The Satanic Verses

It’s tough competition here—I read War and Peace, Gilgamesh, The Grapes of Wrath, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla in the same twelve months. For me to choose anything over ancient poetry is almost unheard of.

But I think the state of socio-politics right now has played a hand in influencing me—we can see what fanaticism is doing to the world everywhere we look, and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses not only shreds the notions of religious and political fanaticism but does so with great humanity and intellectual savagery.

Blasphemy is a human right. And only through tragic comedy… show more.

A complex magic realist novel. Two Muslim Indians are on a highjacked plane that explodes over the English Channel. As they fall into the sea, Bollywood superstar Gibreel Farishta, turns into the Archangel Gabriel, while Saladin Chamcha, a voiceover artist, metamorphoses into the Devil. They struggle with their new identities, with rivalry, with life in Britain, and in Gibreel’s case, with mental illness. Like all Rushdie’s work, it is a post-colonial perspective on the metropolis and the identity crises of the ex-colonised. There are long dream sequences about an Arabian prophet called Mahmoud—who resembles the founder of Islam.… show more.