Salman Rushdie, 1988
Random House, Vintage, 1998
Characters:
[...] the deep-seated prejudice against books which led Changez to own thousands of the pernicious things in order to humiliate them by leaving them to rot unread
p 50
He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn't manage to beam. Only when it was too late did she tell him that her parents had committed suicide together when she had just begun to menstruate, over their heads with gambling debts, leaving her with the aristocratic bellow of a voice that marked her out as a golden girl, a woman to envy, whereas in fact she was abandoned, lost, her parents couldn't even bother to wait and watch her grow up, that's how much she was loved, so of course she had no confidence at all, and every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut.
A rebel captain. — 'And your spouse, madame?' — 'Waiting for you at the dam, as he should be.' — 'Then since he did not see fit to protect you, the revolution will.' And he left guards outside the house, my dear, quite a thing. But in the fighting both men were killed, husband and captain and Claudette insisted on a joint funeral, watched the two coffins going side by side into the ground, mourned for them both. After that we knew she was a dangerous lot, trop fatale, eh? What? Trop jolly fatale.
It had been a marriage of crossed purposes, each of them rushing towards the very thing from which the other was in flight.
p 187
Jamshed, who had always been clumsy with women, told Pamela that he had not felt so wonderful since the day in his eighteenth year when he had finally learned how to ride a bicycle. The moment the words were out, he became afraid he had spoiled everything, that the comparaison of the great love of his life with this rickety bike of his student days would be taken for the insult it undeniably was; but he needn't have worried because Pamela kissed him on the mouth and thanked him for saying the most beautiful thing any man had ever said to any woman.
'It's a straight choice,' he trembled silently, 'It's A, I'm off my head, or B, baba, somebody went and changed the rules.'
p 192
He was beginning to give off the unmistakable odour of the genuine crazy.
She accepted loneliness as the price of solitude.
Mahound himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organization and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if not corporeal, God.
p 392
'Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.'
Mahound replied, 'Writers and whores. I see no difference here.'
"I stand here," my son declared, "because I have chosen to occupy the old and honourable role of the uppity nigger. I am here because I have not been willing to seem reasonable. I am here for my ingratitude." He was a colossus among the dwarfs. "Make no mistake," he said in that court, "we are here to change things. I concede at once that we shall ourselves be changed; African, Carribean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are other than we would have been if we had not crossed the oceans [...]
p 415
As if all causes were the same, all histories interchangeable.