Even though Midnight's Children is an entirely original work, it is selfconsciously in a distinct narrative tradition which can be traced as far back as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759). In fact, Rushdie echoes Sterne's masterpiece on several occasions and styles his narrative on the earlier novel's transgressive, teasing, digressive, and nonlinear style. Moreover, Saleem Sinai's birth, physical oddness, sensitivity, and playfulness owe a great deal to Sterne's conception of his hero.

Midnight's Children also echoes other celebrated works of world literature.

Like Gunter Grass's Tin Drum (1959) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Rushdie's novel presents a national history through one family's extraordinary experience; and all three books employ the fantastic in the service of reality.

Saleem's gift for telepathy parallels the talent of Oscar, Grass's hero, for seeing through the surface; both characters survive the cataclysms of recent history in unique ways. From...