This item is currently not available. If you have this item,
Join and post it to share with others.
No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie'sThe Satanic Verses, which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's powers of invention are astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner.
solid, but far from his best Having read a fair portion of Rushdie already, I came to the Satanic Verses with high expectations, but this book can't be placed alongside many of his other works. This is not to say that it is lacking in merit, but it certainly doesn't reach the heights he reaches elsewhere. In this respect, it compares to his more recent work Fury. If the ramifications hadn't been so serious, I would be inclined to dismiss the political dimensions of the work outright. More virulent charges against religion are commonplace.
Not Indian, Not Muslim, Not British Educated For me, this book was interesting and very different, but I can't say I enjoyed it. Not being a British educated Indian Muslim, much of the context was beyond my reach. Why was there so much fuss over this book? My curiosity drove me to read it, but reading it didn't answer the question. Imagine being an Arab Muslim reading the Da Vinci Code and trying to understand the fuss over that book. If you liked Joyce's Ulysses and have time to devote to the unusual, you may enjoy Satanic Verses. But, if you don't like it after the first 100 pages or so, you might as well quit. Other reviewers have covered the basic plot, so I won't duplicate their effort.Rushdie's cup runneth over Explaining Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" is like trying to describe a Persian carpet to somebody who's never seen one: There are so many tiny, crazy designs interlocking with each other and contributing to the overall impression of exotic elegance and grandeur that it's difficult to know where to start. The novel itself begins with a bang--in the air, as a commercial jet traveling from Bombay to London explodes over the English Channel, sending all its passengers plummeting earthward, and proceeds from this ominous introduction to tell a multitude of fabulous stories linking the ancient with the modern.
The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, both Indian Muslims, both actors of unequal fame and fortune, both tied socially, culturally, and romantically to England, are among the passengers on the hapless plane and miraculously survive the descent, affected by the near-death experience in very different ways. Gibreel, who became India's most famous movie star playing elephant- or monkey-headed gods in "theological" films, is convinced he is "born again" and hallucinates that he is the archangel Gibreel, dictating divine decrees to a prophet in a cave and monitoring a pilgrimage to Mecca, and then that he is the exterminating angel Azraeel, who roams the streets of a riotous London sounding his horn of death.
Saladin, on the surface so much like Gibreel, becomes his antithesis and even his nemesis after certain revelations. Desiring to escape his ridiculous parents, Saladin came to London from Bombay at thirteen to attend school, became a struggling actor whose only employment opportunities were in campy commercials and television shows, and married a brittle English woman. After the aerial calamity and detainment by sadistic immigration officers, he undergoes a bizarre metamorphosis before discovering that his wife is having an affair with his old college friend Jumpy Joshi, a former nerdy radical who now teaches martial arts.
Gibreel's phantasmagorical dreams take him centuries back to a city called Jahilia in an unnamed desert where a vociferous businessman named Mahound receives holy messages from a visitant angel (Gibreel), assumes the role of a prophet instructed by God, and founds a religion called "Submission." The city's Grandee, threatened by this man's rising influence among the citizens, commands the poet Baal to satirize Mahound in verse and oppresses the adherents of the new religion until they flee Jahilia. After many years in exile, Mahound returns to Jahilia in a position of power, usurps control of the city, overturns its polytheism in deference to "Submission," and sentences Baal to death for mocking him, taunting the poet with an insinuatingly snide parting statement as guards drag him away to be executed.
A separate but related narrative tells of a contemporary pilgrimage to Mecca by a village of Indian Muslims led a bewitching girl named Ayesha who says they must travel only on foot and persuades them that the waters of the Arabian Sea will part for them to cross. The village zamindar (landholder) thinks this is madness and tries to stop them, especially his wife, who believes the pilgrimage will cure her terminal cancer. A wonderful tale of miracles, faith, and tragedy ensues in which Rushdie contrasts rural and urban Indian life and the vestiges of British colonial India.
Although his scenes often tend to the macabre or the violent, Rushdie is at heart a comedian, making his novel funnier than it needs to be by giving his characters and their actions almost cartoonish dimensions to respond to the outlandish world they inhabit. In a sense he is following the tradition of the English comic picaresque novelists of the eighteenth century, imagining great landscapes of the wildest possibilities and conjuring panoramic perspectives of being an Indian in England, of being a Muslim in India, of being an angel on earth or in your mind. Just beware that, as one character says, metaphors can and will be misinterpreted.
