Midnight's Children
Voted the best Booker Prize winner of all time. Twice (1993 and 2008). Rushdie's panoramic novel of Indian independence, told through a narrator born at the exact moment of partition, fuses magical realism with postcolonial history in a voice of astonishing exuberance.
Nearly a third of the book passes before the narrator is born, grandparents and parents first, and that wait is where readers quit. The voice admirers call virtuosic reads to others as "the most pretentious thing I've ever read," a grandstander who casts himself as the center of a nation and interrupts every paragraph to say so. "No consideration for linearity or chronicity or the reader's sanity," one complains, another describing the effect as "having my brain inside a centrifuge." Women fare badly, with reviewers flagging "crass sexualisation, and careless violence towards women." The magical children who supply the title get introduced and then underused. And the Booker garland breeds backlash, a book "to be name-checked rather than really engaged with."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
