This book is very good. It is massive, and to spar with other books that are larger, it packs incredibly dense prose, each sentence extends your senses into the history, culture, and change of India through its early independence. With such an assortment of devices used, ranging from the lies of true geneology to telepathic powers of communcation between the children that were born at midnight – at the same hour that India became an independent nation, you are swept through not only a whirlwind of history, a but a trip through the concept of reading. Each aspect of the novel attacks from a different angle, always leaving one with some way to relate to our shattered narrator.

My complaint is the ending. Only because there are so many chapters of building energy, so many small subplots, so many tortured curries and broken heroes/parents that no conclusion can do this novel justice. At the very least, wrapping up life, before death, is premature, and possibly the ending to this novel – the ending to India as a nation? – the ending to the belief of being connected to a country? – is premature.

This novel captures insanity, urgancy, and self-belief, it showcases a range of historical events from the gigantic to the quickly forgotten, and it focuses in on the power of a single giant nose. Somehow inherted through conditioning between generations, the largest example of a wonderful moral to take away, the point of the novel is not what happened, it is the resulting memories, the story that can be passed on.

Fury, a novel written in 2001 by Salman Rushdie was my first actual encounter with his work. He has an unmistakable style and a great sense of how society and culture function on a day to day basis. Full commentary: Furies of Representation