Rating: 
Summary: A hard slog for no good purpose
Review: Should anyone ask why this book is so revered, I would be at a loss to even being rationalizing others' adulation. The Booker Prize? One of the 100 best works of fiction of the 20th century?This book was one of the toughest slogs I have ever undertaken voluntarily. I pushed forward hoping that the end would justify and reward the senselessness of that which preceded the end. Had I not invested so much in a vain quest to find that which others described (allegory, metaphor, mysticism, creativity, use of language), I would have put it down much sooner. The language and flow of the work are distinctive, imaginative, and complex, but these are the few positive characteristics I can ascribe to the work. The remainder I found to be uninteresting and dense. In parts, I felt as if Rushdie had lost energy and focus, inserting filler until he could again jumpstart the storyline by again stretching the life of the central chracter across a historic event. Read instead Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jorge Luis Borges. You'll find what others have promised within this work and come away with a far more rewarding experience.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book!!
Review: This is a great book. I think Rushdie's main charm lies in the way he has mixed all the political events of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh effectively in the story; more so for the fact, almost all the events are at wrong times in history and yet its difficult to notice it!! Language has always been Rushdie's forte. I cannot think of any other writer who can convey a 4-pageful of facts in 4 lines. On a lighter vein, this book could be a good GRE supplement for verbal section! The humour and sarcasm too are very well written and placed in the book. This book rightly deserved the booker for the best book, and even more rightly deserved the booker of bookers i.e the best book in 25 years. Ya, its that GOOD!! and its a must-read for a book-lover. Another book I liked very much is Paul Omeziri's Descent into Illusions and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
Rating: 
Summary: Woah!
Review: This book is a COMMITMENT! I read it for a paper I wrote on Religious Prejudices in Indian Literature (dealing with Hinduism) along with "God of Small Things" and "Death of Vishnu." I got only 1/2 way through when it came time to write my paper... and still I'm pressing through it. 530 pages... wow. This book was a little hard to get into at first. But then pages 80-200 were incredible. When the main character "comes of age" and recieves his "gift"... the book is so intruiging and compels the reader to think of his/her own growing up experience. But as Saleem becomes an adult and goes to war, the book drags on and on for 200 more pages. I have 80 pages left, and i'm just excited to move on and read something else - not to hear the ending. This book has been beautiful... but a little too long. Just realize that you're getting yourself in for a LONG haul before starting it!
Rating:
Summary: An exciting, but immature and somewhat unoriginal, classic
Review: While Salman Rushdie released in the mid-seventies a book called GRIMUS that bombed and promptly went out of print, it was his 1980 work MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN that catapaulted Rushdie to international attention and really started his career. Winning first the Booker Prize, and later the "Booker of Bookers" (that is, the best of all novels to win that British prize), MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN is a tale of India from the beginning of the 20th century to 1977 that holds a mirror up to history. Narrated by Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight on the August night in 1947 when India officially became independent, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN begins with the history of his grandparents in Kashmir and then alludes to the killings of practioners of Gandhi's civil disobedience by British occupiers. Rushdie builds up considerable suspense as the timeline of his narrative approaches Sinai's birth. Afterwards, the novel deals with Saleem's upbringing, his coming of age, and a stint in Pakistan's army before returing to the heart of India. While the book could have used a more energetic editor and some parts drag, the final 200 pages of MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN make it entirely deserving of the heaps of praise showered on it so far. There are elements of magical realism in MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN, but often with a characteristically Indian twist. All of the surviving members of the 1001 children born at midnight of August 15, 1947 have special powers, in Saleem's case it is a form of telepathy that allows his to bring together telepathically the children of midnight in a conclave each evening. Towards the end of the novel Saleem encounters practioners of magic influenced by Hindu mysticism that impacts the plot immensely. But alongside the magical elements is astute commentary on the reality of modern India. Rushdie's tendency to always look at Pakistan (and Bangladesh) and India together, in spite of lines on a map, gives an interesting perspective to the culture and politics of the region. While Rushdie is always an entertaining author, his tendency to take an absurd amount of elements from other works of literature sometimes dilutes his originality. Much of MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN is taken from Gunter Grass' novel THE TIN DRUM, a book with which Rushdie claims inspired his to begin writing. Like Oskar Mazerath, Saleem Sinai is a young man of questionable paternity who has special powers and remains aloof from the madness of his age as he reports it. Saleem, just like the narrator of THE TIN DRUM, follows his mother to a cafe to watch an adulterous meeting, and instead of a tin drum Saleem refuses to be parted from a silver spitoon. While all authors are influenced by their predecessors, I found MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN to be far too unoriginal at times. Rushdie's later work is much better in this respect. I find THE SATANIC VERSES to be Rushdie's finest novel, and would recommend that to anyone who has not read his work before. It's a brilliant and excellently constructed roller-coaster (and I say that with no hyperbole) of a novel that is all the more important because of its impact on East-West relations of the late 80's and early 90's. After reading that, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN is a good choice for further Rushdie.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastically engaging and shockingly brilliant.
Review: When I first picked this book up, I really didn't like it. Who writes a novel where there narrator doesn't even get born until page 131? And I found the narrator's style of constantly dropping hints and alluding to what would come later to be irritating and distracting. It wasn't until I finished the first book (of 3), on page 137 or so, that I realized how brilliant the book is. From then on, it wasn't just about plot or style: I found myself hanging on every word the author said, over-analyzing everything (especially colors; blue is for god, red for communists and true feelings, green is for nostalgia) and wishing I had an annotated copy, since I didn't feel capable of keeping up with Rushdie's sprinting mind and style. It got to the point where after every chapter, I had to put the book down and take a deep breath. Every chapter feels laden and interlaced with symbolism that melds with rather than rises above (or sinks below) the plot. Rushdie's style is infectious. I found it obnoxious at first, but his mixing of standard English with Indian-referenced Hindi-tinted 'Babu English' to be completely endearing and fantastically comical. ("There was hankying and pankying? In the basement?? Without even chaperones?!") And the use of realistic fantasy-- describing unlikely actions in such a way that they seem plausible, with the narrator all the time apologizing for what seems unlikely, and informing you to believe it if you like-- pushes the story forward and makes it gripping. ("Purushottam the Saddhu grew tired of his sedentary lifestyle and developed the suicidal hiccups, which assailed him for an entire year, sometimes lifting him bodily off the ground two or three inches and causing his head to crack alarmingly against the garden tap; eventually he died and collapsed to one side, his legs still locked in the lotus position, and leaving my mother's verrucas without any hope of salvation.") And as a person who knew nothing about India or Pakistan and was never particularly interested in either, the book was a fantastic introduction to the extremely interesting events following India's independence. Overall, I can't think of a book I'd recommend more highly. It's definitely within my top 5 books I've ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: Switched off at 10pm
Review: I love the way Rushdie plays with language, so this is not at all a predictable, or mundane read. That doesn't make it easy, but for eighty percent of the book I was captivated by both the story and the writing. The use of Indian terms or colloquialisms, endearments was a bit frustrating and meant I was distanced from the culture being depicted not only by non-membership, but through language. But still, there are other places where the Indianness is hilarious and a testament to Rushdie's skills at evoking images. There is a description of the "actress with a mountain of fruit on her head" in the pictures in a peepshow ... "Lifafa called her Carmen Verandah" Verandah is a word which has found its way into English from India, and this verbal joke about a Latin American actress is lovely. Coming from a country where the verandah was adopted as part of the architectural vernacular, I have an uncommon fondness for verandahs, both the word and the concept! Then I got to within 80 pages of the end, and just couldn't get excited about finishing it. Somehow, I didn't really care any more. The best part of the storytelling was when Saleem was a child; somehow events filtred through childhood seemed more compelling. There is loads of symbolism; much of it just washed over me. I think Rushdie is a fine storyteller in his best passages, but other times merely pretentious. Absolutely worth reading, but I think it might encompass too great a time span, and be flawed for that
Rating: 
Summary: Yet another that I really wanted to like, but didn't
Review: This book should have been a favorite of mine, as it combines the overall concept of a small, misunderstood group of people with extraspecial powers (a la X-Men in the comics) with the style of Latin American magic realists (a la Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marques) and the literary theme of trying to make one thing match another (in this case, the life of Saleem Sinai with the history of India itself). But I found it much too slow, repetitive, and obtuse. Perhaps I needed an annotated version, so that I could appreciate it more? This is indeed very disappointing to me, as I think Rushdie's style of mixing the highbrow literary art with pop culture references and scatalogical content a refreshing change. I like it a lot more than literary pretension like that of New Yorker darlings Matt Klam. The problem really came down to the way that the style came together in that, while I found the story and the theme elements fascinating, I thought the sentences way too bloated, where entire sentences and paragraphs could easily have been cut. This is not to mention the repitition of earlier events in an underscore of the themes, that might have been useful if you were the type of reader who couldn't connect the dots the first time the lines were drawn. I also found the conceit of the narrator storyteller, and his impotence, to be a little too precious. Rushdie was walking the fine line of metastory and I felt he slipped off it way too much into a self-conscious parody of literary (...) I know I'm going to be in the minority on this one, for not only has Midnight's Children already won major awards, it's been virtually canonized by the Booker people as the best of the Bookers. Oh, well. I'll chalk yet another one up to the vagaries of taste. It's not that I don't think Rushdie can't write, but that his writing just doesn't work for me.
Rating:
Summary: An outstanding work with some outstanding buts
Review: This is an excellent and in some ways ground-breaking work. It deserves a lot of accolades, and I share many kudos from some previous reviewers. However, the work falls short of a masterpiece, for the following reasons. 1. It's too long. At a skilled and parsimonious hand, the novel could be half the length to tell the same story. 2. Mr. Rushdie has a tendency to flaunt the same (admittedly) good ideas or puns over and over again. Example: the perforated sheet, when first introduced, is ingenious, and the initial narration quite funny and touching. But it gets too many repeated airings later, as if Mr. Rushdie believes that the reader is too dumb to get the symbolism. 3. The work lacks subtlety. Mr. Rushdie writes exuberantly, which is a good thing. However, he often overdid it, making no room for personal discovery of hidden treasures. In other words, the feeling one has out of second and (rarely) third reading is the same-ol and not infrequently, a mild revulsion at literary exhibitionism. Mr. Rushdie's eagerness, in my opinion, has resulted in several shortcomings in the plot. For instance, revealing Mary's "crime" immediately after it was committed is not as good a strategy as delayed climax. 4. Some sybolism is confusing. Saleem is obviously portrayed as a symbol, witness, living (and then dying) embodiment of India with a Muslim heritage. But him being the bastard son of an Englishman and an accordianist's wife seems to confuse that. I can appreciate the implication that India is held up as a bastard of Britain by this parentage, but how that gets into the Muslim aspect is something I cannot sort out clearly (despite Saleem's upbringing by Amina, with a Christian twist through Mary). This lack of clarity, maybe intentional, is nonetheless a detraction from the novel, in my opinion. In totality, M/C is a very good novel, and its Booker of Bookers, in my opinion, is deserved, in the sense that other Bookers are mostly mediocre to good offerings. Some weaknesses evident in the novel (lack of patience and exhibitionist knack), sadly, foretells Mr. Rushdie's decline as an author.
Rating:
Summary: A Rare Gem
Review: Rarely in your lifetime will you come across a book where the author has mastered not only the delicate art of the english language, but the ultimate creative obstacle: the narrative. Salman Rushdie writes with such flourishing vocabulary the reader wonders if he wrote his masterworks with a Roget's Thesaurus in his lap.But it becomes evident that his colorful vocabulary is only surpassed by his ability to tell a colorful story, so vivid it rivals the paintings in the Louvre. Do not be overwhelmed with the number of characters, all of whom are relevant perhaps rather later than sooner. I cannot write much more in praise of this book, only to say that the feverish pace to which you read this book is the only testament you need to realize this truly important, beautiful, and moving read.
Rating:
Summary: Starts out slow, but after a while you can't put it down
Review: I have to admit I had a real problem with the beginning, it started out kind of slow. And there was also a bunch of characters, so many it was really hard to keep track of. But with careful reading, it went to to get more and more exciting, and after a while I simply couldn't put it down.
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