Rushdie is a master of words and verbal images. With equal facility he draws from history, world literature, classical art, and popular culture to weave his story. He often feigns bashfulness about subjects like sex, violence, or illness, but plunges ahead, ostensibly because they are stories the narrator must tell, and the reader senses that both the reluctance and the candidness are equally authentic. He curses, blasphemes, and shocks. He stops and starts tales, interrupting, sidetracking, returning; promising to develop later; filling in details to which he had not been privy previously.