Midnights Children and Never Let Me Go

You could probably couldn't read two more different books one after each other than Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (my eng class text) and Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie. One is a massive book written in the magical realism style and has a political allegory. The other is a normal sized book which is chronicled through the memories and thoughts of it's main character. Yet like all antithesis's they have their similiarities.

Midnights Children is written through the eyes of Saleem Sinai who is telling his story to a group of women and is structured looking back at events at the past. The reliability of his story is deliberately put into question as he admits later he got the date of Gandhi's death wrong but later concludes "it happened that way because thats how it happened." This is tied also with Saleem being determined that he and his story will have meaning and thus he is careful to highlight the meanings and literal metaphors of life which are connecting his family with Indias larger history. This story is characterised by a change in tone often going from light hearted to serious and mixing self-glorification with self-depreciation.

Never Let Me Go is structurally similar to Midnights Children, being told through the eyes of Kathy H who is a clone in a boarding school for clones. The story takes us through her relations with other characters takes us through the different periods of her life. Unlike Midnights Children the story is deliberately told in dull bland prose and emphasised is the lack of meaning, lack of purpose and acceptance of it.

Read In Cold Blood by Capote

In Cold Blood was one of Capotes more famous books as it launched the genre of novelistic non-fiction. The book is written like a novel but is supposed to be all true, on the events leading up to and after the murder of the Clutter family by Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.

Maybe it's because I'm very interested in murder cases but I found it only mildly interesting. Capote shows good technical skills as a writer, but never quite knows where events in the book stand, is every thought Capote emits coming from characters heads as they go through events accurate? Almost impossible. If Capote has not taken artistic license he has god-like powers of making people remember places, events and thoughts in perfect photographic memory and getting a range of people to share them to him. Also other journalists suggest he made up passages and quotes to fit his story.