Well, I finished it. I guess all it took was my public realization that I might not finish it to get me reading again. Note that I wrote that post yesterday and still had about halfway to go. I’ve done a good bit of reading over the past couple days.
The Satanic Verses is a long, hard read. Very long, very hard. My main problem with it is the plot is overly convoluted: I’m not quite sure about what exactly happened, and while I’d like to read it again to put it together, I know I won’t. I won’t be running back to Rushdie anytime soon, either. It’s not really what I expected, kind of like One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn’t. And the two novels have more in common: they’re both examples of magical realism, though Marquez‘s novel is much more convincing. And, in general, better.
If you want a thorough rundown of the plot of The Satanic Verses, I’ll direct you to Wikipedia because I couldn’t do it without writing much more than the short blog post I’ve planned. Rushdie’s novel consists of two-and-a-half storylines involving Bollywood actors Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, a plane crash, one turning into a goat, and one developing paranoid schizophrenia and possibly being, at some point, the Archangel Gabriel. And that’s only one of the plotlines. It ends up really confusing.
It’s not that it’s a bad novel: it’s just not as good as some people say it is. I have a feeling that a lot of people with strong opinions about it haven’t read it. I can totally see why Khomeini issued a fatwa to kill Rushdie: The Satanic Verses is fabulously blasphemous.
In Rushdie’s defense, the language is nice – even beautiful in some places. Here’s my favorite part:
The landscape of his poetry was still the desert, the shifting dunes with the plumes of white sand blowing from their peaks. Soft mountains, uncompleted journeys, the impermanence of tents. How did one map a country that blew into a new form every day?
And that’s about all I have to say about it. I didn’t really like it, though I didn’t hate it either. I might reread it someday and get more out of it: I have a feeling that if I did read it again, I’d like it more. Maybe an abridged version would suit me better, though.
