قصة الكتاب :
\"Midnight\'s Children\" (1981) is a novel by Salman Rushdie, a British Indian author. In 1981 Rushdie\'s novel was awarded the 1981 Booker prize. In 1993 it was also awarded the \"Booker of Bookers\" Prize, and the best all-time prize winners to celebrate the Booker Prize 40th anniversary. Rushdei\'s major works include \"Shame\", \"The Jaguar Smile\" and \"Satanic Verses\".
\"Midnight Children\" addresses the history of independence of the British colony India and its tragic aftermath that caused the partition of Pakistan from India. This tragic chapter of the subcontinent\'s history was punctuated with displacement, destruction and uprooting. Rushdie\'s novel is an archetype of postcolonial literature presented through a marvellous structure of magic realism technique.
The protagonist, who is also a first-person narrator, is Saleem Sinai. He was born at midnight, August 15, 1947, exactly the time when the independence of India and partition of Pakistan announced. Saleem was born with telepathic gifts, enormous dripping nose, and strong smell sense. Latter, Saleem noticed that those who were born in India at the same night between 24:00 pm and 01:00 am enjoy these powers too. He decided to conduct a conference that gives forum to them so they can discuss local political issues that had faced India since the early hours of its independence. Some of the Saleem\'s conference members are more gifted than the others; this is believed to be caused by the intervention of some Indian Goddesses.
In his narration Saleem visits the history of his family and the multiple migrations and conflicts that have changed the course of their lives when they ended up exiled in the jungle of Sundarban, where Saleem is reendowed with his memory after a period of amentia. Saleem registers the deeds of Prime Minster Indira Ghandi who is given the name \"emergency\", as well as the deeds of her son Sanjay who led a cleansing of the Jama\'s mosque and the slum around it. This violent incident costs Saleem his telepathic powers. He is then imprisoned and left only with his feverish desire to relate the incidents of his life and his generation.
What makes this work a prominent postcolonial literature is its shrewd depiction of the dynamics that resulted in the independence war whether military, civic or non-violent. The novel also addresses the colonial legacy of societal cleavages that undermined the original nature of the peoples of India. Thanks to colonialism, the successive governments were no better than colonialism. These myriad aspects are narrated using magic realism, a technique established by the anticolonial Latin American literature spearheaded by Garcia Marquez.