This is honestly the kind of book I'd like to write for myself.

Readalong posts that I made as I was reading this book:

1st Entry
2nd Entry
3rd Entry
4th Entry

Midnight's Children is told entirely in First Person POV by Saleem Sinai, a man scrambling to commit his life’s narrative to paper as his body starts to deteriorate and come apart. “Life’s narrative” is a difficult thing to qualify here, however, since Saleem himself is so cosmically entwined with India that his recollection spans three generations’ worth of familial and national histories. Saleem constantly intrudes upon the narration, offering glimpses into the future and editorializing the events for both the audience and his lover Padma. It's practically the definition of postmodern literature: fractured, subjective, and confusing. It upends the conceit of the bildungsroman, which focuses on the life of a single individual as he grapples with history. Here, the individual IS history, and he shapes it as much as it shapes him.

Assigning a rating for this book is a process fraught with indecision for me. It’s true that I struggled for a substantial part of my reading and I still feel that the novel’s earlier attempts at distancing itself by sheer virtuosity–while understandable–has been excessive. But the ending came at me like that pickaxe into a frozen lake that Franz Kafka speaks about. So is this a 4 star or a 5 star book? It is such an in-your-face and mouthy narrative that confronts ingrained (Western) notions of how novels should be.

I'm not as enamored with this as I once was but it's still pretty great. Patricia Highsmith is a Slytherin.