The Satanic Verses is vastly imaginative and creative; it is a force to be reckoned with in the literary world providing you can actually get through it. And there’s the rub because The Satanic Verses is quite possibly the single most confusing piece of fiction I have ever read. I’m just not sure what happened. And after 500+ pages I feel like a book should leave me with a little more than an overbearing sense of bewilderment. Perhaps if I was more widely read I would have appreciated it more. T...

What kind of idea are you?This question, scattered throughout the pages of this novel, is the intermediary between the author and his work. A waterloo of sorts, a windbreaker giving rise to the question of the material’s purpose. It gives us some sort of glimpse as to why he chose to name it “Satanic Verses”, insight to all its diabolical implications, and some sort of motive as to why it is disrespectful to Islam and the Prophet. So what kind of an idea is this? In turn, what kind of idea are w...

People jumping into this book blindly may soon find themselves wishing they had informed themselves somewhat beforehand. I must claim an embarrassing ignorance about just about every aspect of this daunting work at the outset: I had only the faintest whisper of a memory of having heard the phrase "satanic verses" outside of a discussion of the ever-present religiously-sanctioned hit out on the author's life. I had very little knowledge of Indian culture and none regarding the cross-cultural expe...

I never got past page 60 in this book. I read and forgot and reread and forgot again up unto about the fifth reading when I thought to myself that I might rate Midnight's Children as one of the greatest books I've read, enjoyed the depiction of Benazir Bhutto as the Virgin Ironpants in Shame a great deal, but I also couldn't read Shalimar the Clown and thought that Grimus was excreble (not even Rushie rated this first offering of his oeuvre). So what was I doing trying so hard with the Satanic V...

Occasionally, I will go into Half Price Books and buy a book that hasn't been recommended by any one I know, by an author I've never read before, solely because of its "critical acclaim." I buy and read a book because I feel that I should, based on the general public's reaction to it. It is a weakness. Many months ago, I decided to buy Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. My decision was based on the controversy surrounding the book. It was thought to be so controversial, so blasphemous, that Ay...

Here's the thing about this book that you will immediately grasp from what everyone says: it's a beast. I do not mean this in a bad sense. I mean this in the sense that it's overwhelming. It's long, complex (storylines that involve overlapping characters and storylines that don't overlap in time or space at all), dense and occasionally slow. It is not for the reader with ADD. No matter how quickly you think you might read, reading this book will slow you down. No matter how determined you are to...

Unfortunately, most people know this book from the scandal and fatwa it generated around the personage of its prolific and outspoken author Salman Rushdie rather than the book itself. The thing that enraged some Muslims (and the Ayatollah of Iran most of all) was Rushdie's hypothesis that Mohammed, being completely illiterate and having the Qu'ran being narrated to him by Archangel Gabriel could have dozed off at one point and that Satan could have impersonated Gabriel without Mohammed noticing

This is controversial book because of the social context rooted in the story. It didn't take me finishing the book to understand why Salman Rushdie was/is a hated man. Having studied extensively Arab/Middle Eastern/Islamic culture and being a former Arabic linguist, I was able to zero-in on what was being written. The controversy of the Satanic Verses from a historical perspective is a whole other discussion. I am not confident to discuss them so I'm sticking to a book review.The title is taken

I'm giving this four stars because I acknowledge the importance of what this book has to say. The importance does not outweigh the fact that Rushdie does the "oh look how badly they treat women they must be bad!" dance while amassing almost a dozen girlfriends in the refrigerator and a couple personas whose bad ass character definition is completely subsumed by their (male) lover's plot lines, but stands alongside it, equally worthy of mention. It's a balancing of my importance as a self with my...

This book is not for the faint of heart. It is overwhelming in terms of plot, imagery, and its large cast of characters. However, it is completely worth it and it flows beautifully once you get in tune with the book. I bought the Satanic Verses when I was 17 and I was not ready for it--I read 15 pages and then put it away. I picked it up again 7 years later and could not put it down. There is just....so much packed into this book. One would have to read it many many times to get the full meaning...

Rather spooky reading at the time of the Rushdie fatwa. Deserves a reread. It really is better than the three stars I’ve given it. It was a little over my head when I read it.

This is the third Rushdie book that I have read and he has a way of making me feel not smart enough to really get his books so I have a hard time rating them. This one has been on and off my reading radar for at least 25 years. I remember all the controversy surrounding it when it came out and the fatwa that was placed on the author. I found I was more interested in the circumstances and the author than I was the actual book so I never read it.Picking it up now I expected it to be somewhat dated...

Satanic Verses: A CompositionHe had just finished his thirty-fourth reading of the play. The unsaid hate, the unseen events, the half-imagined wrongs; they tormented him. What could cause such evil to manifest, he just could not figure. He loved him too much to believe the simple explanation.And then the idea starts growing on him - to explore the growth of evil just as Shakespeare showed, explored the tragic culmination of it. And because you show the growth, it can no longer be a tragedy, no,

From the archives: September 27 1988The Satanic Verses, the controversial first draft of the Quran recently discovered after spending 1379 years in a safe deposit box, finally appeared yesterday to a mixed reception. "Wheeeeee! I'm so excited!!" said one fan who had spent all night lining up outside her local Barnes & Noble. "A new book by Allah! Can you believe it?!" Other readers are however less enthusiastic about the novel, and take exception to its portrayal of the much-loved character Moha...

Salman Rushdie uses excessive language to cloud discordant plots, has a part-time occupation of scouring the news to write op-eds about evil Muslim organizations he reads about, and is obsessed with celebrity. Rushdie strangles his plot in The Satanic Verses by hitching every development to a forced and unnecessarily long description or metaphor. His overwriting prevents the development of narrative flow. He even returns to more metaphors about the same topic sometimes, like when he writes about...

Life is too short to endure bad fiction.The story started out interesting enough, with the characters literally falling out of the sky. It took me a awhile to get into the story, but I finally did. The problem was that every time you managed to get a hold of the basic underlying narrative it would evaporate and be replaced by a nonsensical dream sequence. The transitions between the two realities was so seamless that you frequently find yourself lost. Add all of that to the fact that you are try...

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.” I’ve been meaning to read this novel for years, ever since I first read his other magnificent novel “Midnight’s Children“, and the wait was worth it, it is not disappointing in any sense of the word.My one problem is that I expected this to be an novel set in ancient times, as I thought it had a bigger focus on ancient deities and Islam in general, instead I was greeted by a fantastic study on what is like to be alienated, as an

I can't really review Rushdie's work. I don't understand everything he writes about. But I do love him because his language and his prose and his stories are just so Indian.He writes lushly, extravagantly, with story tripping over story, subplot over sub sub plot. Characters tromp through with no regard for their antecedents. The colors are candy pink, good luck red, and Aegean blue, and everything is crashing and tumbling into each other.And on top, his stories are amusing, mischievous, clever,...

I have decided that it's time for me to leave this book. I have tried to stick with it. It jumps around way to much, has too many moments of abstract non-sensical story inserts and I often feel as though I have ADD when I pick it up. I always have to read the last few pages I read the time before in hopes of refreshing myself for the current reading session. Unfortunately because the book is so abstract, new characters constantly appear as if they have been there all along, causing immediate dis...