Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Book’s as easy as falling out of a plane
Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2005. I own a lot of books, hundreds, and have read nearly all of them. This isn’t bragging, as I haven’t read all that much since college, except for my first copy-desk stint of 1985-87. They just add up. Here in my 40s, there ought to be more. Yet among them are some, fewer than a dozen I think, I bought intending to read and haven’t.
I’ve finally gotten into the top volume of that stack. It’s been sitting on the lower shelves since 1989 or ’90, and I have read the first five to 12 pages three or four times in the last 15 years and then the new New Yorker arrived or the X-Files or later West Wing came on.
Earlier this week I pushed through the first 50 pages of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and since then I’ve read 20 to 40 pages daily. I understood that the late Iranian ayatollah’s fatwa was proclaimed over some surface sacrilege taken out of context and overall offensiveness to fundamentalists (fundamental Islam, that is). That may be part of it.
But Rushdie’s sin was writing a masterpiece. It is an ‘onest-to-Allah work of wild imagination in the first and last, not the increasingly favored alleged fiction of disguised memoir.
This isn’t to say Rushdie has committed a flight-of-fancy from hallucinations. His reading of Western and especially, of course, Eastern literature, philosophy and religion are well shown here. I’m taking his word for it.
In the above-referenced reading mania of the mid-80s, I concentrated on humorous essays of the 1930s and a bit later — the Algonquin Round Table members, in short, their biographies and actual works. This includes people before them — Don Marquis, Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, and contemporaries who did their drinking elsewhere: Thurber and Perelman chief among them. S.J. “Sid” Perelman was frustrating. Intricate sentences and always, always obscure words. Building vocabulary by reading with a dictionary at the ready is great, but the point when you’re spending more minutes looking up words that often aren’t there than actually reading, you give up.
I realized a couple of things: Perelman used foreign words, including a lot of slang, and sometimes he invented words. Second, if I quit being so darned literal and just pushed through, I was not only happier but laughed. When Sid got elite, I would guess what he might mean from the context and move on. That is good enough. There is no test on this tomorrow.
Back to Salman: I am well educated, by today’s sad standards, but my off-the-cuff knowledge of India and Britain is spare. I ought to know much more about Islam. That is, the various theologies (just like Protestant Christianity, can’t persuade me there’s only one), the histories, the Koran and other sacred writings (don’t tell me it doesn’t have scripture that didn’t make it into the authorized edition, as well as mythology and midrash), its intersections with geo-political entities. I just don’t, outside of a firm belief that at its core Islam has kindness and godliness, as do all major religions. They all have viciousness, too, but that’s obvious.
So let’s try the first five, 10, 20 pages of The Satanic Verses. You accept that some of this dancing, singing narrative is Rushdie, but a lot comes from history, and the intersection of Hinduism and Islam, including plot points and the characters’ names and personalities. You keep reading.
Is it sacred, or magic realism? At least it’s not autobiography. At worst, it’s well-hidden memoir because Self is not the point for a wonderful change. The story is the point, all the stories here. You keep reading.
When you get confused, you don’t put the book away, nor do you skip to the next chapter (then you’re really lost and you’ll sell this trade paperback to Dickson Street Bookshop for $3). You do a Sid and move to the next sentence. You enjoy the fancy, even if the flight started as some other group’s gospel.
Now every day I must learn what happens next to Gibreel and Saladin. -30-
