The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

I can’t believe I hadn’t gotten around to reading The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie until now.

People are trying to kill a guy for writing this and I haven’t read it yet? What the hell is wrong with me?

Plus, once again, big fan of Satan. Satan in the title.

How could I go wrong? I gotta tell you, this book is easily one of the ten best novels I have ever read.

There is so much in here that I really need to digest it and maybe even reread it in the coming months before I can get a handle on it. I think that if most authors were to attempt something on this scale, it would end up being a mess, but Rushdie is up for the task.

Verses is congested with all kinds of crazy ideas and jumps from theme to theme, from story to story, from protagonist to protagonist.

We start with two fellows falling out of a plane that has just blown up. It doesn’t sound like it should be a funny chapter, but it really is. We follow them all the way down to earth as they miraculously land, unharmed.

We travel alongside them as they learn that maybe survival isn’t in and of itself the prize.

There is something more.

Then, Rushdie takes us back to the brothel where twelve prostitutes pretend to be the twelve wives of Mahound, the prophet.

Such sacrilege.

Then, it’s on to a disastrous pilgrimage with a delusional, leader who claims to be taking orders from the Archangel Gibreel. Is the prophet sadistic or foolish? Not only am I not sure, I’m convinced that Rushdie himself doesn’t know..

Rushdie juggles so many characters, so many stories, so many story arcs yet he weaves them together with such credibility that it really doesn’t feel as experimental as it really is.

It’s a rare novel that really experiments with theme, character, and story and is simple and accessible at the same time.

When it comes down to it, while Verses deals chiefly with religion, transformation, (one of our protagonists changes from a man to a faun to Satan himself and back again only to find that he really hadn’t changed much at all.) deception and death, on a broader level, it’s really about how we react to the unknown.

Rushdie studies both the insanity of belief and the stubborn arrogance of disbelief.

Goddamn, this book was good.

Rushdie’s style is so simple and lovely.

When he states that, “Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy,” it just really impacts the entire book with a very short, simple sentence.

I really need more time to digest and then I may post more thoughts on it in the coming weeks/months/years.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi: A Study in Freedom and Irreverence

Okay, if The Shadow of the Wind is the most elegant and graceful book I’ve read in a long time, The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is certainly the most irreverent.

And yes, that really is a compliment, especially when you see how her criticism of authority and general sarcasm never turns cynical.

Satrapi retains her respect and affection for all her characters, even the ‘bad guys.’ She refuses to paint them as caricatures or monsters, never letting them off the hook by constantly reminding us that these are thinking individuals who make choices.

After all, a monster can’t be held responsible for behaving like a monster and she does insist on holding the people who've oppressed her country to account.

Satrapi doesn’t spare herself either.

At one point, I found myself thinking, ‘wow, what a selfish bitch’ only to find a couple of pages later that her grandma tells her that she’s a selfish bitch and Satrapi openly and apologetically admits that she found herself behaving in an unconscionable way.

I have no doubt that when you read this, you’ll know exactly which part I’m talking about.

We see Satrapi growing up under the Shah, going through the revolution and then experience the disillusionment that comes when the people of Iran find themselves just as repressed as they were before they overthrew the Shah.

What we see here is the end result of too many revolutions in which the ‘liberators’ turn out to be as or more oppressive than the tyrant they fought to overthrow in the first place.

This book also serves as a caution against painting an entire nation of people with a broad brush. Doing so isn’t only naïve, it’s dangerous.

But what stands out is that Satrapi never comes off as sanctimonious or preachy. Any political point of view rests comfortably in this bed of humor and sarcastic irreverence.

Seriously, read this book.

Hiroshima by John Hersey

Hiroshima by John Hersey follows the stories of six survivors from about an hour before the bombing until a year after. As an aside, I’d recommend Isao Takahata’s film Grave of the Fireflies as a companion piece. It goes without saying that the accounts of what happened that day are horrific. The scale of the devastation was so great and survivors unarmed enough to help were so few that they had no choice but to ignore the countless cries for help from people who were buried alive, being slowly crushed or suffocating because they simply couldn’t get to them all. There were so many devastating moments in the story, like how after a few days, the Reverend Tanimoto became so used to the carnage and trying to move living bodies from one place to another that he had to keep repeating aloud, “these are human beings” just so he could keep going. There is another moment when Reverend Tanimoto had helped drag dozens of the injured to lie by the side of the river only to find when he had come back that the waters had risen and the wounded were so weak that they couldn’t crawl even a few feet to safety, so they had all drowned, helpless. And while the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were appalling acts, what struck me when reading this was how Hersey refuses to make any overt moral judgments or political statements. He simply lets the narrative do its work. This is a very important book. It should be read by everybody, no matter what you think about whether dropping the bomb was the right thing to do or not. Even if action must be taken, no matter how justified one is in using deadly force, we should always be reminding ourselves, like Reverend Tanimoto that “these are human beings.”