Warning: Pretentious Literary Babble Ahead

Currently consuming my brain: I've been reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses for last few days. I'll freely confess that I originally picked it up because it's one of those books I thought I should read. The Obligation Reads are always a toss up: Moby Dick—fantastic; Crime and Punishment—a thousand agonies.

I was surprised by how much I liked The Satanic Verses (or at least the first three hundred odd pages I've read thus far). I suppose I shouldn't have been: I adored Rushdie's children's book Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I suppose I figured any book that was so overtly political as to cause such a brouhaha could not possible be of much literary interest.

Okay, so I was wrong. The stories are absorbing, the language is elegant, and the underlying premise is persistently intriguing. I have very much entered into full-blown obsession mode, in which every minute spent not reading this book seems to be a waste of time. If only my office had a door: I'd be done by dinner.

My favorite parts (if I may revert to third-grade-book-report-style for a moment) are the sudden outbursts of frustrated questions. Invariably a character will reach the end of his or her rope and erupt into furious inquisition. A minor example— a character struggling in the wake of her father's suicide:

"...why does a survivor of the camps live forty years and then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does great evil eventually triumph, no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood, working its way through until it hits the heart? Or, worse: can a man's death be incompatible with his life?"

Rushdie proposes earlier in the book that the opposite of belief is not disbelief, but doubt. Which is, I suppose, what ultimately makes his book so dangerous: it cracks a window on widely-held religious beliefs, and that's really all it takes. Rushdie takes the biggest swing at Islam, but no major religion remains unscathed.

Despite the temptation to revert to my graduate school days and turn this blog into one long dissertation on religious theory, I'll restrain myself, delete all those long-winded paragraphs I just wrote, and spare my single reader the agony of prolonged philosophical discussion.

Instead I'll just tell you to read the book. It's good, really! It contains monsters, ghosts, lots of sex, apocalyptic visions, and all sorts of wacky magical realism antics. Highly recommended! Dropping acid optional! Guaranteed mind fuck!