Midnight's Children

Can "a person's life be the mirror of a country"? To this question Rushdie responds not with a historical-biographical novel (the classic story of a family intertwined with that of a nation), but with a fantastical, imaginative, and astonishing tale.
The protagonist is born in Bombay at midnight on August 15, 1947, the day of India's independence, but also of Pakistan's separation: the so-called "partition."
And through this coincidence he has been mysteriously "tied to history" both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively.
Duality is the guiding thread of the narrative, of the protagonist's life as well as of the vast Indian subcontinent, characterized precisely by interdependence and diversity at once.
The author imagines that the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, narrates his family's story and his own up to 1984, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated.
Saleem's grandparents are Muslims originating from Kashmir, the "mother" of Indian Islam.
His grandfather, a Westernized doctor, had been called to treat his future wife, permitted to examine only parts of her body, which remained covered out of modesty.
He had therefore fallen in love "in pieces."
It is a primary metaphor that recurs frequently throughout the narrative: that of fragmentation.
Just as the

, the detachment of Pakistan weighed like a curse upon the new nation, leading to an endless conflict with India.
Saleem's grandparents have a daughter who, after her marriage, moved with her husband to Bombay in India, where Saleem was born.
At the moment of birth, the midwife swaps the couple's real child with Saleem, who thus usurps his place as a well-to-do child, while the other is destined for poverty.
Does independence, then, bear the mark of betrayal? On the day of Saleem's birth, a thousand children were born in India.
All possess extraordinary powers, and Saleem has the incredible faculty of communicating telepathically with them all: that is, he manages to forge in his mind an interdependence among distant children with entirely different languages and customs.
The mystery of this great country is metaphorically fulfilled—constituted, at the moment of independence, by over five hundred states and a religion, Hinduism, made up of thousands of local deities.
How can a country so vast and so fragmented hold together? In 1966 Nehru died, ushering in the era of Indira Gandhi, who introduced authoritarian rule culminating in the phase of the so-called Emergency, when she instituted an outright dictatorship.
Saleem's family moves to Pakistan, where they hope to be safer from discrimination and violence against Muslims.
Here, strangely, Saleem loses his telepathic powers (has Indira destroyed the unity of the country?).
He enlists in the Pakistani army and goes to fight in Bangladesh against the Indian army.
Having deserted the army, by then in total disarray, and after hiding in the jungle (a metaphor for the abyss into which India had fallen?), he flees to India, where he marries, lives in a village of acrobats and musicians, and takes up political activity, notably alongside a snake charmer.
He seems, perhaps, to have found his path, when Indira Gandhi's crackdown erupts and Saleem discovers that he is one of the few surviving children born on August 15, 1947,

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Alongside the bond between personal life and national history, the novel also confronts more intimate themes: Saleem's ugliness (afflicted by an enormous nose), his incestuous love for his half-sister, and the nostalgia for childhood, which, nevertheless, "disappears, or rather, is killed."
And the pride of childhood is precisely one of the most intriguing and universal themes of the book: the ability to hide and to travel in one's mind, through one's own imagination, creates a unity that does not exist in reality:

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As happens all too often with Rushdie, the pursuit of baroque, wondrous prose overpowers the narrative, which seems to become—especially in the final part of the book—merely an occasion for "special effects."
Already lengthy in its own right, difficult to follow—owing also to its references to Indian history—as one advances through the reading, one becomes completely lost in a deluge of words, neologisms, and complex, rhetorical syntactic structures.
One must allow oneself to be carried away by the prose, yet at times it is a struggle to read on.

Why read it? The core premise is truly remarkable, just as it remains a remarkably timely book for us Italians: the duality between interdependence and diversity, between unity and fragmentation, constitutes a defining trait of every Italian.
Having managed to depict this in imaginative terms represents the fundamental merit of the book.
As Paolo Bertinetti wrote in the daily newspaper La Stampa on August 12, 2017, the novel's greatest merit,

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