The Satanic Verses

So first off, hi, Katie graciously allowed me to join your group. If you don’t know me and want to know why you should trust my opinion on books anyway (because there are some people whose taste you question sometimes, right?), feel free to blog stalk me. Okay, now to the good stuff.

Salman Rushdie. Holy cow. 

Have any of you read The Satanic Verses before? Or any other Rushdie for that matter? Until I read this book (for a class, but let me tell you it’s the best book I’ve finished so far this year) I hadn’t been exposed to him before. His writing style is dense and overwhelming, but at the same time so rich and descriptive. I can’t describe it well, so here let me excerpt for you:

Bitterness, too, and hatred, all these coarse things. He would enter into his new self; he would be what he had become: loud, stenchy, hideous, outsize, grotesque, inhuman, powerful. He had the sense of being able to stretch out a little finger and topple church spires with the force growing in him, the anger, the anger, the anger. Powers.

He was looking for someone to blame. He, too, dreamed; and in his dreams, a shape, a face, was floating closer, ghostly still, unclear, but one day soon he would be able to call it by its name.

I am, he accepted, that I am.

Submission.

 

In short, I love the way he writes. He masters the English language so powerfully, it’s amazing. If you want a taste of him without committing yourself to a novel, read In the South or The Shelter of the World. Some short stories of his published in the New Yorker, and they are both excellent.

Okay, enough about Rushdie, now about the book itself. Again, masterfully written. It opens with a plane crash, and these two Indian actors tumble through the air toward London going round and round, one singing a famous pop song, the other singing Rule, Britannia. They are the only two survivors of the plane crash, and once they arrive back to earth one of them takes on the form of the angel Gabriel (his name is Gibreel) and the other becomes a devil. The novel then discusses how these transformations affect their lives as well as the lives of those around them. Rushdie discusses in great deal the ideas of transformation and rebirth (look for the phrase, “To be reborn, first you have to die.”), identity (“What kind of idea are you?”), immigration, religion, faith, agency, and what exactly good and evil are. There is some magical realism which enhances the story very effectively, there are numerous references to James Joyce (which I missed because I’m not super familiar with James Joyce), pop culture, and tons of religious references and imagery, of course. There were so many different ideas being explored at once that I really don’t think you can grasp the novel completely the first time around; I want to read it again.

There is, yes, the whole issue of the fatwa. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go here.) And I can see why some parts of the book could be offensive to devout Muslims. I can’t decide what I think about all of that, but either way, the book was phenomenal. I have to recommend it.

And I see you use five stars? I hate rating things, it’s hard for me, but I’d go with four out of five. Maybe four and a half.

It’s that good.