Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from the beginning, been a story much stranger than fiction; if a novel had been so riddled with ironies, it would have been condemned for implausibility. In Salman Rushdie and Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the world has two master plotters, celebrated 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...
...controversy, and attendant celebrity, he has often seemed to crave -- yet with a cruel vengeance. For years Rushdie has been one of Britain's most vocal polemicists, an agent provocateur who has delighted in mixing it up -- even if "it" means politics and literature. His first great novel, Midnight's Children, about India, was successfully challenged by the Prime Minister of India; his second, Shame, about Pakistan, was banned in Pakistan; now the last in his unofficial trilogy, about both India and England, has been banned in India and burned in England. As one who was born into the Islamic...
...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 by night...
Many a university professor daydreams about someday casting aside his footnotes and writing a splashy novel that will sell zillions of copies and make him rich. Umberto Eco, 57, a bearded and bespectacled professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, fulfilled exactly that daydream eight years ago, when he concocted his mega-macro-medieval-mystery hit The Name of the Rose. He wrote part of the best seller in a 50-room country retreat near Urbino that he bought and restored himself and where he spends his leisure hours expanding his 40,000-volume collection of antique books...
That bizarre scenario might seem impossible for even a semiotician to duplicate. But guess again. Eco has produced another novel, Foucault's Pendulum, which has sold more than half a million copies in Italy since it was published last October and at one point outsold the next highest best seller by 15 to 1. Translation rights have been assigned in 24 countries, and an English version by William Weaver will be published in the U.S. next October. Once again the Italian press has orchestrated what it calls Ecomania with cries of delight and outrage. One newspaper praised Foucault's Pendulum...