The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

2000, Picador USA

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Rating

Synopsis: Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

The Good: The title sounded interesting. It, plus the drama that the book caused, led me to believe that this would be something other than it was. Had it been anything I had imagined, it would have been better than this.

The Bad: As a banned book, one that the author had to risk his life to write and publish it, I was expecting something very different. The book is long, rambling and often doesn't seem to have any idea what's going on itself, never mind, me, the poor reader. Too literary for my tastes perhaps, and definitely a cultural barrier that wasn't quite able to translate to me. My reading of this book was something along the lines of saying "WTF is going on?" or some variation at least once a page for about 600 pages.