I have a habit of picking up and starting new books to read while lying in bed and preparing for sleep. Usually I will already be in the middle of 4 or 5 other books or will be close to finishing something that hasn't been keeping my attention and the prospect of something new will lure me away from whatever it is that had been on my plate before. Usually I will keep up with the rhythm of reading this book for a few nights before realizing that I don't know who a pivotal character is or what is happening in the narration. I won't really know what is going on because the novel has just been a soporific. Most times I will fight through this until I figure it out, sometimes I will go back and re-read the beginning to get things right, and on rare occasions I will just give up.
Yesterday I finally threw in the towel on Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verse after getting about 200 pages in. I had put this book on my 2019 reading list because I have moved this book with me probably at least 6 or 7 times and had it in apartments in at least 3 states and I just needed to finally get through it. I had read a lot of Rushdie in college and graduate school and generally enjoyed it (there was a stretch of time when I thought, like many a good student of postmodernism, that Midnight's Children would feature prominently in my scholarship). This did not turn out to be the case with Satanic Verses. The novel opens with two men falling out of the sky and there is some allegory relating them to Islamic angels. There are famous actors and spurned lovers. This is about all I got from it.
In my grad school days I would have powered through the book so I could add it to the tally and may even have made my way through some turgid scholarship about it so that I could stay as confused as I would have been in the first place or discover how I had mis-read it. Instead, I started reading a Murakami book which I anticipate liking more.
No comments:
Post a Comment