Salman Rushdie was marked for death and celebrated as an icon after writing 'The Satanic Verses.' Last week's near-fatal attack reminds us of the stakes
Rushdie’s shining armor did not go undented. He and novelist John le Carré slung insults in print — Le Carré a “pompous ass,” Rushdie guilty of “self-canonization.” BothRushdie was a celebrity even among celebrities, bringing the cachet of literature and heroics to the Vanity Fair Oscar party and other name-check events.
Over the weekend, “The Satanic Verses” hit No. 1 on Amazon, as people bought copies of the nearly 35-year-old novel to show solidarity with Rushdie and what he stands for. The book title “The Satanic Verses” comes from a very old religious debate over historical suggestions that the prophet Muhammad was fallible — supposedly briefly tricked by Satan into endorsing some female pagan influences as part of his theology. This interpretation has been largely rejected as heresy by Muslim scholars for centuries, hence the furious reaction when Rushdie revived it as a literary device — in a manner one scholar called a “desacralizing treatment of the Koran.
Rushdie became a U.S. citizen in 2016, right ahead of the presidential election. I asked him about it in 2019, when we talked forand at Writers Bloc in Santa Monica. “I voted in it,” he said sardonically. “That went well.” We were discussing his latest book, “Quichotte,” starring a Quixote-in-a-Chevy Cruze — an American picaresque novel that spans opioids, reality TV and father-son relationships.
Yet there is something pop about Rushdie’s work, a gloss that completes the portrait of this modern Quixote whose battles with immovable objects can seem both reckless and fundamentally heroic. As dark as his novels can sometimes be, there is a silver thread of whimsy running through them, one that is brighter and broader in Rushdie the conversationalist. His sense of comic timing when he speaks to a live audience can be onstage-grade.
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