Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children

'No, tell, Taiji, how old, truly?' And now a brandy bottle, materializing from nowhere: cheap liquor from the folds of the great warm chugha-coat. Then a shudder, a belch, a glare. Glint of gold. And - at last! - speech. 'How old? You ask how, you little wet-head, you nosey . . .' Tai, forecasting the fisherman on my wall, pointed at the mountains. 'So old, nakkoo!' Aadam, the nakkoo, the nosey one, followed his pointing finger. 'I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen Emperors die. Listen. Listen, nakkoo . . .' - the brandy bottle again, followed by brandy-voice, and words more intoxicating than booze - '. . . I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head.

I'm up to p.47 so far. It's been entertaining, but the prose is quite dense, and I need to read it in short bursts. The prose is packed with wordplay and plot twists and digressions slipped in by the prominent narrator. It's very much written in the style of a master storyteller, before that term got so cheap. He was halfway through telling of the story his birth by the first sentence. Two chapters in, even though we've been moving forward the whole time, we're still two generations from finding out.

The question is, can he keep it up?