The Satanic Verses

[Upinflames]

I am an avid reader. I'll polish of a paperback in a couple of sittings and I read a book most weeks but this has got me beat.

I'm 80 pages in and I can't take any more.

Has anyone actually read it?

[Panthro]

I'd like to, but fear that its reputation precedes it.

[Stick Legs]

You aren’t missing anything.

It’s not a great novel. I only read it because I was curious to see what the fuss was about.

If I was going to irritate a significant sector of the planet’s population to the point where they wanted to actually kill me, this wouldn’t have been the hill to die on.

Imagine re writing the plot of a soap opera in the most pretentious way possible. Essentially it’s a ‘good vs evil, and good people don’t succeed necessarily’ narrative.

The one thing it taught me was that some religious are more thin skinned than others:
if Saladin had been the ‘angel’ and Gabriel the ‘devil’ the Muslim world would be fine with it & some Christians would appear on TV with sad faces & Rushdie wouldn’t be a household name…


…and still retain sight in both eyes.

[coppice]

It is bloody hard work. The Rushdie book to read is Joseph Anton - a Memoir. JA was one of the pseudonyms he used to preserve anonymity after the fatwa and the book is an autobiographical . It is superb. It is a very readable and endearingly funny about a bloody awful predicament . Recommended !

[Skeptisk]

I have tried a few times but not managed to finish it.

I am not sure why. I really enjoyed Midnight’s Children and Shame, so I did like his writing style, yet I’ve not managed to finish The Satanic Verses. I might give it another go as I don’t like to be defeated.