Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) influenced Midnight's Children

Rushdie has named the debt repeatedly and written an essay about it, and the two novels answer each other point for point:

• A family saga standing in for a nation's century, told by a narrator inside it
• The impossible reported in the same flat voice as the everyday, so nobody in the book is surprised
• Births timed to a political event, which then shape everything the children become
• A closing act that folds the telling back into the told

Rushdie's own qualification is worth keeping: he has said the real common source is the condition of writing from a place where the official history is not believed.