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The Satanic Verses: A Novel

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Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$16.00~~
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Seller: MVAW BOOKS
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

235 reviews
Sales Rank: 8,889

Media: Paperback
Pages: 576
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.5 x 1.3

ISBN: 0812976711
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780812976717
ASIN: 0812976711

Publication Date: March 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

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Features:

•	ISBN13: 9780812976717
•	Condition: New
•	Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Also Available In:

•	Hardcover - Satanic Verses (First American Edition)
•	Hardcover - The Satanic Verses
•	Hardcover - The Satanic Verses
•	Hardcover - The Satanic Verses
•	Unknown Binding - Collection law in Missouri
•	Paperback - The Satanic Verses: A Novel (Bestselling Backlist)
•	Paperback - The Satanic Verses
•	Audio CD - The Satanic Verses
•	Hardcover - The Satanic Verses
•	Paperback - The Satanic Verses
•	Library Binding - Satanic Verses
•	School & Library Binding - Satanic Verses (Bestselling Backlist)
•	Paperback - The Satanic Verses
•	Hardcover - The Satanic Verses
•	Paperback - The Satanic Verses

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The 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.

Product Description
One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times.

Customer Reviews:

Showing reviews 1-5 of 235

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over my head July 21, 2010
Caraculiambro (La Mancha and environs)
1 out of 7 found this review helpful

Well, this book is famous you-know-why.

But if you put all that aside and address it purely on its artistic merits, there's not much here. It's crammed with allusions, hallucinatory episodes, and flat characters.

Maybe I'm just angry because I found this book simply too difficult to read. I couldn't make it more than halfway through. But I'm slaggin' on it here because, unlike other difficult books that I couldn't finish, at no point did I ever discern that the difficulty of the novel was founded on a core of literary excellence. What I mean is that if you were to get turned off by reading, say, William Gaddis, Propertius, or David Jones, you'd at least have the satisfaction of suspecting that there really was something behind the curtain, something worthwhile that beckoned you to return when you were ready. I didn't get that with this book.

Another reviewer warns that "knowledge of Islam and Indian culture" is essential before attempting this. I agree: only problem is that life's too short, and even if you were to somehow gain the requisite knowledge, I have a hunch you'd still find this book disappointing. I guess one of these days, somebody will come out with an edition of this with extensive footnotes, and we'll more or less be able to judge at that point.

5 out of 5 stars

A satire on the never-ending delusions of humanity July 16, 2010
Dennis Littrell (SoCal)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This is a tour de force, a show of strength, a performance. It's the sort of novel that requires a Big Style and a lot of learning to write. It's not the sort of thing that can be attempted by just anybody.

I could not write this book. Few people besides Rushdie could even attempt it. It is stamped with the mark of the man himself--his culture, his milieu, his education, his beliefs, his passion and his experience.

And what are "The Satanic Verses"? They are lyrical yearnings made verbal depicting the clash between the world of rationality and that of superstition, between the world at the time of the Prophet and today's world, between the cold fog of England and the hot sweat of India and the Middle East, between the rationality of the Enlightenment and the mythology of a time long ago, between a secular interpretation of life and a religious one. In short there really is a clash of civilizations that is being worked out in today's world, and Rushdie is here to give us his take on this earth-shaking process.

Normally I would not read such a novel. Five hundred and sixty-one pages--over 200,000 words! Life is too short to give that much time to a singular view. Better to risk the time on Tolstoy, Melville or Joyce where one has the report of literary history as a guide. Here we have a novel reviled and revered but only a little over 22 years of age. A lot of flash and glimmer goes by the way of the popular mind toward something Great, but in time may be more clearly seen as pedestrian, even banal, faddish and brought before our eyes by the celebrity of some event--like a sentence of murder upon its author--only to fade with the yellowing of the newspapers of yesteryear.

I will say however that "The Satanic Verses" will outlive its author and will outlive the memory of the Ayatollah Komenini who did in fact issue a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death, and thereby greatly increased not only the sales of the book but helped to spread Rushdie's message that Islam is a religion full of evil, lies and deceit, born like most religions from the very human lust for power. It will stay in print for decades and remain a torn in the side of the followers of the Prophet until they lose their hatreds, their prejudices and especially their fears. Yes, Islam fears. It fears science, education, Western culture, women and much of what constitutes the post-modern world. Unlike learned arguments and reasoned debates or shouting matches that change no minds, this novel will persuade many (mostly young) minds that a religion born in the barren, superstitious desert, sired by the tribal mentality of the Bronze Age, and forced upon others by the sword has no more relevance to today's problems and challenges than the religions it replaced.

The problem for the reader is not the length of the novel. It is in the fact that few readers will have the background necessary to appreciate much of the references, allusions, puns, jokes, asides, and other bits of wordsmithing from the very cosmopolitan and worldly Salman Rushdie. But no matter. It will require some effort of attention and concentration, some very real investment of time and effort on the part of the reader; but as the pages turn and the fantasy begins to stand out from the realism, as the time of Mahound clashes clearly with the time of an Indian/Muslim Bollywood actor, as the Ayesha of ancient is differentiated from the Ayesha of today, as the Gibreel of the film is made distinct from the Gibreel of legend--indeed as the web of mystery and magic, of fact and fantasy, of goats and gods becomes a fabric like a woven rug of artistry, one begins to appreciate Rushdie's intent and artistry. And this is the way it is with all great works of literature: there are levels. On the level of the mass mind, there is a world of people and events; on the level of the initiated, there is added a rich vocabulary of shared intellectual experiences. But Rushdie is no dry intellectual novelist: he can create intriguing characters and the tension necessary to sustain a narrative.

Now what is needed (I believe) for all but the most learned readers is a guide to the novel written by someone who knows Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, modern culture and has a good grasp of their histories. Such a guide will be written by some academic somewhere--and indeed may have already been written, or is being written.

And so I read the novel from beginning to end and found it uneven and marvelous, a bit obtuse at first but as my familiarity with Rushdie's intent, style, and structure grew, so too did my enjoyment of this rich satire. Yes, this is a satire similar in intent to the works of Voltaire or Twain however distant in style they may be. It is a satire upon not only Islam and Hinduism and the mass culture from Dhaka to Manchester, but a satire on the never-ending delusions of a pitiful, but ever hopeful humanity.

3 out of 5 stars

A Very Challenging Read April 20, 2010
Kenny of LA (Los Angeles, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Lauded on the cover of Satanic Verses is the statement: "#1 NEW YOUR TIMES BESTSELLER." I have to believe that boast addresses the number of books sold and not the number read. I consider myself to be a fairly well-educated, sophisticated reader, but found this to be a most difficult book to read--and to complete.
My difficulty arose from several factors:
1. The book assumes (requires?) a working knowledge and appreciation of, Islam and Arabic culture--which I lack. Not only are there undoubtedly many nuances lost on the uninitiated, but these gaps in knowledge can make the various stories difficult to follow, understand and/or appreciate.
2. To further complicate matters, this book is "a frame story." As defined in Wikepedia, "a frame story (also anatomy, frame tale, frame narrative, etc.) employs a narrative technique whereby an introductory main story is composed, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage for a fictive narrative or organizing a set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story." Each of the stories are independent, but yet, interrelated (again, nuances lost heightened by the lack of background). To exacerbate the problems associated with this challenging structure, several of the stories have completely different characters living in different cities and eras with the same names as in other stories. I suspect this was done for literary effect, which effect was largely lost on me.
3. Rushdie has a unique writing style, that takes some getting used to.
4. Finally, the stories are largely told from the viewpoint of an Indian immigrant in England. While there are some universal themes that can be appreciated by any reader, regardless of background, there are others that would no doubt be more meaningful to some readers sharing ethnic or national backgrounds.
Notwithstanding these rather meaningful obstacles, I found large stretches of several stories to be quite compelling. I was able to enjoy the book as a series of several independent short stories, as opposed to the unified novel it was no doubt written to be. Unfortunately, reading the novel in this manner prevented me from appreciating the larger themes Rushdie no doubt intended to present to the reader.
(In all fairness to Rushdie, there is absolutely no reason to expect that he would dumb down the book for me--particularly since there are study guides for this book readily available on the internet. I guess I just didn't want to work that hard.)

5 out of 5 stars

More applause for Salman April 14, 2010
R. Wetherall (Fort Myers, Fl)
An exciting trip through real and visionary worlds--with enough characters and scene changes to keep you challenged. Rushdie's sly sense of humor allows him to poke fun at his world with biting clarity. Part nonsense with a mock-serious facade--from the incredible opening sequences to the somber/comedic finale. Enjoy the dream.

5 out of 5 stars

To Be Born Again, You Must First Die March 31, 2010
JMack (Chicago)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

As other reviewers have noted, it is imperative that the reader have an understanding of Middle Eastern Culture, particularly India and the Muslim world, before engaging in this book. Because the pages of this book are so busy, it is easy to miss important bits, while struggling with the obvious. I found it helpful to use internet "primers" as I read the book, giving me a better appreciation.

To some, the title of this book is enough to discourage reading. Yet the title is a clever reference to verses in the Qur'an that allegedly allow for prayers of intercession to pagan goddesses. As the story evolves, this reference makes sense. Some may see the story itself as blasphemous, yet it is a work of fiction and should be treated as such.

The plot follows Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, both actors of Indian Muslim background. Both are trapped in a hijacked plane which explodes over the English Channel. They survive and undergo a miraculous transformation, with Farishta taking on the persona of the archangel Gibreel, and Chamcha taking on the persona of a devil. As the two struggle to regain their previous lives, the story is interrupted by Gibreel's dream sequences which parallel revelations in faith. Even as the stories of the two diverge, fate brings their stories back together with motives that fit their characters.

At times, the novel seems to run too long and elements of the plot border on absurdity. Looking at the novel as being a main story and dream sequences, the novel could almost be presented as several smaller stories/novels. For many, the novel will not be an easy read because of dealings in the abstract. Other can appreciate it even if they did not full understand it.

Showing reviews 1-5 of 235

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