부산대학교 도서관

The author describes various example of censorship, and using the Satanic Verses as a starting point, shows how Salman Rushdie has become a champion of the fight against it. She brings the readers's attention to the book's contemporary segments, which in her opinion have so much to tell the world about life since roughly 1987, and in particular about increasing efforts, sometimes by well-intentioned people and sometimes not, to draw the strings of the bag of ignorance ever tighter. Her conclusion is that the novel is more than a work of art, brilliant, funny, engrossing and unforgettable as that art may be; it is a canary sent into a mine, and its survival or extinction in the face of the noxious odors should perhaps be viewed as the last test of the twentieth century, and the first test of the twenty-first. Either society fights to save the canary or it ends up dead in the gas chamber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]