The Satanic Verses
An incoherent love-letter to Salman Rushdie
I cannot distinctly remember when I first read the name of this book, but taking into account my frivolous and rebellious temperament I can almost certainly establish that it was not suggested as a good read by anyone I knew. Of course, the only thing I remember knowing about the book was that it was controversial. I wouldn’t vouch for myself if I said that I read for good reasons- which there can be many and I don’t want to indulge into explaining. Rather, I have the tendency to read because I want something checked off of a checklist. And so it happened with this book.
My biggest motivation for buying this book was simply that I could buy it. When I moved to this country, I could see it on online stores and I had the money to get it- both of which were to varying degrees dubious before I came here. Another motivation- as is for all bad readers (feel free to exclude yourself from this) is that we hoard books even if we don’t read them. The third motivation is the worst and the most sinister of all- curiosity. And the curiosity followed from multiple things- from simply admiring the writer’s style and his hold over the craft to getting into online arguments with strangers (a well-nourished hobby unlike any other). This was one of the first books I bought online here. It happened to be a used copy from someone else, upon receiving which I could see that that someone else also had one of the questionable motivations for buying it because the book felt entirely unused. A hardbound book with no marks of usage- now that is every second hand book buyer’s dream I suppose In this excitement, I definitely overlooked the size of the damned (you see what I did) book. It is by no means a small book- at least not for the occasional hobbyist readers like me unlike some of my friends who either read or claimed to have read the whole Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in one night or finished the whole book series in a week. With all my apprehensions and ambitions, I started reading it the same evening I got it and evidently found other temporary addictions more apt. I read 4 pages of the book with a questionable level of focus and even more questionable retention and moved on.
In the quest to get to an insatiable itch, I bought the same book again, but it wasn’t before at least three years of pure abandoning of the book, at least two major life events, at least one lifetime’s worth of psychedelic ingestions, at least two heartbreaking election results, at least three lost friendships over political arguments, at least two good years of reading other people’s recommendations and at least one favorite writer stabbed publicly. I was reading a popular garbage called Alchemised, which if it were pulp would have been completely fine by me and totally unworthy of my mentioning it here, but it wasn’t and it was a perfect rhyme of loop. Anyway, I digress. I bought the book because I wanted to read it on a device and I definitely wanted to also keep the physical book with me so as to remember what I was reading when I was not reading. Apparently over time, I have grown up with visible signs of patience, respect and gratitude towards masters of the craft. I have a simple formula now. I try to go through the first 100 pages of a book with whatever the book wants of me and then if the book doesn’t hold me captive, I free myself of it. This book imprisoned me from the fifth page.
Oh! To the meat of the matter! Here’s my opinion of the book. It is fantastic! There it is. I’ve said it. It is impossible to overstate how balanced the book is. I had read one critic describing Julio Cortazar’s Ryuella as written by someone intoxicated by literature. There is no other way I can describe Salman Rushdie’s writing. Reading the book makes you wonder if a person can be any more of a sponge of the seemingly uncountable fables, the noises, the smells, the art, the kinks and the truest selves of societies all over the world. When he describes the police, he becomes the police, when he describes a poet, he becomes a poet, when he describes a scoundrel, he becomes one; and not one hair of his of which not many remain on his head betrays his character such that it feels as if he lets go of his skin and wraps himself entirely in corruption, uselessness and innocence respectively. Even if one doesn’t ponder too much on the artistry of magical realism or the count of hypodiegetic levels, they would feel being cradled by a literary giant of the craft of simple storytelling, rather, I suppose it would be worth it to read the book just for the story once and then later for the finesse.
A dear teacher of mine who himself is a Bastiat awardee journalist and commands great respect in the literary circles once said to his class “Never write something that draws attention towards how it has been written more than what has been written.” While as a golden rule it works, I suppose to every great rule, there have to be certain exceptions. Satanic Verses has to be exempt from that formula. When you are Salman Rushdie, you are allowed to take the strings of the art-form and weave a white ghost-sheet out of it and make that ghost a performing puppet on the streets of London. And make the ghost puppet he does. Rushdie’s writing is anything but boring. Every sentence is full of juice and riddles and wisdom and life. It is written in the way that changes how one reads literature.
We live in the times of abundance. Our conveniences are such that we don’t even have to infer the messages of a book, we are just told those by the writer in his own interview about his Türkish translator being murdered. In that BBC interview, not only Mr Rushdie expresses his disgust over a false apology letter issued under his name and his disappointment over the fact that the book being so funny is not what the first thing about the book is is, he also describes the core message of the book which is the question: What kind of an idea are you? Every idea regardless of what its level of epistemological, ontological or moral correctness is, is asked this same question when it confronts the world and the answer can be only one of these two: one that bargains with the world or the one that holds its ground. The book toys with this theorem and tells you different tales of different ideas that answer this question differently. Ultimately, those ideas that hold their ground stand the test of time. In this sense, the book is also a book of metafiction. And the book definitely stands the test of time.
To the question of whether the book is irreverent: yes, the irreverence is right on the nose. But I must also suffix that by saying it is not malice. Could the story have been told without the whole Satanic Verses section? I don’t know. I can only think of one incident about a decade back when someone watched a George Carlin sketch and got visibly agitated at him cursing in his comedy. “Couldn’t he have done the comedy without the curses?” “I don’t know! But this I know for sure that you don’t teach George Carlin how to do comedy”. Precisely that! You don’t ask a Salman Rushdie to not write a counter-fable, which if I may add only he could write as comically, as musically and as full of colors. Tom Holland the celebrated historian spent years in a desert trying to find the roots of a story which rightfully ruled over all other stories in the world for over centuries. Needless to say, Tom Holland failed at finding anything worth finding. Salman Rushdie who had a typewriter in London paints that desert with a story in which angels, prophets, poets and harlots all come to life and start quibbling about their space in your mind at one summon. To attempt to silence that magic is unjust, horrific and blasphemous.
There could have been a world where this book didn’t exist and the more you think the more that world feels real. Between that world and this one, I would prefer this one. Between this one and a possible one where inventive, irreverent and intelligent writers are celebrated more, I would prefer the latter. Because, I see no point in killing your own thoughts just because others might not like it. In summation, to someone who got both celebrated and threatened for his opinions not unlike Faiz, to someone adamant about those opinions not unlike Faiz, to someone who loves Faiz so much that his book is sprinkled with his poetry and whose characters are in awe of Faiz, from one other giant of literature and literary criticism who loved Faiz:
Hua jo teer-e-nazar neemkash to kya haasil
Maza to jab hai ke seene ke aar-paar chale
- Mahindar Singh Bedi
Loosely translated:
“What avails the arrow of a glance that’s only partly drawn?
The fun is when it pierces through the center of the heart.”
Everyone who can get their hands on this book should at least attempt to read this book. Everyone who can write should at least aspire to write books like this just on the off chance that someone writes a book like this one day.
