Quote:
Originally Posted by BelleZora
I also struggled with this book until I came to the conclusion that I had three choices: (1) give up on the book, (2) plod through it miserably, or (3) read enough secondary material to have a framework in which to at least partially understand what I was reading and the author’s intent. One of the chief obstacles for me was that the story kept changing. Just as I cared about a story…Presto Change-o!...I was in another story.
This quote from a Rushdie interview helped:
Exactly. So in order to continue I had to accept that change is part of the story.
I was on page 252, 50%, when I was riveted by this paragraph:
I’d been pondering the nature of good and evil because of a preoccupation with the last season of the television series Breaking Bad, an obsession I share with a fair portion of the American population. This fact has nothing to do with this book or this thread, but it explains my sudden intense interest in this theme throughout the remainder of the book.
In the interview cited above, Rushdie says of Ovid's Metamorphoses:
Metamorphosis happens throughout this book, most significantly as Gibreel Farishta becomes an angel and Saladin Chamcha becomes the devil. But this post is now too long. This is a theme I would like to see discussed and I’ll likely have a good deal to say about it. But now I must read Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
A second theme that fascinates me is the experience of the migrant, which is also a metamorphosis. But there will be time enough in this thread for that.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by BelleZora
The evil Saladin was in need of rescue because, after he has destroyed Gibreel's fragile mind and relationship using an innocent woman to achieve his goal, he races into a burning building, despite the pain in his chest and left arm, to save the people inside.
Gibreel then rushes in and finds the fallen, traitorous Saladin, and this question is asked:
Gibreel asked Saladin: "Why'd you do it?, referring to the damage Saladin inflicted upon himself and Allie. And then Gibreel says:
Rushdie asks: "Is it possible that evil is never total, that its victory, no matter how overwhelming, is never absolute?"
This book asks so many questions that I can barely (or not even) comprehend them, much less the answers, although questions are obviously more important to Rushdie than answers. The questions that held my attention most concerned the presence of good and evil within the same person: how could this be? What does it mean?
Rushdie asks: "Are we coming closer to it? Should we even say that these are two fundamentally different types of self?"
I can't even begin to trace out the threads of all the other stories and how they make a whole. There is so much here. I actually began to keep a reading journal, the first time I've done so in decades. So I suppose that means the book is worth the effort to grapple with it, at least for me.
|
There are some really remarkable insights in these posts. Thanks for sharing them.
I read it many years ago and haven't bothered to re-read it. Now I think I might do so to see if I appreciate it more than I did.