The New Yorker:

By V. S. Pritchett

July 19, 1981

In Salman Rushdie, the author of “Midnight’s Children” (Knopf; $13.95), India has produced a glittering novelist—one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling. Like García Marquez in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he weaves a whole people’s capacity for carrying its inherited myths—and new ones that it goes on generating—into a kind of magic carpet. The human swarm swarms in every man and woman as they make their bid for life and vanish into the passion or hallucination that hangs about them like the smell of India itself. Yet at the same time there are strange Western echoes, of the irony of Sterne in “Tristram Shandy”—that early nonlinear writer—in Rushdie’s readiness to tease by breaking off or digressing at the gravest moments. This is very odd in an Indian novel! The book is really about the mystery of being born and the puzzle of who one is. Rushdie’s realism is that of the conjurer who, in a flash, draws an incident out of the air and then makes it vanish and laughs at his cleverness. 

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