Midnight's Children

Elegant writing, but story without focus tumbles around without much intimacy of the characters

I was very interested to finally have time to read this book, given that Rushdie’s professional history is so unique and has taken on a life far beyond his authorship. While he is a creative and elegant writer, this book is, in the end, disappointing. It never leaves the shallowness within which magic realism can often wallow, loyal to the authors live of their own ideas, and thus one never really grows to care much about the characters or about any significant moral crux in the story. Each chapter just turns the page on the last and begins again to meander around in the unfenced whims of the writer and whatever he plucks from the notebook of ideas he dreamed through in graduate school. Overall, an undisciplined book in which important history is reduced to wispy, fantasy threads at every turn