What makes you unique from your contemporaries? How does the culmination of all of your past experiences affect your present choices, and what does that mean about the choices you end up making? Are you destined to fall back into the cycle of what has been, or can you throw everything away and start over, and be able to tell the tale of it all?

These are the questions I gathered Mr. Rushdie is trying to ask with the Satanic Verses, among other things (should everything that’s said from those you trust be taken face value without question?). What sets a Salman Rushdie book apart from the rest, other than me having to heavily reference a dictionary, is it’s beautiful presentation.

After finishing Midnight’s Children a year or two ago I knew I needed to eventually visit another from him. I was not let down; this book did everything I loved from my first soiree with him. He does everything I was told not to do growing up. Exegesis paragraphs that take up entire pages, with dives into history for the sake of context within slim reference to the main events of the plot that are still incredibly intriguing and engaging.

Magical Realism is the best way to describe his works for sure, because who knows exactly what is and isn’t happening. As far as I can tell, the narrator of the overarching story is God(?) and everything is actually happening, even the stories within a story of another story. Christopher Nolan definitely referenced works of Rushdie when working on Inception.

The book is humbling, made my cry once, and continues to influence my view of the world. I feel my vocabulary grow alongside my hunger for more of what the world has to offer. So many of the references went right over my head, and there are some that were so dense I wouldn’t have even thought to look them up. I had a great time, even if it took a few months. Very solid and pleasant 4 out of 5.