Salman Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize winner, which I first read as a teenager, is still one of my favourite novels. Reviewing it when it was published, the Sunday Telegraph said that "India has found its Günter Grass" and Midnight's Children does have some similarities with Grass's best known work, The Tin Drum: the "magic realism"; a country divided into three with the main character, Saleem, forced to cross and recross its new borders; taste and smell as metaphors for political history.
Although the film skips over some parts of the plot (communalism in Bombay, conflicts between pro-Moscow and pro-Peking Communists, Saleem's experiences as a soldier in the 1971 war in East Pakistan/Bangladesh), it's generally faithful to the novel (unlike the film version of The Tin Drum which ends halfway through the book) and benefits from Rushdie's collaboration with director Deepa Mehta and a voice-over of him reading from his novel.
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