by Salman Rushdie, 2008, Audiobook released 2011, narrated by Sam Dastor, Recorded Books

I don’t get it. The book started out with a tale of two men who were in an airplane that blew up in mid-air, but they somehow safely floated down into the ocean and survived. The book is narrated superbly by Sam Dastor who captures the Indian accents suffused with English and American idioms. The narration is particularly crisp in the case of the female characters who are portrayed as strong women in charge of their male counterparts.

The reason I wanted to read this book is because I wanted to understand why it was so controversial and caused so many threats against the author. I sense that the point of the book was that it is difficult to determine whether religious events are real or just hallucinations. The author never clearly states it, but cast enough doubt about the reality of the events that it raised the anger of the Muslim and Hindu communities.

Rushdie is greatly praised as an author, so why did I really not like this book? While the narration was good, it wore on me after listening to it for over twenty-three hours. It was cute in the beginning, but not in its later stages. The stories seemed to wander all over and there were new characters introduced frequently who didn’t seem to fit with the narrative. And then, when I was expecting some kind of enlightenment toward the end, there was over an hour of detailed description of one of the character’s father’s dying, a huge disappointment!

I can now take this one off my list of must-read books, but it was definitely a chore to get through it.