Salman Rushdie; The Satanic Verses
Things are closing in on me. Gibreel was drifting towards him, like India when, having come unstuck from the Gondwanaland proto-continent, it floated towards Laurasia. (His processes of mind, he recognized absently, were coming up with some pretty strange associations.) When they collided, the force would hurl up Himalayas. What is a mountain? An obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an effect.
I've been wanting to recommend this book for some time, but I thought it best that I actually finish reading it first. Like many Rushdie novels, I got about a hundred pages into it and then began to be sidetracked by other books. Eventually, as always, I returned to it and then could not put it down until it was finished.
The book concerns, for us gora who do not know such things, the controversial verses that some Islamic scholars consider apocryphal. The verses show the Prophet (on whose name be peace) in a less flattering light than is traditional, namely that he was capable of political compromise. Such an idea certainly strikes anyone who has been paying attention lately as quite unusual indeed. Unusual enough as to incur the fatwa-death sentence on Rushdie just for writing a fiction novel about it.
But what often gets lost amid the maelstrom of religious uproar about the book is that it isn't only about theses verses. In point of fact, these verses are only a motif that Rushdie uses in the telling of a very moving story of jealousy, loss, and narcisssism.
I won't bother summarizing the plot, other than to mention that one should not be bothered to read any of the dust-jacket summaries. Any such summary would be like summing up Moby Dick by mentioning that whales exist. The story is told from many the perspectives of many characters (though not so many as to make it Pynchonesque) and from half a dozen time frames.
To be honest, I'm not sure if it's solipsism or great writing, but Rushdie often makes me feel as though he were writing for either me specifically or the several dozen or so people that think just like he does, and so I cannot give a blanket recommendation for this book. Those of us who align ourselves with Salahuddin Chamchawala doubtless get something greater out of the text. That said, I think there is enough here for pretty much anyone to get something out of the text; if not through identification with, then at least opposition to.
If you are already sold on this book and intend to go buy it no later than tomorrow morning, read no further, as I intend to quote a passage that while reveals no "spoilers," does move one considerably more while encountered during the reading of the text. If you are not sold, however, this might sell you. And if you have no intention of reading it whatsoever, then I urge you all the more to keep reading. In addition to being a passage of undeniable beauty, it was particularly moving to me.
Alone, he all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they'd both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, its colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, smashing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. 'Tell her,' he said to the emissaries, 'that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.' The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven's sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at the last? They had lost a lifetime's friendship; could they not even say goodbye? 'No,' said the unforgiving man. 'Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?' 'It was the vase,' he answered, 'the vase, and nothing but.' Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. 'Nobody can judge an internal injury,' he had said, 'by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.'
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