"I admire Salman Rushdie enormously. Before Midnight's Children, writers of Indian origin writing in English were encouraged by convention to write of their world with detachment and irony. Their method was reductive. They treated their characters as though they were uncomplicated. With Midnight's Children, Rushdie breaks down those conventions. He aggrandizes, and that's marvellously healthy. The sections on Bombay have a superb excess of energy. Many of the writers before him tried, very unfortunately, to "tame" India for foreign readers. The other interesting thing about Salman Rushdie is that he discards British models. His fiction is closer to that of Günter Grass and Márquez than to Forster."