Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...must be added that few of those outraged by The Satanic Verses have ever seen it, much less opened it. Their fury, and the timorousness of government officials fearing violent uproars, has been prompted by one accusation: that the novel contains a blasphemous portrait of the Prophet Muhammad and thus amounts to a terrible insult to Islam. The plain, simple truth is that the novel does nothing of the sort, but only those who consent to read the thing will discover this for themselves...
...novel, in fact, begins with a big bang: the blowing up, by Sikh terrorists, of a jumbo jet, Flight AI-420 from Bombay to London, at 29,002 feet over the English Channel. Two passengers, cartwheeling and conversing, plummet earthward. One is Gibreel Farishta, India's most popular movie star, who is in disguise and fleeing his fame after suffering a life-threatening illness and discovering in the process that there is no God. The other is Saladin Chamcha, a prosperous performer of voice-overs for commercials on British television, returning to his adopted land after a melancholy visit...
...someone outside the faith to lecture Muslims on what they should or should not read would be impudent. But it must also be stated that there is no ridicule or harm in this novel, only an overwhelming sense of amazement and joy at the multifariousness of all Allah's children. As Gibreel and Saladin try to make their afflicted ways through contemporary London, a fascinating tapestry unfurls behind them. This backdrop contains vivid scenes -- among them, the subjugation of an immense subcontinent and ancient cultures by an upstart island, and the upheavals that result when this thralldom is abruptly ended...
That possibility of meaninglessness tantalizes and bedevils throughout the novel. But Rushdie's furious, organizing energy seems to mark him as an angel of coherence. He has obviously read his Garcia Marquez, his Joyce, his Thomas Pynchon. He shares with those authors the desire to assemble everything he has known and seen and make it all fit together, beautifully. In his fourth novel, Rushdie has done just that...
...campaign personally. Last week Kenneth Noid, 22, walked into a Domino's Pizza shop in Chamblee, Ga., with a .357 Magnum revolver and took two employees hostage. When police arrived, he demanded $100,000 in cash, a getaway car and a copy of The Widow's Son, a 1985 novel about secret societies in an 18th century Parisian prison...