The Satanic Verses
So, I've been reading The Satanic Verses. I'm halfway through. For me at least, it's shaping up to be a pretty good, but ultimately disposable, book. It's well-executed, and the characters ring true, and the agenda is to explore humanity and various themes (as opposed to idle entertainment), but I'm not getting any x-factor here, for whatever reason (narrow/underdeveloped personal preferences are possible).
For example, a repeating motif is the choice between host and native cultures, and the strains in various relationships between people who approach the issue differently, as well as outright racism in various forms. The text is a bit of a representative survey at an arm's-length 3rd-person day-to-day level. Which is fine, in its own little subtle and prodding approach to social criticism.
This motif is explored in a much more raw and personal way by Ralph Ellison in his novel Invisible Man. There's a soul-rending scene in which the Invisible Man, an ambitious black southerner in New York, is confronted by a street vendor with a sweet potato. After denying the potato (the taking of which would amount to an embrace of his backward southernness, naturally), he comes back to it, and gets seconds, a bittersweet private moment in which the most essential and natural of needs is satisfied, as he submits to the false shame of the guilty pleasure. Here, instead of Rushdie's tension and estrangement, we get outright pathos. And I'd trade all of The Satanic Verses for just the first of those two potatoes.
As far as actual pet peeves go for Rushdie, once every page or three there are self-consciously hip things thrown in, but it's done at just the right level of frequency that I don't have trouble tolerating it, but I wonder consciously why the fuck he's doing it. And whadyaknow, he even gave Vonnegut's "listen:" a few spins - dubya tee eff? But wait, that's not it.
On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 meaning he deserves to be killed for writing this book, and 1 meaning he does not, I give it a 1.
For example, a repeating motif is the choice between host and native cultures, and the strains in various relationships between people who approach the issue differently, as well as outright racism in various forms. The text is a bit of a representative survey at an arm's-length 3rd-person day-to-day level. Which is fine, in its own little subtle and prodding approach to social criticism.
This motif is explored in a much more raw and personal way by Ralph Ellison in his novel Invisible Man. There's a soul-rending scene in which the Invisible Man, an ambitious black southerner in New York, is confronted by a street vendor with a sweet potato. After denying the potato (the taking of which would amount to an embrace of his backward southernness, naturally), he comes back to it, and gets seconds, a bittersweet private moment in which the most essential and natural of needs is satisfied, as he submits to the false shame of the guilty pleasure. Here, instead of Rushdie's tension and estrangement, we get outright pathos. And I'd trade all of The Satanic Verses for just the first of those two potatoes.
As far as actual pet peeves go for Rushdie, once every page or three there are self-consciously hip things thrown in, but it's done at just the right level of frequency that I don't have trouble tolerating it, but I wonder consciously why the fuck he's doing it. And whadyaknow, he even gave Vonnegut's "listen:" a few spins - dubya tee eff? But wait, that's not it.
On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 meaning he deserves to be killed for writing this book, and 1 meaning he does not, I give it a 1.