The Satanic Verses

I just finished this book. As always, Rushdie takes you through a fascinating journey of innumerable characters, each with innumerable personas. He takes you down rusty dusty lanes of deep, real facets of human nature- of malice, vengence, anguish and those tricky, complex facets that invariably lack single word descriptions. He takes you to a place where the line between dream and reality is hazy or non existent, making you question why that distinction is even necessary! It's a world of devils, djinns, the Satan, genies, angels and prophets, a world that is agglutinated with the other-world. The story speaks of the innocence of unthinking love, the hope and the hopelessness of blind faith, casting a kaleidoscopic rainbow of the banal and the magical in our very-little-understood lives.

There were parts that I thought were very allegorical and I'd have had a better grasp of them had I known the Quran, but the story of the Prophet Mohammed, which I kind of vaguely know, thanks to my husband who told it, made me appreciate at least a few of those parts.

As always, it's a Rushdie. It ain't an easy read, but wonderful nonetheless. The only thing that gets to me about Rushdie's writing is the convoluted style in certain parts and the places with sentences that you honestly think are never going to end. But I am all for riding in the hot air balloon through the fantastic imagination of this man's brain. Yes, I'd do it again.