false 3 6 false false Mon Dec 10 10:37:23 -0800 2007 Thu Sep 06 14:27:39 -0700 2007 Mon Dec 10 10:31:46 -0800 2007 Yes, I'm reading on, with strange compulsive patience that some readers acquire... Maybe we think, it'll get better or it'll reach a moment when all the nonsense will have become justified.
And then, there is the miserable expository didactic style. You don't believe me? Ok, how about this: "Now, however, change had begun to feel painful; the arteries of the possible had begun to harden."
Arteries of the possible?!? No, really, is that writing?
Or this: "...she had no confidence at all, and every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut."
A monkey without a nut? Now how exactly do you imagine such a character? And is she a husk or a monkey... Or is it both?
Amendment, if you'll allow me: finally, I reached the end and must say, almost despite myself, that it is worth the effort. What happens? Various disconnected and initially confusing strands of the story come together, more or less. There is, in any case, a feeling of wholeness and an idea that seems to animate it. And it is in this "main" idea that I recognize Rushdie and realize that he has always been faithful to himself. I think he tries, here as elsewhere, to address the question of faith, but in a sense much broader than the mere religious one. What does it mean to believe something so strongly that the fiction comes to be real or reality is denied and becomes a miracle? This question matters as much to literature as it does to religion and here the two overlap. This I find to be a very powerful achievement of The Satanic Verses: to ask you when and how you believe and what the consequences of that belief may be... Or when and how you don't believe and what the consequences of that unbelief may be... So my favorite aspect of the book: the steady, intricate focus on fiction -- its reality and its delusions.]]>