Midnight's Children
A Novel
(Sprache: Englisch)
Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriously 'handcuffed to history' by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent -...
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Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriously 'handcuffed to history' by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent - and whose privilege and curse it is to be both master and victims of their times. Through Saleem's gifts - inner ear and wildly sensitive sense of smell - we are drawn into a fascinating family saga set against the vast, colourful background of the India of the 20th century.
Klappentext zu „Midnight's Children “
Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's independence, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs, and telepathic powers link him with the other children born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.
Lese-Probe zu „Midnight's Children “
The Perforated SheetI WAS BORN in the city of Bombay once upon a time. No, that won t do, there s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it s important to be more On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn t even wipe my own nose at the time.
Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, overused body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning yes, meaning something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives;
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and to know me, just the one of me, you ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the center, clutching at the dream of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame, I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.
(The sheet, incidentally, is stained too, with three drops of old, faded redness. As the Quran tells us: Recite, in the name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood.)
One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history. Unaware of this at first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled the prayer-mat into a thick cheroot, and holding it under his right arm surveyed the valley through clear, diamond-free eyes.
The world was new again. After a winter s gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow. The new grass bided it
(The sheet, incidentally, is stained too, with three drops of old, faded redness. As the Quran tells us: Recite, in the name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood.)
One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history. Unaware of this at first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled the prayer-mat into a thick cheroot, and holding it under his right arm surveyed the valley through clear, diamond-free eyes.
The world was new again. After a winter s gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow. The new grass bided it
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Autoren-Porträt von Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Salman Rushdie
- 2006, 560 Seiten, Masse: 13,4 x 20,3 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Random House UK
- ISBN-10: 0812976533
- ISBN-13: 9780812976533
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
In Salman Rushdie, India has produced a glittering novelist one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling. The New YorkerA marvelous epic . . . Rushdie s prose snaps into playback and flash-forward . . . stopping on images, vistas, and characters of unforgettable presence. Their range is as rich as India herself. Newsweek
Burgeons with life, with exuberance and fantasy . . . Rushdie is a writer of courage, impressive strength, and sheer stylistic brilliance. The Washington Post Book World
Pure story an ebullient, wildly clowning, satirical, descriptively witty charge of energy. Chicago Sun-Times
This brash, knowing, massive, aggressive novel is to modern India what Günter Grass s The Tin Drum is to modern Germany. The New York Times Book Review
Dazzling . . . In combining past with present, nostalgic realism with mythic overtones, specific detail with complex and binding narrative devices, Rushdie has achieved a magnificent and unique work of fiction. The Philadelphia Inquirer
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