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Return to Book Page. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps as most of these works have been housed in our most impor This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world , and other notations in the work.
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by HENLEY, WIlliam Ernest
To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about A Book of Verses , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Yusuf Loonat rated it it was amazing Sep 22, Gwendolyn Biggerstaff rated it it was amazing Nov 24, Bryan rated it really liked it Dec 24, Isabelle rated it really liked it Mar 01, Emmanuel Horsfall rated it it was amazing Sep 09, Rodney Ulyate marked it as to-read Oct 05, Chad Hall marked it as to-read Dec 20, Thomas Delaney marked it as to-read Oct 02, Nora marked it as to-read Oct 20, Nazanin Davis marked it as to-read Jan 06, Cloud marked it as to-read Sep 04, The frame narrative, like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England.
Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specialises in playing Hindu deities. The character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and N. At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain [6]. The plane explodes over the English Channel , but the two are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gabriel and Chamcha that of a devil.
Chamcha is arrested and passes through an ordeal of police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant. Farishta's transformation can partly be read on a realistic level as the symptom of the protagonist's developing schizophrenia.
Both characters struggle to piece their lives back together. Farishta seeks and finds his lost love, the English mountaineer Allie Cone, but their relationship is overshadowed by his mental illness. Chamcha, having miraculously regained his human shape, wants to take revenge on Farishta for having forsaken him after their common fall from the hijacked plane.
He does so by fostering Farishta's pathological jealousy and thus destroying his relationship with Allie. In another moment of crisis, Farishta realises what Chamcha has done, but forgives him and even saves his life. Both return to India. Farishta throws Allie off a high rise in another outbreak of jealousy and then commits suicide. Chamcha, who has found not only forgiveness from Farishta but also reconciliation with his estranged father and his own Indian identity, decides to remain in India.
Embedded in this story is a series of half-magic dream vision narratives, ascribed to the mind of Farishta. They are linked together by many thematic details as well as by the common motifs of divine revelation, religious faith and fanaticism, and doubt. One of these sequences contains most of the elements that have been criticised as offensive to Muslims.
It is a transformed re-narration of the life of Muhammad called " Mahound " or "the Messenger" in the novel in Mecca " Jahiliyyah ". At its centre is the episode of the so-called satanic verses, in which the prophet first proclaims a revelation in favour of the old polytheistic deities, but later renounces this as an error induced by the Devil. There are also two opponents of the "Messenger": When the prophet returns to the city in triumph, Baal goes into hiding in an underground brothel, where the prostitutes assume the identities of the prophet's wives.
A book of verses
Also, one of the prophet's companions claims that he, doubting the authenticity of the "Messenger," has subtly altered portions of the Quran as they were dictated to him. The second sequence tells the story of Ayesha, an Indian peasant girl who claims to be receiving revelations from the Archangel Gibreel. She entices all her village community to embark on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca, claiming that they will be able to walk across the Arabian Sea.
The pilgrimage ends in a catastrophic climax as the believers all walk into the water and disappear, amid disturbingly conflicting testimonies from observers about whether they just drowned or were in fact miraculously able to cross the sea. A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate religious leader, the "Imam", in a lateth-century setting. This figure is a transparent allusion to the life of Ruhollah Khomeini in his Parisian exile, but it is also linked through various recurrent narrative motifs to the figure of the "Messenger".
Overall, the book received favourable reviews from literary critics. In a volume of criticism of Rushdie's career, the influential critic Harold Bloom named The Satanic Verses "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement". Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain" that captures the immigrants' dream-like disorientation and their process of "union-by-hybridization".
A book of verses (Book, ) [theranchhands.com]
The book is seen as "fundamentally a study in alienation. Muhammd Mashuq ibn Ally wrote that " The Satanic Verses is about identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, and conformity. These concepts confront all migrants, disillusioned with both cultures: Yet knowing they cannot live a life of anonymity, they mediate between them both. The tone is comic. After the Satanic Verses controversy developed, some scholars familiar with the book and the whole of Rushdie's work, like M.
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Fletcher, saw the reaction as ironic. Fletcher wrote "It is perhaps a relevant irony that some of the major expressions of hostility toward Rushdie came from those about whom and in some sense for whom he wrote. Clearly, Rushdie's interests centrally include explorations of how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile, and of the nature of religious faith and revelation, not to mention the political manipulation of religion.
Rushdie's own assumptions about the importance of literature parallel in the literal value accorded the written word in Islamic tradition to some degree. But Rushdie seems to have assumed that diverse communities and cultures share some degree of common moral ground on the basis of which dialogue can be pieced together, and it is perhaps for this reason that he underestimated the implacable nature of the hostility evoked by The Satanic Verses , even though a major theme of that novel is the dangerous nature of closed, absolutist belief systems.
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Rushdie's influences have long been a point of interest to scholars examining his work. Ballard and William S. Srinivas Aravamudan 's analysis of The Satanic Verses stressed the satiric nature of the work and held that while it and Midnight's Children may appear to be more "comic epic", "clearly those works are highly satirical" in a similar vein of postmodern satire pioneered by Joseph Heller in Catch The Satanic Verses continued to exhibit Rushdie's penchant for organising his work in terms of parallel stories. Within the book "there are major parallel stories, alternating dream and reality sequences, tied together by the recurring names of the characters in each; this provides intertexts within each novel which comment on the other stories.
Within the book he referenced everything from mythology to "one-liners invoking recent popular culture". The novel provoked great controversy in the Muslim community for what some Muslims believed were blasphemous references. They accused him of misusing freedom of speech. On 12 February , a 10,strong protest against Rushdie and the book took place in Islamabad, Pakistan. Six protesters were killed in an attack on the American Cultural Center, and an American Express office was ransacked.
As the controversy spread, the importing of the book was banned in India [12] and it was burned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the Commission for Racial Equality and a liberal think tank, the Policy Studies Institute , held seminars on the Rushdie affair. They did not invite the author Fay Weldon , who spoke out against burning books, but did invite Shabbir Akhtar , a Cambridge philosophy graduate who called for "a negotiated compromise" which "would protect Muslim sensibilities against gratuitous provocation".
The journalist and author Andy McSmith wrote at the time "We are witnessing, I fear, the birth of a new and dangerously illiberal "liberal" orthodoxy designed to accommodate Dr Akhtar and his fundamentalist friends.