Read The Satanic Verses Online
Authors: Salman Rushdie
Tags: #Family, #London (England), #East Indians, #Family - India, #India, #Survival after airplane accidents; shipwrecks; etc, #Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), #Modern fiction, #Fiction - General, #General, #General & Literary Fiction, #Fiction, #Domestic fiction, #Didactic fiction
The Satanic Verses
Praise for
The Satanic Verses
“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 recommended.”
—
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.”
—
The Sunday Times
(London)
“
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
A
LSO BY
S
ALMAN
R
USHDIEFICTION
Grimus
Midnight’s Children
Shame
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Fury
Shalimar the ClownNONFICTION
The Jaguar Smile
Imaginary Homelands
The Wizard of Oz
Step Across This LineSCREENPLAY
Midnight’s Children
ANTHOLOGY
Mirrorwork
(co-editor)
The Satanic Verses
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2008 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1988 by Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of he Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
T
RADE
P
APERBACKS
and colophon are
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., and in the United Kingdom by Viking, a division of Penguin Books Ltd., in 1989.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Living Doll” by Lionel Bart, copyright © 1959 (renewed 1987) by P
ETER
M
AURICE
M
USIC
Co. L
TD
. All rights for the U.S. and Canada controlled and administered by C
OLGEMS
-EMI M
USIC
I
NC
. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rushdie, Salman.
The satanic verses : a novel / Salman Rushdie.
p. cm
eISBN: 978-0-307-78665-4
I. Title
PR6068.U757S27385 1997
823′.914–dc21 97-795
v3.1
Dedicated to the individuals
and organizations who have supported this publication
.
Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is … without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.
Daniel Defoe,
The History of the Devil
‘T
o 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 down 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?