-The voice of the protagonist in 'Midnight's Children' is a playful, very self aware one. It is not the reportage, streamlined style of Salim in 'A Bend in the River'. At multiple points in 'Midnight's Children', he acknowledges his presence to the reader, and he is very aware of his role as enchanter and storyteller. I enjoy this first person self awareness, mainly because(in my reading experience) a first person narrator who acknowledges their presence is usually a deranged or sick person. It's nice to have a seemingly fun and sane narrator be self-referential.
Rushdie is obviously a lover of language and rhythm, and I can really sense his admitted influences; most namely Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon. This novel is full of inventive energy(Rushdie, before reading a selection from 'Midnight's Children', once remarked that it must be like when the Rolling Stones are asked to play 'Satisfaction'). I could pick so many passages from what we have read, but here is perhaps my favorite. It is the opening passage of 'Hit-The-Spittoon':
"I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like a old jug-that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams".
I marveled at things like 'Mutilated by doors' and 'Brained by spittoons'. Beautiful stuff. The pacing is this particular passage is masterful, as something as rough and robust as a jug is transformed into nothing but a ball of wayward strings.
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