Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Sheer brilliance. Took an entire summer to get through this tome -- it's the kind of work you read slowly and with relish because every single sentence becomes ever more heavy-laden with references to previous events (historical as well as fictional) and metaphors, using artful ways of describing the mundane or the grotesque: tears down a face become mollusc slime, and sniper bullets are (at first) seemingly innocent, distant bees buzzing at the edge of a field.

One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. (4)

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. (121)

Obviously enough (because otherwise I should have to introduce at this point some fantastic explanation of my continued presence in this "mortal coil"), you may number me amongst those whom the war of '65 failed to obliterate. Spittoon-brained, Saleem suffered a merely partial erasure, and was only wiped clean whilst others, less fortunate, were wiped out; unconscious in the night-shadow of a mosque, I was saved by the exhaustion of ammunition dumps.

Tears -- which, in the absence of the Kashmiri cold, have absolutely no chance of hardening into diamonds -- slide down the bosomy contours of Padma's cheeks. "O, mister, this war tamasha, kills the best and leaves the rest!" Looking as though hordes of snails have recently crawled down from her reddened eyes, leaving their glutinous shiny trails upon her face, Padma mourns my bomb-flattened clan. I remain dry-eyed as usual, graciously refusing to rise to the unintentional insult implied by Padma's lachrymose exclamation.

"Mourn for the living," I rebuke her gently, "The dead have their camphor gardens." Grieve for Saleem! Who, barred from celestial lawns by the continued beating of his heart, awoke once again amid the clammy metallic fragrances of a hospital ward; for whom there were no houris, untouched by man or djinn, to provide the promised consolations of eternity -- I was lucky to receive the grudging, bedpan-clattering ministrations of a bulky male nurse who, while bandaging my head, muttered sourly that, war or no war, the doctor sahibs liked going to their beach shacks on Sundays. "Better you'd stayed knocked out one more day," he mouthed, before moving further down the ward to spread more good cheer. (397-398)

(New York: Penguin Books, 1980)