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Salman Rushdie

Amadou Moustapha Wade

The Satanic Verses Kindle Edition

by Salman Rushdie (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Just before dawn one winter’s morning, a hijacked aeroplane blows apart high above the English Channel and two figures tumble, clutched in an embrace, towards the sea: Gibreel Farishta, India’s legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices.

Washed up, alive, on an English beach, their survival is a miracle. But there is a price to pay. Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But chosen by whom? And which is which? And what will be the outcome of their final confrontation?

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572 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage Digital
Publication date

31 Aug. 2011
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3776 KB
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Amazon Review

No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a fatwa from Iran's Ayatollahs decreeing his death. Furore aside, it is a marvellously 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 astonishing powers of invention are at their best in this Whitbread Prize winner. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Review

'A staggering achievement, brilliantly enjoyable' Nadine Gordimer

'A masterpiece' Sunday Times

'A novel of metamorphosis, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles and jokes. Rushdie has the power of description, and we succumb' The Times

'Damnably entertaining and fiendishly ingenious. One of the very few current writers whose works are attempts at the great Bible, "the bright book of life" ' London Review of Books

A great novelist, a master of perpetual storytelling. ― V S Pritchett --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen novels - Grimus, Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Golden House and Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize) - and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of non-fiction - Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line - and co-edited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

From the Publisher

'A great novelist, a master of perpetual storytelling' V.S.Pritchett --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Book Description

One of the most controversial and infamous books of modern times --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Synopsis

Gibreel Farishta, India's legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices, fall earthward from a bombed jet toward the sea, singing rival verses in an eternal wrestling match between good and evil. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

'to be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again '' Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.

'I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you," and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, 'to the devil with your tunes," the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, 'in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now."

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. "Ohé, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch.' At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. "Hey, Spoono," Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, 'Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards own there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. Dharrraaammm! Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat."

Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time ' the jumbo jet Bostan, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into the powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea.

Who am I?

Who else is there?

The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also ' for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts ' mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home. Knocked a little silly by the blast, Gibreel and Saladin plummeted like bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork, and because Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for babies entering the birth canal, he commenced to feel a low irritation at the other's refusal to fall in plain fashion. Saladin nosedived while Farishta embraced air, hugging it with his arms and legs, a flailing, overwrought actor without techniques of restraint. Below, cloud-covered, awaiting their entrance, the slow congealed currents of the English Sleeve, the appointed zone of their watery reincarnation.

'O, my shoes are Japanese," Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, 'these trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart's Indian for all that.' The clouds were bubbling up towards them, and perhaps it was on account of that great mystification of cumulus and cumulo-nimbus, the mighty rolling thunderheads standing like hammers in the dawn, or perhaps it was the singing (the one busy performing, the other booing the performance), or their blast-delirium that spared them full foreknowledge of the imminent ' but for whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began.

Mutation?

Yessir, but not random. Up there in air-space, in that soft, imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which, thereafter, made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet-shrinker and power-vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic, ' because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible ' wayupthere, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr Lamarck: under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired.

What characteristics which? Slow down; you think Creation happens in a rush? So then, neither does revelation ' take a look at the pair of them. Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it?

That's not it. Listen:

Mr Saladin Chamcha, appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel Farishta's mouth, fought back with verses of his own. What Farishta heard wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr James Thomson, seventeen-hundred to seventeen-forty-eight. " ' at Heaven's command," Chamcha carolled through lips turned jingoistically redwhiteblue by the cold, 'arooooose from out the aaaazure main.' Farishta, horrified, sang louder and louder of Japanese shoes, Russian hats, inviolately subcontinental hearts, but could not still Saladin's wild recital: 'And guardian aaaaangels sung the strain."

Let's face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let's face this, too: they did.

Downdown they hurtled, and the winter cold frosting their eyelashes and threatening to freeze their hearts was on the point of waking them from their delirious daydream, they were about to become aware of the miracle of the singing, the rain of limbs and babies of which they were a part, and the terror of the destiny rushing at them from below, when they hit, were drenched and instantly iced by, the degree-zero boiling of the clouds.

They were in what appeared to be a long, vertical tunnel. Chamcha, prim, rigid, and still upside-down, saw Gibreel Farishta in his purple bush-shirt come swimming towards him across that cloud-walled funnel, and would have shouted, 'Keep away, get away from me," except that something prevented him, the beginning of a little fluttery screamy thing in his intestines, so instead of uttering words of rejection he opened his arms and Farishta swam into them until they were embracing head-to-tail, and the force of their collision sent them tumbling end over end, performing their geminate cartwheels all the way down and along the hole that went to Wonderland; while pushing their way out of the white came a succession of cloudforms, ceaselessly metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures pressed in upon them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks, winged cats, centaurs, and Chamcha in his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion that he, too, had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid, as if he were growing into the person whose head nestled now between his legs and whose legs were wrapped around his long, patrician neck.

This person had, however, no time for such 'high falutions'; was, indeed, incapable of faluting at all; having just seen, emerging from the swirl of cloud, the figure of a glamorous woman of a certain age, wearing a brocade sari in green and gold, with a diamond in her nose and lacquer defending her high-coiled hair against the pressure of the wind at these altitudes, as she sat, equably, upon a flying carpet. 'rekha Merchant," Gibreel greeted her. "You couldn't find your way to heaven or what?' Insensitive words to speak to a dead woman! But his concussed, plummeting condition may be offered in mitigation ' Chamcha, clutching his legs, made an uncomprehending query: 'What the hell?"

'You don't see her?' Gibreel shouted. "You don't see her goddamn Bokhara rug?"

No, no, Gibbo, her voice whispered in his ears, don't expect him to confirm. I am strictly for your eyes only, maybe you are going crazy, what do you think, you namaqool, you piece of pig excrement, my love. With death comes honesty, my beloved, so I can call you by your true names.

Cloudy Rekha murmured sour nothings, but Gibreel cried again to Chamcha: 'spoono? You see her or you don't?"

Saladin Chamcha saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. Gibreel faced her alone. "You shouldn't have done it," he admonished her. "No, sir. A sin. A suchmuch thing.' --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Back Cover

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. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Synopsis

When a jumbo jet blows apart above the English Channel, Gabreel and Saladin are two who survive and are washed up on an English beach. However, it soon becomes clear that curious changes have come over them and that they have been chosen as protagonists in the eternal struggle between God and the Devil. Salman Rushdie is the author of "Midnight's Children", winner of the 1981 Booker Prize, and "Shame". --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005E87XIA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Digital; New e. edition (31 Aug. 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3776 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 572 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 37,687 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 16 in Religious Science Fiction & Fantasy (Kindle Store)
- 31 in Celtic, English & Welsh
- 32 in Contemporary Religious Fiction

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1,232 ratings

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Salman Rushdie

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Sir Salman Rushdie is the author of many novels including Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury and Shalimar the Clown. He has also published works of non-fiction including The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Short Stories.

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Worth reading if you are willing to make the effort

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 January 2018

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Some 30 years after its publication, I picked up this book (second hand) to see what all of the fuss had been about in the pre-ISIS days of the Ayatollah Khomeini who had replaced the Sha of Iran (Persia).
Before reading this huge rambling (but often amusing) 540+ pages; a difficult book. Do read the Wikipedia page on the Rushdie Fatwa resulting from this book and explanations of its origins. There was, as of 2016, still severe controversy relating to the author and the Muslim allusions in (and interpretations of) his story. It will also help to have an understanding of Indian cultural (and food) terms, the culture in Mumbai in the 1980’s and some of the historical friction between Christians and Muslims. The book is still banned in many countries with a significant Muslim population.
To the average Western reader this may be seen as a simple (?) comical tale of the amazing survival of two Indian actors, blown out of the skies by a fanatical suicide bomber, then their experiences and escapades in England, supplemented by flashbacks to their historical development in India and subsequent interaction of Asians with UK culture at the time of the Thatcherite years (significant institutional racism and even racial violence).
One survivor takes on the attributes of the angel Gabriel, the other the devil Saladin and we follow their escapades, lives and loves and their reversion to more human form. The story is constantly interwoven with actual and imagined historical events.
Is it religiously offensive? Possibly to those of a strict Muslim upbringing and their religious leaders interpreting what is said alongside the Quran. I am sure than many decried the book without ever reading it – as happened with many other books/ films which attracted notoriety.
Compared to the non-event Christian fuss over Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian”, there is a certain fantasy section relating to certain reported history of the prophet which could certainly be interpreted negatively by those of a strongly Muslim religious view (You need to read beyond 300+ pages to come to this section) – see also the Wikipedia review mentioned above.
Is it worth reading? If the above does not put you off but intrigues you get hold of a library copy and see!

86 people found this helpful

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neighbour

Salman, keep calm and carry on!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 January 2020

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I really have no idea what all the fuss was about. I initially bought a copy on the street whilst stuck in a traffic jam in London. The vendor was handing them out as if he was Kim Philby. As for the mentioning of the Prophet, and considering that people were killed during demonstrations, it never ceases to amaze me that people can take offence at the merest hint. As Christopher Hitchens said, most of the demonstrators had never read the book, even if they could actually read. We live in sad times.

16 people found this helpful

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Susan Hamilton

What a surprise!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 September 2016

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A very strange book - I was expecting a serious tome and was highly surprised to find a comical novel. I bought it to see what all the fuss was about and NO WAY could I find a single sentence in the book that could possibly be construed as insulting to anything or anyone. I'm sure there are millions who have decried the book without having opened it!

42 people found this helpful

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Yangmaster

A most unusual fictional novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 April 2018

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I began reading this book full of curiosity about what had sparked such hostility from the radical Muslim quarter. I found it to be a modern-day novel, and a very unusual one at that. The two main characters were both Muslim Indian actors who began the story falling from the sky out of an air-liner which had just been blown up by terrorists.
Miraculously, they survived their fall into the English Channel (seemingly by supernatural intervention), but thereafter began to experience further supernatural changes - one began to show angelic characteristics, while the other began to turn into a satanic-style goat-like demon complete with horns!
Neither of these characters, in my opinion, deserved what was happening to them, and I began to struggle to carry on reading it, despite the excellent style of the writing.
Just past half-way through, I lost the desire to continue and I gave up. I may go back to it... I have to admit, I'm curious about how it all ends - but not just yet.

12 people found this helpful

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Holly "Ragdoll Reads" Hodson

Not for me.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 July 2018

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Reading this made me feel like I had serious brain damage. I'm sure it's a great book, presumably if you're the type of person who loves linguistically interesting or 'difficult' literature - I on the other hand am not typically on of those people and only managed to get through the first 2 chapters because I'm stubborn.

16 people found this helpful

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jt666

I can't understand what all the fuss is about

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 March 2019

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OK as a book not really a page turner though
Frankly I can't see what the fuss was all about there is nothing in this book I could recognise as controversial but perhaps that's because I gave up on it half way through
Just to put that in perspective I have read War and Peace twice and The Lord of the Rings three times
I believe the Freemasonry elements in War and Peace succeeded in offending both the Church and Freemasons
Meanwhile The Lord of The Rings has found itself on a list of banned books according to some sources for promoting witchcraft of all things
It must be nearly impossible to write anything which somebody wont find offensive
Bring back Mary Whitehouse she was offended by almost everything as I recall
Look her up on Google if you are under 50 years of age :)

6 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

A comprehensive human story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 February 2019

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I knew that this book had to be read and I found it hard to put down. I knew Bombay in the 80s briefly and knew Midnight's children. I felt there was a pressure behind the writing that was visible in the intensity of the action. A unique book that seems to come from the writer's soul. It was bound to be contraversial but it's honesty shines through every page and it's detractors should have read it rather than burn it.

7 people found this helpful

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