The Nature of Things

The Satanic Verses , Salman Rushdie's notorious 1988 book that garnered him a fatwa from the ayatollahs, has been on my to-be-read list all these years since, but somehow I just never got around to it. Until now. Maybe it's just as well. Perhaps I wouldn't have had the patience for this complicated tale earlier. It is a difficult but ultimately rewarding read.  The book is so famous as to almost not require a description, but it is full of magical realism and of allusions to Islamic texts, not only the Qur'an, of which I have a woeful ignorance. I'm sure that my ignorance led me to a lack of understanding of some of Rushdie's points and yet I felt that his overall theme regarding human, and especially family, relationships was universal and fully accessible to me.  He begins his story with a hijacked airliner that is blown up over the English Channel by the terrorists who hijacked it. We meet Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha as they are tumbling toward the e...