Washed up on the wintry English coast, salvaged by an aged widow, who is imaginatively reliving her early married life on the Argentine pampas, the survivors feel themselves to be ''born again'' in some sense yet to unfold. With poetic license (and poetic justice) is about to be transformed by forces beyond his control. He is an ardent Anglophile, a self-created man, who, Gibreel is a celebrated face and figure of the Indian cinema, star of the genre films known as ''theologicals.''Ĭhamcha is a star of the dubbing trade on British radio and television, a man of a thousand and one voices, none of them his own. Rushdie's work, where each act of naming is dense with implication.Īnd the name ''Bostan'' might prompt us to ask, isn't this precisely what the fabled Oriental garden has become in our day - a terrorized, disintegrating jumbo jet?įalling slowly over the English Channel, the sole survivors are a strange twosome: Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. Persian poet Sadi, proclaiming the virtues of justice, benevolence, self-restraint, gratitude, penitence and so on. The plane is named Bostan, which is both a Farsi word for garden and the title of the great didactic poem by the 13th-century Verses,'' with a scene of human figures tumbling from the debris of a hijacked jumbo jetliner. MOJTABAIĪlman Rushdie, author most famously of ''Midnight's Children,'' opens his fourth and latest novel, ''Satanic
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