Before Salman Rushdie had that problem with a certain religious-political figure with a serious need to chill out, he"d already shown he was an important literary force. Quite simply, Midnight"s Children is amazing--fun, beautiful, erudite, both fairy tale and political narrative told through a supernatural narrator who is caught between different worlds. Though it"s a big book, with big themes of India"s nationhood and of ethnic and personal identity, it"s far from a dry history lesson. Rushdie tells the story in his own brand of magical realism, with a prose of lyrical, transcendent goofiness.