commute, I thumbed through the audiobooks on my iPod and settled on Midnight's Children. In about 90 seconds, Salman Rushdie made me feel more stupid than a season of Are You Smarter than 5th Grader? First, he says his favorite Indian authors are Charles Dickens and Jane Austin and he loved the Bombay description Charles Dickens gives. Dickens? In India? Then he says the birth of Midnight's Children started the year Indira Gandhi was indicted for election fraud and then activated emergency powers and began her series of crimes. Indira Gandhi was a dictator? And during that year, so-and-so, the founder of Bangladesh was murdered. The founder of Bangladesh was who? Was assassinated? Maybe I don't read enough.

This novel is amazing. It simultaneously transports me to a world so completely foreign I might as well be on Mars and prominently reminds me of the pains of poverty and petty politics in Cairo. Funny and disparaging, absurd and painfully real, I love it.

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80 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Great writing... but didn't hold my interest

I wanted to like this book more than I did and ended up calling it quits about halfway through. It's not that Rushdie isn't a brilliant writer, but his generation-sweeping narrative felt like a long exercise in allegory and self-referentialness without characters or a plot that I managed to find involving.

You'll find that the usual checkmarks of "magic realism" apply here. The writing has a fanciful storybook quality, as does the plot logic. The author blends real-world history with myth and pseudo-myth. Characters have exaggerated personality and physical traits, and strange ailments, some of which seem to grant them extraordinary powers of telepathy and foresight. Don't get me wrong -- I appreciate symbolism and thematic depth, but there was a bit too much literary flash at the expense of characters or a story arc I could relate to. Maybe it's just me -- I was also left cold by Mark Helprin's much-loved Winter's Tale, for similar reasons.

Too bad, because Rushdie really can write colorful descriptive passages that sing in audiobook form, combining poetry, satire, Bollywood imagery, and bits of the real world in a rollicking series of well-crafted scenes. But it's also one of those books where the author is constantly and consciously being "clever", mainly through manipulative foreshadowing and an air of ah-but-you-don't-see-where-I'm-going-with-this. To me, that sort of thing gets annoying, as though Rushdie wants to bait critics into being impressed with his novel through structural trickery.

Still, Rushdie is quite brilliant, and for literary adventurers who appreciate dense novels and are perhaps a bit more knowledgeable about India/Pakistan/Kashmir than I am, there's a lot here. Depending on your tastes, it's certainly worth consideration. But, as generation-spanning multicultural novels go, I *liked* Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex a lot more.

I dunno... maybe I'll come back to it later.

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68 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

"Better Each Time

?? have lost count of the numbr of times I've read this modern classic. It's hard to believe that it gets better with each read. The story is detailled, beautifully structured and timed, and has a credibility that is better than the truth. Lyndam Gregory made the experience richer for his many nuances of accent, the way he captured the characters and enlivened some of the best prose ever written. Rushdie is brilliant, of course. Not everyone could have done him, or this great piece of literature, justice. I suggest that Gregory has. Is he planning to read Satanic Verses? If he is, or has, I can't wait. Back to the store to check!

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38 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Great performance of a great book

Lyndam Gregory was born to do this performance. it is truly extraordinary. He captures the essence of India, the characters, the time, the wonder and the magic of this incredible book. It was a joy to listen to each day, and I felt very sad when it was over. It was like saying goodbye to intimate friends. Congratulations to Mr. Gregory for a tour de force performance.

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35 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Great Narrator..for an empty book

Any additional comments?

I couldn't quite shake the idea, as I listened, that Salman Rushdie worked with an open copy of The Tin Drum by his side. But where Tin Drum felt to me like rich and moving reading experience, Midnight's Children felt clownish and empty. Reading it was like listening to the author shout LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME for hundreds of pages...and then it was over. I can fully admit the writing itself is masterful, but I found myself wondering with almost every sentence: How can great writing be so empty of purpose and meaning? And also: How can such a skilled writer make the topic of Indian independence, and the resulting partition of India, such a dull bludgeon of a reading experience?

Let me say more about this nagging Tin Drum echo that I heard throughout Midnight's Children--and why Midnight's children could mimic, but totally fail to capture the mastery of Tin Drum. Each book has countless minor characters who appear, play their part, and go away again. But in Tin Drum the characters are deeply felt, no matter how unrealistically portrayed, and in Midnight's Children the characters feel like windup toys. I think of Sigismund Markus in Tin Drum, a very minor character, the Jewish shopkeeper who commits suicide during Kristalnacht, versus Ilse Luben, who drowns herself in a lake before she makes any impression on the reader whatsoever, or Tai, a boatman who takes up many pages of narrative and who suffers an equally meaningless death. The death of Sigismund still moves me when I think about it, and the deaths of Ilse and Tai left nothing more than a great, boring, ho-hum, glad-they-are-gone-so-we-can-get-on-with-the-story feeling. Worse is the death of Vanita in childbirth--again my only feeling was that I had none.

Then I tried to frame the book as post-modern so of course it would use distancing effects as a way to call attention to its own fictions...but again the book compares so poorly with other postmodern novels, like those of Nabokov or Barthelme, which manage to use the same distancing effects to somehow bring a reader closer to all the beauty and tragedy of the human condition. This book in contrast just distances the reader.

So I'm left with a great wonderment that this is the book that wins the Booker of Bookers. The other book that Midnight's Children compares poorly to is A Passage to India by E.M. Forster--each book has a Dr. Aziz who is central to the story, with Rushdie's Aziz comparing very poorly to Forster's in any sort of valuation I can imagine for fiction.

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28 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

magic realism, but a slow listen

The story reminded me of the "magic realism" of One Hundred Years of Solitude. If you enjoy that type of writing, you will enjoy this. The book takes place in India. The main character's life parallel's India's growth as an independent nation, including struggles with Pakistan. There were parts of the book that were fast-paced and extremely engaging, but I found there were also parts that my attention lagged during. I felt that was due to the book itself, not to the narrator.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

a magical story about what's his name

I did not give the story three stars because I didn't enjoy it. I gave it three stars because I would need to be a genius, and probably an Indian Historian, to be able to understand it all.

I did like the book though, and for many reasons. The most important being that Salman Rushdie can turn words inside out and upside down and form them into something beautiful that you've never seen before. This book made me feel like what I imagine it would feel like to be in India. The smells, the traffic , the poor people hanging onto buses and trains. He doesn't make things picturesque. He makes things real. Not only the good, but the bad as well. The narrator of the story, Saleem Sinai, doesn't hold back from telling us how things really are. He tells us about his snot, accidentally seeing his mother's woohoo, fighting on the wrong side of things and falling in love with his sister. He is the kind of narrator that most of us are. He forgets things, backtracks, skips ahead, gets muddled. But through it all you learn about his whole family and history, and how the history of India is a part of everything. My favorite character is the grandmother, Reverend Mother. She is absurd, and yet, somehow quite likable. Every time she said "what's his name" it made me smile.

I found Midnight's Children easier to understand than The Satanic Verses. Even though it doesn't flow in chronological order, and the story is often interrupted by Padma, it is not as fantastical or as dreamlike as SV. But there are some similar themes in both books. Rushdie seems to be fond of the good/evil, God/Satan dynamic. Also, reality and non-reality play an equal part.

If you like books that push you, that expand you, that make you question things and look at the world in new ways, then you will like this book. It's not easy, but it is worth it.

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26 people found this helpful