Like Cervantes,
Rushdie is able to balance his commentary with a voice full of tragicomic fervor, which makes the novel a thrilling adventure on a sentence-by-sentence level and another triumph for
Rushdie.
He made the allegation while discussing claims former US Vice President Joe Biden, 76, touched women inappropriately,
Rushdie, 71, said: "I have a little experience of being sexually violated by a powerful politician.
Rushdie made the claims during a discusssion about allegations of inappropriate touching made against former US vice-president Joe Biden.
The hardline media in Iran did not make a major event of this year's 30th anniversary, though most years a few dailies rehash the history of how Khomeini said
Rushdie must die for writing an English-language novel, "The Satanic Verses," that Khomeini ruled blasphemous, although he could not have read it.
As a result of these events,
Rushdie went into hiding for over a decade while bookshops were set on fire and publishers murdered.
At the core of this novel,
Rushdie revives the spirits of the medieval thinkers al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd to conduct an inquiry into the influence of faith and reason in the contemporary world.
An EU-based source told FNA Saturday evening that
Rushdie has "canceled his presence at the book fair and called off his visit to Frankfurt".
To
Rushdie's credit, not many could have handled the scale and ambition of the novel the way he has done.
Several of
Rushdie's protagonists, i.e., Saleem Sinai, Omar Khayyam Shakil, Saladin Chamcha, Rashid Khalifa known as The Shah of Blah, Abraham Zogoiby, the Cambridge educated academic Malik Solanka, the besotted singer Orphus Cama and Niccolo Vespucci dubbed the Mogor del Amore, could thus be said to bear the imprint of the storyteller and embattled writer
Rushdie.
Rushdie also reveals all about his four marriages and the birth of his two sons.
It did not escape my notice that
Rushdie's discussion of the ideal and the actually existing Islam is sandwiched between an elucidating preface and an important coda, neither of which are given consideration in Heller's account.