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Apr 05, 2010

Choupette rated it:

It's unlike me to re-read a book so soon after I finished it the first time (the last time I read this was at the end of 2008). Usually I'd wait at least a couple of years before re-reading any book, even one I loved. And despite the four-star rating, this was not a book I loved. So when it came up on the shortlist of books for my book club, I was seriously annoyed because I knew that people would vote for it, they would vote for it because of its notoriety, and then they would read it and if th More...

26 comments like (51 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Max rated it:

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 cont More...

10 comments like (28 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Cam rated it:

At the outset, all that l that I knew about this book was that Iranian clerics had issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death back in the 1980's for 'insulting the Prophet and Islam.' The reason (and this I learned from the book) is an old Islamic legend that Muhammed briefly relaxed his strict monotheism to allow a second goddess in his religion--doing so for self-serving, political reasons, but as usual ascribing the shift to his divine revelations. After he had consolidated power, he reject More...

6 comments like (8 people liked it)

Dec 10, 2007

Stanka rated it:

I'm doing my best not to think "Here goes Rushdie again." I never read this one before although I read every other book he ever wrote. And now, to fill the gap, I am stuck with the last unread jewel, except that it's somehow lackluster because Salman doesn't age or accumulate well. I mean, the more you read him the more he sounds the same. And has this ever happened to you: that you discover in a writer just a wisp of too much wit and it's wit that bores you?
Yes, I'm reading on, More...

5 comments like (8 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Johanna rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jan 04, 2008

Sheba rated it:

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 amusi More...

2 comments like (8 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Ben rated it:

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-cul More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Taylor rated it:

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 More...

1 comment like (7 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Victoria rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Apr 20, 2010

Rich rated it:

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 More...

5 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jan 17, 2012

Riku rated it:

Satanic Verses: A Composition

He 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 l More...

13 comments like (9 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Radhika rated it:

I only picked up this book because I wanted to know what the big hullabaloo was about. It was a slog in parts and not Rushdie's best work. And yet, one must acknowledge that the man is definitely a master of his pen. This book is quite ambiguous in many ways and it is likely that the author meant it to be that way.

"Verses" refers not only to the pseudo-Koranic verses which appear in the book, but also to childish rhymes and other words spouted by various characters in More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jul 27, 2007

Reshma rated it:

Well, I just finished it. Here's the thing. I made the mistake of reading this book a few pages at a time, spread out over a long time. Not the way to read this book. If you choose to read it, commit to it. Or it will confuse you more.

The "confusion" is not a bad kind of confusion. It's the kind that, after you finish reading the book, makes you want to stand back and smile, wondering how you got suckered into this ride and how you became consumed in it. You can spen More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Dec 08, 2008

Beth F. rated it:

Salman Rushdie is a weird man. Sometimes he would write things like, “…Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for babies entering the birth canal…” and “…Saladin, like a bloody lettuce, I ask you…” and he used a lot of big words I’ve never seen like “orotund” and “obsolescent” and the whole time, I kept thinking, ‘wow, Salman Rushdie made a cameo appearance in the Bridget Jones’s Diary movie and he has funny eyebrows like Jack Nicholson.’

Um. Right. This More...

5 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jun 26, 2008

Adam rated it:

Excellent. Maybe not worth a death sentence, but excellent.

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Sep 28, 2011

Javier rated it:

For all it's hype, I was pretty disappointed with this book. Pretty is an understatement actually. This experience reminded me of my attempted reading of Thomas Pynchon's "V." I have come to the conclusion that idiosyncratic wording and arrangements are a turn off, and that's exactly what I found in the "Satanic Verses." The book itself is also confusing because there's two or three story lines intertwined with each other. What you basically have is a story about two Indian b More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Lily rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Sep 06, 2011

Djayawarman rated it:

I can't understand why Queen of England give Salman Rushdie a Knight of literature status? Anyone who like to put dirty words and provoke people can easily produce such books like this!

Just like anyone who can draw can produce cartoon to mock one's religion. I wonder why is a big powerfull country like britian still uses old lame monarch system and believe in that Dumb Queen who actually like to read this so called book, that only brings a provocation after another with bad foul mo More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jun 01, 2011

Whitaker rated it:

I liked it more than I thought I would. Rushdie is ~~a bit~~ exceedingly heavy-handed with the symbolism (I mean, Indian expatriate who denies his Indian roots turns into the incarnation of evil? Come on!), but makes up for it by his pungent prose. Beware though. If sentences like, "Exit Pimple, weeping, censored, a scrap on a cutting-room floor." or "Here he is neither Mahomet nor MoeHammered; has adopted, instead, the demon-tag the farangis hung around his neck." make you cring More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Dec 10, 2008

Ellie rated it:

I was massively underwhelmed by this. I have put off and put off reading it, and then I was told by a friend that it was her favourite book, so I thought I'd give it a go, and frankly I wish I hadnt bothered.

I found the writing pretentious, with very little story. It has the potential to be brilliant, as the bones of it is good, but there is so much waffle, rubbish and unnessessary wording that it fast becomes tedious and irritatnig.

That said its made him very rich, so go

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

May 22, 2008

Photo Jenny rated it:

I read this ages ago, it seems, and in competition with the dude I was dating (he started earlier, but I had to finish first). Anyway, I was shocked by Rushdie's sense of humor. I dunno, I guess I thought the dude who had a fatwa out on him was probably going to be pretty dour. WRONG! "The Satanic Verses" is a lovely dose of mystic realism or realistic mysticism, along with a great examination of cultural identity, and the things that can go awry when you deny your peoples.

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 06, 2011

Nathan rated it:

If you are new to Rushdie, do yourself a favor and skip this book. I'd say start with "Midnight's Children," but his other books may be good entry points as well; whatever you choose, don't make "The Satanic Verses" your first Rushdie novel!

After the joy of reading the masterpiece that is "Midnight's Children," I was really excited about sinking my teeth into Salman Rushdie's most (in)famous book. Unfortunately, it turned out to be an utter mess.

More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 04, 2011

Marcus rated it:

I'd been meaning to read the Satanic Bible for a long time now, and now that I've finally gotten around to it... I kid. This book isn't the Satanic anything, but it is strange. At times while reading it I'd try to imagine how Rushdie came up with it. I can't. His life, his thought process are so foreign to me as to be almost other-worldly. I've never read anything like it. It's magical realism, but it really has little in common with the Latin American variety of the genre. The plot is fairly st More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 01, 2011

محمد rated it:

الرواية فعلا مثيرة ، الاستطراد سمة أساسية في الرواية ، الخلط بين الثقافة الاسلامية و الهندية للأبطال واضح ، أيضا فكرة التناسخ ترد في فقرات كثيرة ، على المستوى الحقيقي و الخيالي
الاجزاء التي تحكي قصة النبي محمد ستغضب أي مسلم معتدل ، هناك الكثير من الأحداث المختلقة ، و لا تقف الأجزاء الصادمة عند قصة الغرانيق الشهيرة فقط ، هناك الكثير من الأفعال التي يقوم بها الصحابة ، مجتزأه من احداث وردت في السيرة ، او مختلقة تماما
في بعض الأحيان ألاحظ ان المترجم حذف بعض الجمل ، رغبة في الاختصار ، و مع More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 08, 2009

Mike rated it:

A grand undertaking of a book...

Twenty years after controversy and confusion, I picked this book almost as an obligation, wondering if the publicity was its greatest quality. In fact, on its own, this is, in my opinion, a great novel -- a story which incorporates so many elements all the while never neglecting one or making any feel superfluous.

Politics, religion, family, good and evil, love, hate -- all these elements intertwine but never step on each other, making " More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 24, 2008

Lokee rated it:

Generally speaking, the plot is simple. It is about two Indian Muslims traveling to England. Their plane is hijacked and explodes over the English Channel(almost but not quite in the country), but the two men, in a miracle not unnoticed by the novel's narrator, survive the explosion. The remaining story follows their lives, watching them slowly echo the lives of Gibreel and the devil respectively.

More interesting, though, is how the novel uses Rushdie's standard tangents and series More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 31, 2008

Fran rated it:

Always clever, usually erudite and often sharply politico-comical, Rushdie got death threats for this whimsical interrogation and interweaving of myths and themes and contradictions from Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism. He probably had more from other faiths that I just didn't catch. Rushdie manages to get various characters -- real and (perhaps) imagined -- to coexist, or be teleported to new eras and let them have at it.

The result is a social and political essay in th More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 29, 2008

George rated it:

I actually ended up reading the last third of this book twice -- once by myself, and once out loud to my wife while on a long car trip. It was in that second reading that I really came to appreciate just how brilliant a storyteller Rushdie is -- I don't mean the clever jokes, the "catch 'em if you can" allusions, but the gift for writing a flowing, intoxicating story. In my opinion, this is a book that was meant to be read aloud, or "told." As one of the other reviewers here More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

علی rated it:

From Midnight Children on, seems that Roshdie’s preference moves tward the language rather than the narration itself. Comparing ”The ground beneath of her feet” and ”Midnight children” one comes to a more beautiful language but less interesting events.

در اثار رشدی زبان از زیبایی خارق العاده ای برخوردار است. واژه هایی که رشدی در زبان انگلیسی ابداع می کند و عمدتن مخلوطی از انگلیسی هندی – بریتانیایی ست، گاه به توجیه صحنه، عمل یا شخصیت در روایت کمک شایانی می کند. بسیاری از واژه های ابداع More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 19, 2009

Andrew added it

So it might be the most controversial novel in the entire world... that kind of lends a certain weight to whatever you're going to say about it. Midnight's Children remains my favorite Rushdie, but this is pretty good too. A college friend compared it to Paradise Lost, and I can really see it. It is, in many ways, an intensely Medieval book. And that's where its power comes from. Dense, allegorical Arabian Nights-like storytelling alternates with freewheeling, fragmented, DeLillo-esque narr More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

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