A review by will_meringue
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

2.0

To understand one life, you have to swallow the world.

As difficult a book to rate as it was to read. It's an undoubtedly impressive endeavour. In places then prose is breathless, racing, and beautiful (

particularly: Saleem's deafening by his father; the sequence of bombs falling on his family; the ending

), and in others I decided to skim. The plot is labyrinthine and meandering, which creates a rich portrait of a life against and within history but also can be tedious. I think the book suffers from mis-marketing, at least the Penguin Vintage copy that I read, because the supernatural powers of the Midnight's Children are actually a tiny tiny portion of the narrative, when they were what drew me to read the book from the blurb. More than that though, and what will be the true legacy of Midnight's Children for me, and why the rating is low is the horrific levels of misogyny in this book. Every woman in this book is a cariacture: the shrew and/or the whore, conniving, manipulative, hysterical, money-grubbing, hypersexualised (including almost all of Saleem's female family members) and often adulterous too. I think it is genuinely unforgivable, and goes far beyond what's 'historically appropriate'. It constantly made me shocked and appalled and really soured me towards being able to connect with the narrative.