Word: bookings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie (Viking; $19.95). Charges of blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad have put Rushdie's book into international headlines. But the author's relentless artistry pervades this encyclopedic fiction about the explosive, often comic, meetings of East and West...
...controversialists both, with unusually lively imaginations, each of them now in his own embattled hideout while the War of the Words rages on. Yet even Jorge Luis Borges -- or Rushdie -- could scarcely have dreamed up a scene in which a Muhammadan cleric vows to kill Salman Rushdie for a book in which the Prophet condemns an apostate called Salman for "polluting the word of God." Who is the prophet here -- Rushdie, for predicting the confrontation in the first place, or the Ayatullah, for taking it upon himself to be the living embodiment of Islam? Life imitates art imitates life...
...destinies, bring down upon themselves the justice they deserve. In this case, however, the justice could hardly be described as poetic. Both sides have, in a sense, got exactly what they wanted -- only to find that perhaps they should not have wanted it after all. In banning the book, various wise bodies have ignored the truth that every parent knows: a prohibition is often an invitation in disguise. And in making his Valentine's Day call for massacre, Khomeini seems to have gone beyond overkill to hubris: unlike, say, the Christians who opposed The Last Temptation of Christ, he appears...
...England, has been banned in India and burned in England. As one who was born into the Islamic faith and studied "the Satanic verses" at Cambridge, he must surely have known that his skeptic's accounting of Islam was certain to offend; yet the very title of his book went out of its way to flaunt its hereticism...
...name, Rushdie has become a missing person. Almost worst of all, for a writer, his work of the imagination -- and an exceptionally complex work of an uncommonly fertile imagination -- is now being treated as if it were a heretic's pamphlet; The Satanic Verses has been turned from a book into a talking point. With the drama bringing more and more readers to a novel that most readers will find almost impossible to unravel, one is ironically reminded of the end of that classic discussion of faith vs. doubt, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," in which "ignorant armies clash...