“REINCARNATION WAS ALWAYS A BIG TOPIC WITH GIBREEL, FOR 15 YEARS THE BIGGEST STAR IN THE HISTORY OF THE INDIAN MOVIES”: FIRST EDITION OF SATANIC VERSES, SIGNED BY RUSHDIE

RUSHDIE, Salman. The Satanic Verses. (London): Viking, (1988). Thick octavo, original blue paper boards, original dust jacket. $2200.

First edition of Rushdie’s controversial novel, the book that led to a fatwa against him, boldly signed on the title page by the author.

"Rushdie is a storyteller of prodigious powers; in this novel he draws on resources ranging from Homer to Joyce to Saturday Night Live. His central characters—Gibreel, the angel Gabriel turned satanic, and Chamcha, a hapless victim with horns and a tail—fall from an unlikely heaven to an unlikelier hell in Bombay and London. But their real world is in nightmares, the dreams of Gibreel that make up the spinoff narratives that keep the novel whirling. And the tale of Chamcha and his father forms a novel within the novel. In the imaginative avalanche of stories that fill the book Rushdie probes our ability to conjure up monstrous descriptions of one another, to create monsters in fact. At its strongest, it is burdened with history and politics; the most vibrant scenes are those in which the author looks history in the eye, scenes of expatriation and political exile in which the magical veil Rushdie throws over the whole book does not conceal the hard realism underneath" (New York Times Books of the Century, 580-81). Rushdie's often satirical view of Islam angered many Muslim extremists, and publication of The Satanic Verses in London was greeted with bomb threats against the publisher and book burnings in Muslim neighborhoods. In 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against Rushdie, calling for the author's killing and sending Rushdie into hiding—a threat that culminated in a near-fatal attack on the author at a public lecture in 2022.

A near-fine signed copy.