After their hijacked jet explodes over the English Channel, two Indian actors -- Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood matinee idol, and Saladin Chamcha, an anglicized voice-over artist -- fall to earth transformed, one gaining an angelic glow and the other sprouting horns and hooves. Interwoven with their disorienting new lives in Thatcher-era London are dream-visions of the Prophet Mahound and the founding of a new faith in the desert city of Jahilia, and the story of a village drawn toward the sea by a peasant girl's visions. Salman Rushdie's novel is a sprawling, restless meditation on migration, hybrid identity, and the volatile border between doubt and faith.
Books mentioned in The Satanic Verses (21)
Foundation by Isaac Asimov: “On that first aeroplane he read science fiction tales of interplanetary migration: Asimov's Foundation, Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.”
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury: “On that first aeroplane he read science fiction tales of interplanetary migration: Asimov's Foundation, Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.”
Tamburlaine the Great by Christopher Marlowe: “an antique theatre review in which the English critic, Kenneth Tynan, had imagined the polysyllabic characters in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great as 'a horde of pills and wonder drugs bent on decimating one another'”
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: “So comprehend, please, that I am an intelligent female. I have read Finnegans Wake and am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West, e.g. that we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a 'flattened' world.”
The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov: “she tried, once, referring to Nabokov's doomed chess-player Luzhin, who came to feel that in life as in chess there were certain combinations that would inevitably arise to defeat him ... but he fixed her with a hurt stare that told her he'd never heard of the writer, let alone The Defence.”
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: “Sufyan, sucking teeth, made reference to the last edition of The Origin of Species. 'In which even great Charles accepted the notion of mutation in extremis, to ensure survival of species...'”
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray: “the dream flies him at high speed past Barkers department store and the small grey house with double bay windows where Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair”
On the Nature of Things by Lucretius: “'Question of mutability of the essence of the self,' he began, awkwardly, 'has long been subject of profound debate. For example, great Lucretius tells us, in De Rerum Natura, this following thing: quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit, continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit ante.'”
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli: “if Niccolò could survive such tribulation and live to write that perhaps embittered, perhaps sardonic parody of the sycophantic mirror-of-princes literature then so much in vogue, Il Principe, following it with the magisterial Discorsi, then he, Chamcha, need certainly not permit himself the luxury of defeat.”
Discourses on Livy by Niccolò Machiavelli: “if Niccolò could survive such tribulation and live to write ... Il Principe, following it with the magisterial Discorsi, then he, Chamcha, need certainly not permit himself the luxury of defeat.”
Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry: “a stuffed monkey which he claimed was a 'first draft' of the notorious Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Rembrandt, Portrait of Renoir, numerous mechanical contraptions including sexual stimulators that delivered small electric shocks, and a first edition of Jarry's Ubu Roi.”
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake: “One morning Allie, awaking from spent and dreamless sleep, found him immersed in her long-unopened copy of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which her younger self, disrespectful of books, had made a number of marks: underlinings, ticks in the margins, exclamations, multiple queries.”
The Millionairess by George Bernard Shaw: “Years passed; and then Saladin Chamcha, actor, self-made man, returned to Bombay with the Prospero Players, to interpret the role of the Indian doctor in The Millionairess by George Bernard Shaw.”
A Thousand and One Nights: “On a shelf of Changez Chamchawala's teak-lined study, beside a ten-volume set of the Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights, which was being slowly devoured by mildew and bookworm”
The Ocean of the Streams of Story by Somadeva: “thanks to a string of surprise box-office hits based on old fables drawn from the Katha-Sarit-Sagar compendium -- the 'Ocean of the Streams of Story', longer than the Arabian Nights and equally as fantasticated”
Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore: “What was it that made them a living ... His book learning? His Gitanjali, Eclogues, or that play Othello that he explained was really Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn't spell, what sort of writer was that, anyway? (author inferred: Gitanjali is Tagore's well-known collection, not attributed by name in the text)”
Othello by William Shakespeare: “His Gitanjali, Eclogues, or that play Othello that he explained was really Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn't spell, what sort of writer was that, anyway? (author inferred: not named in text, but Othello is unambiguously Shakespeare's)”
Eclogues by Virgil: “His Gitanjali, Eclogues, or that play Othello that he explained was really Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn't spell, what sort of writer was that, anyway? (author inferred as Virgil, the canonical 'Eclogues'; not named directly in text)”
Carmen by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy: “It all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha in his den: love, the refractory bird of Meilhac and Halévy's libretto for Carmen -- one of the prize specimens, this, in the Allegorical Aviary he'd assembled in lighter days”
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Omar Khayyám: “the Yellow (more lucky than me), Khayyám -- FitzGerald's adjectiveless Bird of Time (which has but a little way to fly, and lo! is on the Wing) (title not stated outright; the quoted line is FitzGerald's famous translation of the Rubáiyát)”
The History of the Devil by Daniel Defoe: “(epigraph) Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is ... without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the…”
Books that mention The Satanic Verses (3)
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens: “Even more of one was the decision by the two main American bookstore chains to stop displaying or selling The Satanic Verses.”
Literary Life: A Second Memoir by Larry McMurtry: “the Iranian cleric the Ayatollah Khomeini shocked or at least startled the literary world by issuing his famous fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie.”
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy: “the Congress government had banned Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses and reversed a progressive Supreme Court judgment...”