Births which occurred on
a June 19:
2001 Two Hundred Years Together, 1795-1995, about the
relations of Russians and Jews, by Russia's Nobel laureate author and
historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn, goes on sale in Moscow.
 1947
Salman Rushdie, in Bombay, novelist.
^top^
In1961 he emigrated to Britain,
studied history at Cambridge, then: worked as an independent
journalist. In 1981 he published the novel Midnight's Children
(surrealist fiction that deals with the history of India
from 1910 to the declaration of the emergency in 1976 through
the eyes of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of Midnight August
15, 1947. It is at once the history of a sub-continent, the
story of a boy's coming to age, the saga of a family and the
off-key liberation-song of a people).
In 1988 he publishes the
novel: The Satanic Verses which earn him a death penalty
(fatwah) for blasphemy against Islam, decreed by Iran. Rushdie
had to go into hiding for many years. His style is a mixture
of realism, fantasy and grotesque tales, using historical facts
and real political events, often allusions and language games.
[Webcurrents
review]
A more recent novel of Rushdie
is The Moor's Last Sigh (1995--Whitbread novel of the
year), a playful family epic told by a descendant of the explorer
Vasco da Gama who was born with a strange condition that makes
him age twice as fast as everyone else. [links
to reviews]
Other books by Rushdie are The
Ground beneath Her Feet (1999): a novel about "the triangle
of art, love, and death" inspired by the Orpheus myth,
which describes the life of an Indian rock singer Vina Aspara,
and the ground beneath her feet shakes in an earthquake.
-- Haroun and the Sea Stories (1990) -- about Khattam-Shud,
the cult-master, whose goal was to drain the sea of stories,
silencing creative expression.
East, West: Stories (1994) -- three stories set in the East,
three in the West, and the final three about expatriates from
the East living in the West. [Indolink
review]
Grimus (1975): A wandering Indian seeks the island of immortality,
but once there must fight Grimus, a mysterious malevolent ghost.
Shame (1983--Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger): a
novel about the shame of being humiliated, and the shame of
the resulting destructive violence--
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991(1991)
-- See
the list of some 70 essays
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987): a diary of
Rushdie's visit to Nicaragua in 1986 and a testament of a revolution
led by warrior-poets, with Rushdie's analysis of the political
situation in central America.
— Salman
Rushdie, escritor hindú, nacionalizado británico.
Summary
of The Satanic Verses:
Chapter I: The Angel Gibreel: The novel opens with the
two main characters, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, falling
to earth because the plane they have been flying in has just
been blown up by the terrorists who have hijacked it. We are
then told a good deal of detail about their backgrounds, their
occupations, their love affairs, and how they happened to find
themselves together on the plane. Then the story of the hijacking
is told, leading up to the moment of explosion which began the
novel.
Chapter II: Mahound: Gibreel falls asleep and "dreams"
the beginning of the other main plot of the novel, the story
of Mahound, more or less closely based on the traditions surrounding
Muhammad and the founding of Islam in the seventh century. It
is this plot that resulted in the attacks on Rushdie by Muslim
critics. We see Mahound surveying the city of Jahilia and are
introduced to various significant locales. The period corresponds
historically to the early days of Muhammad's preaching in Mecca,
where he was not widely accepted, and the Ka'ba was still filled
with pagan idols, including those of the three goddesses who
are the focus of the "satanic verses." Mahound's preaching has
earned the hatred of the ruler of Jahilia, Abu Simbel, whose
fortune is derived from worshippers at their temples. Abu Simbel,
aware that Baal is his wife Hind's lover, blackmails the poet
Baal to satirize the Mahound and his companions.
But then he tries a more effective
alternative to render the prophet harmless by offering him toleration
if he in turn will acknowledge the three goddesses whose temples
he and his wife receive their income from. Mahound horrifies
his followers by seeming to be willing to deviate from his message
of strict monotheism. He consults with the Angel Gibreel, who
has up to this point been dictating holy scripture to him, and
becomes convinced that the "satanic verses" acknowledging the
three goddesses, should be proclaimed as inspired, though the
narrator hints that they have been inspired not by God, but
by the devil.
Mahound's decision produces an
orgy of celebration which results in death for some, and he
himself wakes up in Hind's bedroom. Mahound realizes the "satanic
verses" are indeed satanic, and goes to the Ka'ba to repudiate
them. A fierce persecution of Mahound's followers is unleashed,
and he has to flee to Yathrib. Gibreel dreams that he is being
attacked by the goddesses, for in his dream-role as the archangel/devil
he has been responsible both for suggesting the verses and repudiating
them.
Chapter III: Ellowen Deeowen: Rosa Diamond, an old woman
who spends much of her time dreaming about the past (the Norman
Invasion and her own, in Argentina), witnesses Gibreel and Saladin's
descent to earth and rescues them; but Saladin is arrested as
an illegal immigrant, while Rosa dies. The police strip and
humiliate Saladin, who discovers that he is turning into a hairy,
goatlike creature. In a bizarre secret hospital where animal/human
experiments reminiscent of H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor
Moreau are being carried out he is befriended by a physiotherapist
and escapes.
The scene shifts to Saladin's
home where his wife Pamela, rather than grieving for him, has
started an affair with Jumpy Joshi, and does not welcome the
news that he is still alive. The two lovers flee and engage
in an orgy of lovemaking until Saladin finds them in his goatlike
form. On the train to London Gibreel is bored by an American
fundamentalist with the same name as a "false prophet" in Islamic
tradition: Maslama. Various signs convey to Gibreel that he
is evolving into an angel. This scene shifts to introduce Alleluia
Cone, former lover of Gibreel, speaking to a class of schoolgirls
about her career as a mountain-climber. Gibreel, entering London,
haunted by the ghost of another lover--Rekha Merchant--runs
into her on the street.
Chapter IV: Ayesha: Gibreel's dreams resume with a narrative
imitation of a long zoom shot focussing in on the fanatical
Imam, in exile in London. This figure is clearly based on the
Iranian Muslim fundamentalist leader, the Ayatollah Khomeni.
His companions are named after prominent companions of Muhammad,
and his enemy in his homeland of Desh is named after Muhammad's
favorite wife. Gibreel as angel carries the Imam to the capital
city of Desh, as the Islamic Gibreel had carried Muhammad to
Jerusalem. They witness a popular revolution in which the evil
Ayesha dies. From her dead body springs the spirit of Al-lat,
one of the three goddesses of the "satanic verses," but she
is defeated by Gibreel. The Imam triumphs and tries to freeze
time by destroying all the clocks in the land. Rushdie provides
his own commentary on this image in discussing the Iranian revolution:
". . . the revolution sets out quite literally to turn back
the clock. Time must be reversed".
A separate plot now begins, involving
Mirza Saeed Akhtar, his wife Mishal, and the mystical, mysterious
and beautiful Ayesha (a quite different figure from the Ayesha
of the Desh plot, but in the long run equally destructive).
As Mirza watches the butterfly-clad Ayesha, he longs for her.
A long flashback tells of Ayesha's girlhood and introduces us
to several characters from the village of Titlipur. Mirza Saeed
tries to transmute his lust for the girl into passion for his
wife, but it is Mishal who becomes close to Ayesha. This intimacy
is a disaster, for the seemingly insane girl claims to have
been told by the Angel Gibreel that Mishal has breast cancer.
The only cure, she pronounces, is to make a foot-pilgrimage
to Mecca. Unfortunately, this involves walking across the Arabian
Sea. The skeptical and furious Mirza Saeed cannot stop his wife
from going, but decides to accompany them in hopes of somehow
saving her.
Chapter V: A City Visible but Unseen: Back in contemporary
London, the guilt-ridden Jumpy Joshi takes the goatlike Saladin
Chamcha back to his apartment above the Shaandaar Café, dominated
by Hind, the wife of Muhammad Sufyan. This Hind is not as lascivious
as the one in the "satanic verses" plot, but she is almost as
fierce. She has two teenaged daughters--Mishal and Anahita--who
will become fascinated with the strange man/devil that Saladin
has become. We pause in the plot to learn more about the family
and its interrelationships. Hind muses on the disgusting weirdness
that is London.
A dream provides details of Saladin's
escape from the "hospital." He phones his old work partner,
Mimi Mamoulian, only to find that he has lost his job. He briefly
encounters the name of Billy Battuta, who will figure prominently
in the novel later. His old boss, Hal Valance, explains why
his television series has been cancelled. He is enraged to learn
that Gibreel is alive, and--far from helping him out in any
way--is claiming he missed Flight 420 and seems to be engaged
into making his "satanic verses" dreams into a movie. Meanwhile
his wife has become pregnant by Jumpy. Everything seems to be
conspiring against Saladin; and, battered into submission by
fate, he loses his supernatural qualities after a visit to the
bizarre Hot Wax nightclub. A subplot involves a series of gruesome
murders of old women for which the black militant leader Uhuru
Simba is arrested.
The next section returns to the
story of Allie Cone, detailing her childhood and young adulthood.
Her reunion was Gibreel is passionate, but it will be spoiled
by his insane jealousy. Again haunted by Rekha Merchant, a deranged
Gibreel tries to confront London in his angelic persona, but
he is instead knocked down by the car of film producer S. S.
Sisodia, who returns him to Allie and signs him up to make a
series of films as the archangel of his dreams. Again he tries
to leave Allie, but a riot during a public appearance lands
him back again, defeated, at Allie's doorstep. At the end of
the chapter we learn that a most uncharacteristic heat wave
has broken out in London.
Chapter VI: Return to Jahilia: This chapter, the most
controversial in the novel, returns us to Jahilia, from which
Mahound had fled (historically this corresponds to the Prophet
Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina). Mahound is returning
to his home city, having gained many followers while he was
away. The monstrous Hind, miraculously unaged, continues her
reign of terror over the city. The cynical Poet Baal encounters
Salman, now disillusioned with Mahound. He says that in Yathrib
the prophet has become obsessed with laying down various restrictive
laws, some of which parallel parts of the Sharia, traditional
Islamic law. This passage has been widely attacked by Muslim
scholars as inaccurate and blasphemous, but clearly Rushdie
was not attempting a scholarly discourse on Islamic law. It
is, however, a satire on restrictive moral codes. He also describes
what he takes to be the origins of the religion's restrictions
on women.
Salman, noting that the revelations
Mahound received were very convenient for the Prophet himself,
has begun to test him by altering the revelations given to Mahound
when they are dictated. He has realized that Mahound is far
from infallible; and, terrified that his changes to the sacred
text will be discovered, he has fled to Jahilia. Muslims who
see this as a satire on the dictation of the Qur'an find it
highly offensive, for the sacred scripture of Muslims is held
to be the exact and perfectly preserved word of God in the most
literal sense.
The aged Abu Simbel converts
to the new faith and surrenders the city of Mahound. At first
Hind resists, but after the House the Black Stone is cleansed
of pagan idols (as the Ka'ba was similarly cleansed by Muhammad),
she submits and embraces the new faith as well. Bilal manages
to save Salman from execution; but Baal flees, hiding in a brothel
named Hijab. The prostitutes there have blasphemously taken
on the names of the Prophet's various wives. No scene in the
novel has been more ferociously attacked, though as Rushdie
points out it is quite inaccurate to say that the author has
made the Prophet's wives into whores. Rather the scene is a
commentary on the tendency of the profane to infiltrate the
sacred. Nevertheless, the imagery and language of this section
has offended readers mightily. Baal becomes a sort of pseudo-Mahound,
by making love to each of the prostitutes in turn. Salman visits
Baal and tells him a story that implies the real Ayesha may
have been unfaithful to Mahound.
The brothel is raided, Baal sings
serenades to the imprisoned whores and is himself arrested and
condemned to death. Hind, meanwhile, retreats to her study,
evidently practicing witchcraft. It is revealed that her "conversion"
was a ruse to divert Mahound's attention while she trained herself
in the magical powers necessary to defeat him. Ultimately she
sends the goddess Al-Lat to destroy the Prophet who, with his
dying breath thanks her for killing him.
Chapter VII: The Angel Azraeel: This is by far the most
eventful chapter in the novel, and the one in which readers
are most likely to get lost. The Saladin/Gibreel plot resumes
as the former meditates on his two unrequited loves: for London
and for Pamela, both of whom have betrayed him. He calls on
his wife, now pregnant by Jumpy Joshi, and says he wants to
move back into his home, although he seems to have fallen out
of love with her. Back in his room at the Shaandaar Cafe, he
watches television and muses on various forms of transformation
and hybridism which relate to his own transmutation and fantasizes
about the sexy teenaged Mishal Sufyan. The first-person demonic
narrator of the novel makes one of his brief appearances. The
guilty Jumpy coerces Pamela into taking Saladin home. The pair
is involved in protests against the arrest of Uhuru Simba for
the Granny Ripper Murders. Saladin goes with them to a protest
meeting where an encounter with Mishal makes him feel doomed.
Jumpy mentions Gibreel to him. After hearing evangelist Eugene
Dumsday denounce evolution on the radio, he realizes that his
personal evolution is not finished.
A heat wave has hit London. At
a bizarre party hosted by film maker S. S. Sisodia, Saladin
meets Gibreel again. He starts out to attack him, furious at
the latter's having abandoned him back when the police came
to Rosa Diamond's house; but enraged by the beautiful Alleluia
Cone, he more effectively avenges himself accidentally by blurting
out the news of his wife's unfaithfulness, unaware of the effect
this will have on Gibreel, who is extremely prone to jealousy.
Gibreel insanely assaults Jumpy Joshi, whom he fears is lusting
after Allie.
Allie, driven to distraction
by Gibreel's jealousy, invites Saladin to stay with her and
the sedated Gibreel in Scotland. The two lovers are bound in
an intensely sexual but destructive relationship which makes
Saladin more than ever determined to take his revenge on Gibreel,
whom he takes to the Shaandaar Café, where they encounter drunken
racists. On the way back to Allie's flat Saladin plants the
seeds of his campaign against Gibreel's sanity by telling him
of the jealous Strindberg. He begins to use his talent for imitating
many voices to make obscene and threatening phone calls to both
Allie and Gibreel, and he succeeds in breaking the couple up.
Gibreel, now driven completely
insane, is suffering under the delusion that he is the destroyer
angel Azraeel, whose job is to blow the Last Trumpet and end
the world. A riot involving both Blacks and Asians breaks out
when--after Uhuru Simba dies in police custody--it is made clear
that he was not the Granny Ripper. Gibreel is in his element
in this apocalyptic uprising. It is not always clear in what
follows how much is Gibreel's insanity and how much is fantastic
reality: but he experiences himself as capable of blowing streams
of fire out of his trumpet to incinerate various people, including
a group of pimps whom he associates with the inhabitants of
the Jahilian brothel in his dream. On a realistic level, the
ensuing fires are probably just the result of the rioting that
has broken out around him. Jumpy Joshi and Pamela die when the
Brickhall Community Relations Council building is torched either
by Saladin, or by the police. When Saladin returns to the Shaandaar
Café he finds it ablaze as well, and plunges in to try to rescue
the Sufyan family, but instead he is rescued by Gibreel. As
an ambulance takes the two men away, Gibreel lapses back into
madness and dreams the next chapter.
Chapter VIII: The Parting of the Arabian Sea: It is important
to know that the events in this chapter are based on a real
occurrence. In 1983 thirty-eight fanatical Shi'ites walked into
Hawkes Bay in Karachi (the site of the Rushdie family home in
Pakistan). Their leader had persuaded them that a path through
the sea would miraculously open, enabling them to walk to the
holy city of Kerbala in Iraq
The story of the mystical Ayesha
from the end of Chapter IV resumes. One disaster after another
assails the pilgrims following Ayesha in her march to the sea;
but she insists on continuing, as does Mishal, Mirza Saeed's
wife, despite his repeated attempts to dissuade her. He tries
to persuade Ayesha to accept airplane tickets to complete the
pilgrimage to Mecca (which is in fact the most common way for
pilgrims to make the hajj today); but she refuses. Her fanaticism
makes her more and more ruthless, unmoved even by the deaths
of fifteen thousand miners nearby. She behaves like the evil
Ayesha of the Desh plot when an Imam announces that an abandoned
baby is a "Devil's Child," and allows the congregation of the
mosque to stone it to death. Finally, the horrified Mirza Saeed
watches as his wife and others walk into the sea and are drowned;
though all other witnesses claim that the sea did miraculously
open as Ayesha had expected and the group crossed safely. Mirza
Saeed returns home and starves himself to death, in his dying
moments joining his wife and Ayesha in their pilgrimage to Mecca,
though probably only in his mind.
Chapter IX: The Wonderful Lamp A year and a half later,
Saladin flies home to be with his dying father. He has heard
that Gibreel is now making films based on the "dreams" which
have alternated with the present-day plot throughout the novel.
On the plane he reads of various scandals and disasters taking
place in India: clearly it is no utopia. Whereas Saladin resents
the former maidservant who has married his father and taken
on his mother's identity, his lover/friend Zeeny Vakil immediately
sympathizes with her. After years of hostility to his father,
Saladin finds no support in those surrounding him for his attitude.
As he sits by his father's bedside the two are finally reconciled.
Saladin has inherited his father's estate and is now rich. Meanwhile
a dispute over a film on Indian sectarianism has become the
center of a censorship controversy in a way that ominously forshadows
the treatment which Rushdie's Satanic Verses was to receive
upon publication.
Gibreel has also returned to
Bombay, depressed and suicidal. The movie he tries to make is
a "satanic" inversion of the traditional tale from the Ramayana,
reflecting his disillusionment with love after having been rejected
by Allie. Ultimately he goes entirely mad, kills Sisodia and
Allie (hurling the latter symbolically from the same skyscraper
from which Rekha Merchant had flung herself). Visiting Saladin,
he confesses, then draws a revolver from the "magic" lamp Saladin
had inherited from his father, and shoots himself. Zeeny Vakil's
final words to Saladin, "Let's get the hell out of here," may
be ambiguous: they could mean only "Let's leave," but she may
also be inviting him to leave the the realm of the Satanic in
which he has been living for so long.
Note:
The Satanic verses, according to one Islamic tradition, were
inserted in Quran 53:21-22 by the devil, taking advantage of
Muhamad's desire for reconciliation with his tribe, which believed
in the three "daughters of God" mentioned in Quran
53:19-20: "Have you thought upon al-Lat and al-Uzza And
Manat, the third, the other?" to which the Satanic verses
are appended: "These are the exalted cranes (intermediaries)
Whose intercession is to be hoped for." However the angel
of revelation, Jibril, returned Muhamad to strict monotheism
by substituting the correct verses: "Are yours the males
and His the females? That indeed would be an unfair division!"
|
1945 Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel peace laureate.
1935 Rodrigo Borja Cevallos, político ecuatoriano.
1934 Nathanael
West's A Cool Million is published
^top^
Nathanael West's novel A Cool
Million, a satire of rags-to-riches morality tales, is published.
West, the son of Jewish immigrants, was born in New York in
1903. He attended Brown University, then went to Paris to write
for about a year and a half, during which time he wrote his
first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, about disgruntled
characters inside the Trojan Horse. Only 500 copies of the book
were printed when it was published in 1931.
West returned to New York, where
he took a job managing a hotel. He frequently gave free or cheap
rooms to struggling fellow writers, including Dashiell Hammet
and Erskine Caldwell. In 1933, he published his novella,
Miss Lonelyhearts, about a male reporter who becomes increasingly
troubled by the pitiful letters he answers in his advice column.
In the 1930s, West moved to Hollywood to write screenplays,
and in 1939 he published The Day of the Locust, considered
one of the best novels written about early Hollywood.
West and his wife, Eileen McKenney,
were killed in an automobile accident in California in 1940.
Although West was not widely read during his lifetime, his popularity
grew after World War II and after the publication of The
Complete Works of Nathanael West in 1957. |
1923 Andrés Rodríguez Pedotti, militar y político paraguayo, ex-presidente
de Paraguay.
1922 Aage Niels Bohr Denmark, physicist/study atomic
nucleus (Nobel 1975)
1910 Abe Fortas (US Supreme Court Justice). He died on 6 April
1982.
1909 Tsushima Shuji “Osamu Dazai” Japan, novelist.
Author of Bannen (1936; "The Twilight Years", short stories),
Otogi zoshi (1945; "Fairy Tales", new versions of traditional
tales), Tsugaru (1944), Shayo (1947; The Setting Sun),
Biyon no Tsuma (1947; Villon's Wife), Ningen Shikkaku (1948;
No Longer Human). He committed suicide on 13 June 1948, leaving uncompleted
a novel entitled Goodbye. .
1903 Henry Louis Gehrig first baseman (NY Yankees) "Iron Horse"
(Baseball Hall of Famer: NY Yankees: 7 World Series; his uniform was
the first to be retired)
1902 Wallace
Eckert, mathematician
1897 Moe Howard comedian (3 Stooges)
1896 Mrs Simpson [Bessie Wallis Warfield), Duchess of Windsor,
divorcee
1889 Enrico Celio pres of Switzerland
1881 Jimmy Walker (politician)
1878 James M Kilroe, priest of St Mary Star of the Sea, in the
Bronx
1872 Charles D. Ward, British artist.
1861 José Rizal, escritor y político, caudillo destacado de la
independencia filipina.
1856 Elbert Hubbard US, editor/publisher/author, founder of the
Roycrofters. He and his wife died in 1915 in the sinking of the Lusitania..
HUBBARD ONLINE:
A Message to Garcia
1854 Jacob Simon Hendrik Kever, Dutch artist who died in 1922.
1838 Charles Joseph Staniland, British artist who died in 1916.
1824 Adolf Stademann, German artist who died on 30 October 1895.
1815 Cornelius David Krieghoff, Dutch Canadian painter who died
on 04 March 1872.
1783 Thomas Sully, in England, US portrait painter (Queen Victoria).
He died in 1782 in Philadelphia. Reproductions of ART BY SULLY ONLINE:
Andrew Jackson — Patrick
Henry — Boy
in a Torn Hat —
1771 Gergonne,
mathematician
1764 José Gervasio Artigas general/father of Uruguay —
José Gervasio Artigas, caudillo independentista y creador de la
Provincia Oriental, base del actual Uruguay.
1757 Gervasio Antonio de Posadas, primer jefe supremo de las Provincias
Unidas del Río de la Plata.
1705 José Galván, Spanish artist who died on 21
February 1766.
1669 Magnitsky,
mathematician.
1640 Johann Heiss, German artist who died in 1704
1623 Blaise Pascal,
French writer, religious philosopher, and physicist, also a
prominent mathematician.
^top^
The son of a judge in the French
tax court, the teenage Pascal invented a calculating device
to help his father's tax computations. The counting device relied
on a series of wheels divided into ten parts each, representing
the integers 0-9. The wheels, which were connected by gears
and turned by a stylus, kept track of sums as numbers were added
and subtracted.
— Blaise Pascal (mort en 1663), philosophe,
mathématicien, savant et inventeur (le calcul des probabilités,
la machine à calculer), un des génies de ce XVII° siècle français,
si fécond en génie de toutes sortes. La condition de l’Homme
sur la terre conduit le mathématicien inquiet à “parier”
sur l’existence de Dieu. “Pesons le gain et la perte, en
prenant croix [c.à d. face, jouons à pile ou face] que Dieu
est. Estimons ces deux cas. Si vous gagnez, vous gagnez tout.
Si vous perdez, vous ne perdez rien. Gagez donc qu’il est, sans
hésiter!”
Ses Pensées restent une
source inépuisable de réflexion encore très moderne au niveau
existentiel. “Le moi est haïssable”,“Pensée fait
la grandeur de l’Homme”, “Le nez de Cléopâtre, s’il
eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé”,
“L’Homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature,
mais c’est un roseau pensant”, “Le cœur a ses raisons
que la raison ne connaît point”, “L'affection ou la
haine changent la justice de face”.
PASCAL ONLINE:
La
machine d'arithmétique — Lettres
(sur le vide, aux Roannez,...) — Petits
écrits philosophiques et religieux — Pensées
|
1566 James VI of Scotland (1567-1625). Upon the death of Elizabeth
I in 1603, he ascended the English throne as James I (1603-25).
He is best remembered for authorizing the publication known today as
the 'King James Version' (KJV) of the Bible. |
