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jeaniinabottle 's review for:

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
4.0

DO NOT listen to this on audiobook. It is not a book that you can half-listen to while you're driving. It also is not a beach read. It is a book that you need to read with a notebook full of indexes and charts to keep everything straight.
Early in the fourth chapter of the book I realized I had no idea what was happening or who any of the characters were and ran it back... and realized that the reason I didn't know what was happening was because the book had suddenly completely shifted focus, setting, and cast of characters.
This happens multiple times, and the shifts last for anywhere from the equivalent of fifty to a hundred pages. Everything comes together in the end, but honestly I'm going to have to listen to it probably at least twice more to even begin to glean a solid understanding of events from it. This is the kind of book you could build an entire semester's class around on its own. Worth reading, to be sure, but not one to pick up to read quickly or casually.

SpoilerAlso I got quite annoyed with all the casual infidelity in this book; both Gibreel and Saladin (sp? I listened to it on audiobook) cheat on their respective partners at some point without anyone seeming to think anything of it. My guess is this was meant to emphasize that the angelic and the evil are not so different, but surely there was a way to better support the ramifications of the infidelity within the text rather than having it happen in such a way that it's practically tangential to the actual story? Just my two cents.