An Onslaught of Times and Cultures

One of my bad habits maintained since childhood is reading multiple books at once. Two of the ones I'm most interested in right now are the Satanic Verses and Foucault's Pendulum. Their content and authors are very different. One is written by an English-Indian about Indian actors in a plane crash with flashbacks to the cosmic struggle in Muslim theology. The other is written by a Milanese semiotics scholar and set in contemporary Italy with references to the Knights Templar and Cabalistic Judaism. Coincidently, perhaps, both were first published in 1988. There are other similarities. Both are disorienting at first with their overwhelmingly diverse allusions to different cultures and times. Both are from the viewpoint of supposedly modern men with modern presuppositions, who seem to be taken over, against their will, by mystic forces latent in the universe. Eco, in Foucault's Pendulum, particularly focuses on the distinigration of positivism into cynicism into mysticism and loss of reason. Rushdie's method of transition between normal, modern existence and the mythical is near-death experience. Neither of these books, particularly the Satanic Verses, can be called fantasy in the traditional sense because they are not in the least escapist--they are dealing with contemporary problems. The breakdown of normalcy serves to disorient the reader and make him more vulnerable to the books' messages.