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The Satanic Verses: A Novel Paperback – March 11, 2008

by Salman Rushdie (Author)

4.2 4,283 ratings

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “[A] torrent of endlessly inventive prose, by turns comic and enraged, embracing life in all its contradictions. In this spectacular novel, verbal pyrotechnics barely outshine its psychological truths.”—Newsday

Winner of the Whitbread Prize

One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times.

Praise for The Satanic Verses

“Rushdie is a storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up whole geographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Exhilarating, populous, loquacious, sometimes hilarious, extraordinary . . . a roller-coaster ride over a vast landscape of the imagination.”—The Guardian (London)

“A novel of metamorphoses, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles, and jokes. Rushdie has the power of description, and we succumb.”—The Times (London)

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Popular Highlights in this book

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Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt.
Highlighted by 802 Kindle readers
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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When you have stepped through the looking-glass you step back at your peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds.
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From the Publisher

The Times (London) says, “Rushdie has the power of description, and we succumb.”

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A staggering achievement, brilliantly enjoyable.”—Nadine Gordimer

“Exhilarating, populous, loquacious, sometimes hilarious, extraordinary . . . a roller-coaster ride over a vast landscape of the imagination.”—The Guardian

“A novel of metamorphoses, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles, and jokes. Rushdie has the power of description, and we succumb.”—The Times (London)

“The tone of the novel veers daringly from the slapstick to the melodramatic. . . . [Rushdie’s] conjuring tricks are magical. . . . personal and touching.”—The New York Times

“A glittering novelist—one with startling imagination and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling.”—The New Yorker

“This invites comparison with the miracle-laden narratives of Gabriel García Márquez. Highly recommend.”—Library Journal

“For Rushdie fans this is a splendid feast.”—Publishers Weekly

“An entertainment in the highest sense of that much-exploited word . . . a surreal hallucinatory feast . . . [Rushdie’s] inventiveness never flags.”—Kirkus Reviews

“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 masterpiece.”—Sunday Times

“The Satanic Verses has all the excellences that made [Midnight’s Children] a publishing event: an epic sweep and feel for the larger currents of history reminiscent of Tolstoy, a comic genius for idiosyncratic characterization in polyphonic voices worthy of Dickens, together with the imaginative freedom of fabulation characteristic of Latin American fiction and its magical realism. The Satanic Verses [is] a wider ranging novel. Not since Gravity’s Rainbow has any novel so successfully captured the cosmopolitan texture of modern life. . . . Finally, The Satanic Verses confronts the problem of religion and modern life in such a direct and profound way that it has been banned in India, Pakistan, South Africa, and all the Arab countries. . . . If you want to find out why Rushdie is arguably the most talented and significant author writing in the English language today, by all means read this book.”—The Virginia Quarterly Review

About the Author

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America. His books have been translated into over forty languages.

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.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Publishing Group; Reprint edition (March 11, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812976711
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812976717
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 1.14 x 7.98 inches

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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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Rishi

Fascinating and Complex

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2011

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I had read midnight's children as a teenager years ago and had tried reading The Satanic Verses then but had found the book quite impenetrable. Last month with time in hand, I took to the book again attracted by the controversy it generated and was left with memories of a fascinating story. Before you read this book you should adept yourself with some knowledge of Islam and life of Prophet Mohammed (which basically boils down to reading the wikipedia pages on Prophet Mohammed, Islam and the Holy Quran).

Satanic Verses is a complex satire of two Indian actors Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta. The alter-egos undergo mutation after the bombing of their boarded plane where Saladin takes the satanic form and Farishtaa an incarnation of Archangel Gabriel. It is not clear why each get their form - one may view them to be a result of perception - Farishtaa made fame playing Indian deities in Bollywood while Saladin, an immigrant in London is a voiceover artist mostly doing voiceover for consumer products. There is nothing demonic about Saladin and Farishta is anything but an angel.

The story begins and ends with Bombay but a lot of Satanic verses is about London and life of an immigrant in the vibrant city. Most of the cast are first or second generation south asian immigrants in London . Rushdie devotes a lot of pages on their character development. Saladin and Farishta are pursuing reconciliation with their love interests ( who live in London) after the events of their mutation.

Farishta's dream sequences form the sub-plot of the story. The dreams involve the city of Mecca during the time of revelations , after Prophet's return to the city after the exile and a sequence during the Prophets death. A short dream sequence involves an Imam in exile ( possibly Khomeni) and his attempt to overthrow the empress of the country of his origin. The last dream sequence is about a butterfly eating teenager who takes an entire Indian village onto a fatal pilgrimage. Each of these are captivating , follow a chronicle order and you are left with three or four different stories somehow kept loosely connected by Farishta. It is these dream sequences where the controversy stems from.

There are some who suggest that in reality the book does not have a lot of scandalous elements , and they are wrong. The dream questions the authenticity of the revelations that the Prophet received and how they suit the worldly conveniences. The twelve prostitutes in Mecca each take the names of the Prophet's twelve wives in order to attract business. The venture is successful. Finally, the death of the Prophet is shown as a result of Al-Lat's vendetta. Al-Lat is one of the pre-Islamic Meccan Goddesses , who were all declared false in the earliest of Prophet's revelations. Ayatollah Khomeini who issued the original fatwa may also have been offended by the comic elements surrounding his dream sequence.

What is Satanic Verses about philosophically? - It depends on the interpretation of the reader. It can be viewed as the clash of faith vs doubt or that of a life of an immigrant , or the role of a satirist in a society etc. While Midnight's children was a literary marvel , Satanic Verses is a fascinating story and makes Rushdie a great story teller.

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PJ

Worth reading

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2024

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Difficult to read in places but worth the effort. I found it hard to put down , the story was captivating and disturbing at the same time.

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Hollis Hanover

Great Book, Puzzling Reaction

Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2012

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I finally got around to The Satanic Verses. You just have to read a book which got a death sentence for the author. Really, after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa calling for Salmon Rushdie's death, Rushdie's Japanese translator was killed, his Italian translator and his Norwegian publisher were both stabbed (didn't die) and his Turkish translator ducked, but the miscreants burned down his hotel and killed 37 non-fatwa folks. So I sort of had to see what it was all about. I assumed it was culturally rich and I attended two lecture series on Islam to help me catch at least some of the obscurities. I'm sure I missed a bunch, though. It is culturally rich, alright, but more in Indian culture than Islamic and I did not attend any Indian lectures.

There are two major characters in the book: Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. Both are more or less self made guys who have each attained some success in entertainment fields. Gibreel in movies, a regular heartthrob, and Saladin in voiceover work where his speciality is upper class English diction. Saladin hates being Indian and has decided that his heart belongs to England and to his ultimately and callously unfaithful wife, wait for it, Pamela (is that English or what?). The two (Saladin and Gibreel) find themselves on a flight from India to England which is first hijacked and then blown up at cruising altitude where the two, during the long trip to Earth, have a discussion which is interrupted by, of all things, their survival from the fall (it is instructive to note that during the plummet, Saladin chooses to use up some of his apparently limited time by singing Rule Britannia). Things change, one might say.

Fourteen or so centuries earlier we are introduced to Mahound (I am given to understand that referring to The Prophet Muhammed in that fashion is disrespectful) who is in the process of attempting to convert the polytheistic Arabs of Jahilia. What? I thought it was Mecca. Well, it's deep, see? Jahilia is apparently an Arabic term meaning "ignorance of the will of God", which describes the pre conversion state of the Meccans, I assume. Things are not going well. Muhammed is in the process of receiving the Holy Quran from God through the angel Gabriel (Arabic "Gibreel". See where this is going?), while at the same time preaching monotheism with only limited success. Temptation arises when the head Sultan (or something) asks Muhammed to just spare a few, only three, of the three hundred sixty gods to please the ruler's wife whose family is in charge of the temples of the three female gods and gets money during the pilgrimages. Muhammed goes to the mountain cave, enters his trance and comes back down the hill and permits the three female gods to be honored. There is a hoo-hah among the followers of Muhammed because they have bought into monotheism and are disappointed. Muhammed goes back up the mountain, into the cave, back down the mountain into Jahilia and announces that the verses allowing the three gods were from Satan, not God, and withdraws them. Get it? The Satanic Verses. They're the real deal, actually existing in some ancient Islamic texts, but fervently denied currently.

That's it. That's the story which got people stabbed and burned up. Muhammed was misled by Satan, caught on, rectified the mistake and continued to receive valid revelation from God through Gabriel so that ultimately the Quran was the direct and pure word of God. I don't get it. Seems to me like the God who created the entire Cosmos would have enough horsepower to deal with an errant author on His own. It even seems to me that it wasn't all that nasty in the first place - most Muslims assiduously avoid deification of Muhammed. I think they are just grouchy. I oversimplify somewhat. It can be said that the general tone of the episodes concerning the revelations to the Prophet can fairly be said to call into question whether maybe some of the revelations were Muhammed dealing with ad hoc situations in his personal life. Was there a disagreement with his favorite wife? Up comes a revelation setting her straight on the issue. So some Muslims got angry with Salmon.

Here I must digress and impose a hiatus while I read Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, a book which had a similar effect in the Christian community, although I do not think anyone was stabbed or burned. Also, not atypically, the reaction was not to the book, which is sort of fat and not likely to be read by our Christian lot, but rather to the movie made from the book. I shall choose the book as the basis for my comparison knowing full well that I am opting for twelve hours or so as opposed to two, a significant sacrifice to the blogger's muse.

I will get back to this when I complete Last Temptation and can think more clearly about the rather common, but to me inexplicable, violent response to perceived blasphemy.

Okay, now I am better informed. The Last Temptation of Christ is a book from the 1950's and is afflicted with theology even older than that. I suspect that Kazantzakis wrote it as a sort of Midrash, a riff on Jesus' humanity, which seems a legitimate and loyal-Christian kind of thing to do. There are distractions, of course, which seize the attention (Mary Magdalene is nowhere in the Bible described as a whore), but all in all the attempt is nicely done to make the point, which seems to be that Jesus is an example of how the most attractive and intense temptations of life can be overcome. The point is made with rather extreme examples: Jesus waiting in line at a whorehouse, Jesus sucking up to Romans by making crosses for their executions, Jesus trying to make God hate Jesus so that the load of Messiah-ship may be taken off, but it all comes out alright in the end, good triumphs, evil is defeated. So what's wrong with that? What on Earth about the book prompted such vituperative rants from offended believers?

It's fundamentalism, that's what it is. Not exactly a spoiler. Those who struggle with a subconsciously held worry that their beliefs are fragile, puny, ephemeral and subject to destruction by countervailing views will always react with violence to any description of their orthodoxy which strays from the company line. And so it is with Satanic Verses. The true believer must leap to the defense of God, who by reason of frailty one supposes, is insufficiently strong to handle the defense himself. Apparently God exhausts himself with the first iteration of the revelation and must rely on believers to keep the revelation pure and unsullied by those who would vary the storyline. It's sort of silly, although the silliness is somewhat blunted by the firebombs and terrorism with which believers often make their point.

The Satanic Verses is beautifully written, funny and marvelously inventive. Saladin, for instance, does not quite get the angelic treatment of Gibreel in that Saladin morphs into a faun, Pan, some sort of goat-legged horned-head Priapic sulfur stinking denizen of Hell with the personality of a complete sissy. It is a delightful read, and I wholeheartedly recommend it - just don't read it looking for some hardcore blasphemy. Beats me if it's in there anywhere.

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Christopher Dainton

Not a beach read

Reviewed in Canada on January 5, 2023

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This is an incredible book, if you invest the time to understand it. I underlined metaphors and beautiful bits of poetic prose, circled words to look up later, and often had to read pages over again to understand what on earth was happening in the plot. The first few pages of the book were all but impenetrable. That said, this is a work of genius, a masterpiece worthy of all the laurels it receives, and you sort of owe it to yourself to give it a try. Not a beach read.

5 people found this helpful

Jorge R Saavedra Machin

Excelente novela, intemporal, es un texto sobresaliente

Reviewed in Mexico on March 6, 2022

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El profundo conocimiento y el humor de Salman Rushdie son comparables a Cortazar, Kafka, Hesse, ...
Es cautivador y sus transformaciones espaciales y temporales son espectaculares, lo voy a releer en español
Tambien me recuerda a Borges y al mexicano José Agustín

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Ashvin Vaghmaria

Good book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 10, 2024

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He is good writer

Manuel Popp

Worth its money

Reviewed in Germany on September 12, 2022

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Salman Rushdie got my attention when I heard about him having been attacked by a religious fanatic. Learning about the authors life on the news got me interested in finding out what was so "offensive" about his writings. So I bought this book, not knowing whether it would be a literary masterpiece or just some average writing that got way too much attention through the story around it.
In short: I was not disappointed. The book is comedic and entertaining. As a native German speaker, I even learned one or two new English words (which is always a gain, given most of the vocabulary used in everyday English is pretty repetitive and therefore hardly improves my language skills).

5 people found this helpful

Margherita Suppini

Libro culto un po’ complesso nella versione inglese

Reviewed in Italy on January 19, 2019

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Libro bellissimo un po’ complesso da leggere in inglese se non di madre lingua !

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