slypuma17 said:🤣 Just being blunt and skipping the pleasantries here...🤣
I’m curious, though: how many of you have actually sat down and read his book (we all know which one) and what did you think of the work itself, rather than focusing on the man?
Well, I'll go first. If I didn't finish it, at least I tried before putting it down out of sheer boredom. I skimmed through this little novella closely enough to reach several conclusions:
*Salman Rushdie is your textbook postmodernist trickster. He relies on those convoluted time loops, fantasy elements (reminiscent of Hispanic magical realism), and an overall sense of unreality.
*It is true that the novel features a deliberate mockery of Islam (Mahound is a medieval European slur for Muhammad, which he equates to a demon or something similar. The satanic verses are called such because Mahound isn't entirely sure if his revelation from the angel Gabriel is "divine" or "satanic"). However, this isn't propaganda; it’s just pure postmodern playfulness with everything under the sun. In other parts, you see this crazed woman making a pilgrimage to Mecca who, despite being a fanatic, possesses a sort of divine allure (animals and birds follow her).
*The novel follows several narrative threads, and the one concerning Mahound is just one of three or four. It doesn't even take up much space—maybe 20% of the book.
*Even the opening is lackluster—two angels descending via parachutes from an airplane.
Quite simply, the novel was boring. Rushdie himself is an overwrought, suffocating writer, drowning in his own tools of frantic fantasy, even in his best work, "Midnight's Children." I don't believe his primary goal was to offend Muslims. He is merely a novelist by trade living through the decay of the genre—a period where ambitious writers resort to cheap provocations and intellectual games with any topic they can find. This makes their novels increasingly tedious and unconvincing (think Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Philip Roth, Julio Cortázar, ...).
Recommendation: punish extremists and ayatollahs by forcing them to read any work by Rushdie. The only worse punishment would be making them read the German classics (Thomas Mann, Muslil, Hermann Broch...).
