Book Bearings
The Satanic Verses
- 560 pages · about 9 hours
- First published 1988
- 61 editions
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1 About this book
The Satanic Verses follows two actors of Indian Muslim background living between India and England: Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood star who specializes in playing gods, and Saladin Chamcha, who has made himself as English as he can. Their story, told with the devices of magical realism, frames a series of dream visions experienced by Gibreel. One of those sequences was inspired by the life of the Prophet Muhammad and by early accounts of a group of disputed verses, and it gave great offense to many Muslims. Salman Rushdie's fourth novel was first published in 1988.
- General & Literary Fiction
- Literary fiction
- Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks
- Survival
- India
- Identity (Psychology)
- Airplane crash survival
- East Indians
2 What to expect
A long, exuberant novel of magical realism about two Indian actors in England, whose story is interleaved with a series of dream sequences set in other places and times. Its real subjects are migration, identity, faith and doubt, and the disorientation of the immigrant. It is dense, digressive and full of wordplay, demanding to read, and much broader than the dream chapters about a prophet that made it notorious.
Good for readers who want: magical realism, migration and identity, and a rich, ambitious novel.
3 About Salman Rushdie
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Salman Rushdie
5 Similar books
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