I interviewed Salman Rushdie in the Herrick Theatre at Albion College on Friday, April 25 at 9 a.m. This event followed Rushdie’s keynote address the night before at the college’s Elkin Isaac Student Research Symposium, which was itself followed by a question and answer session (of the 1300 in the keynote audience, some 100 submitted questions on index cards). The morning session was more relaxed and informal; of the hundred or so in attendance, most had read several of Rushdie’s books, so my questions explored literary themes. Since I was in the midst of teaching a Charles Dickens seminar during Rushdie’s visit, and since my students and I had recently explored parallels between David Copperfield and Midnight’s Children, I asked Rushdie both about these parallels and more general affinities between Dickens’s work and his own.             He acknowledged that the opening of Midnight’s Children echoes other narratives that begin with omens, portents, and what he called “omen(ous) births,” introducing characters whose lives will influence (and trouble) the stream of history—including David Copperfield. Both David and Saleem Sinai are born on the stroke of midnight; “some sage women” in David’s neighborhood foretell that as a result David “was destined to be unlucky in life . . . and privileged to see ghosts and spirits.”  David is also is born with a caul, which takes on a life of its own as it is bartered and traded throughout the region by and to those who believe it possesses magic powers.  Saleem, the more “world-historical” of the two characters, is born at the moment of India’s independence, “mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country”;  his preternaturally sensitive nose, like David’s caul, takes on a life of its own and foretells great changes in India’s history. Moreover, both novels are first-person Bildungsroman that have as much to say about national as personal identity (emphasizing, unwittingly in Dickens’s case and self-consciously in Rushdie’s, the historically contingent, “constructed” nature of both). Both are by turns comic, grotesque, and moving; both evoke and appropriate eastern and western traditions of fable and fairy tale; both are self-consciously digressive (Dickens ventriloquizes this awareness into the mouth of the woman who wins David’s caul at a raffle, and exits the novel in the fourth paragraph with the injunction “let us have no meandering”); and both are held aloft by the transformative magic of their author’s endlessly inventive imaginations.             More generally, Rushdie noted that in terms of narrative technique, Dickens provided both example and inspiration. Dickens, a “magical realist” before the term was invented, consistently creates what Rushdie calls “hyperrealistic settings,” based on his journalistic knowledge of nineteenth-century English society, into which he introduces outsized, often “surrealistic” characters who would appear absurd and strain the reader’s credulity if not for the realistic social milieu in which they live and act. It is this “marriage” of socio-historical fact and literary invention, Rushdie said, that helped light his own way forward as a novelist.