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Summary
Author Notes
Salman Rushdie was born in India on June 19, 1947. He was raised in Pakistan and educated in England. His novels include Grimus, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, and The Golden House. His non-fiction works include Joseph Anton, Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and Step across This Line. He also wrote a collection of short stories entitled East, West. He has received numerous awards including the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel twice, the James Tait Black Prize, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight's Children, and the 2014 PEN/Pinter Prize.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After a fatwa ordering his death was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine's Day in 1989, brilliant novelist Rushdie opted to take the first names of his two favorite writers and combine them into a pseudonym, in order to protect his identity. The result: Joseph Anton (from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov). Narrator Sam Dastor delivers an absolutely stellar reading of the memoir that recounts the life and times of the fictional Anton, through sometimes nightmarish events. Dastor's British dialect is pitch perfect and finely tuned. His delivery is well paced and his character interpretations are inspired. Rushdie himself ably narrates the prologue. A Random House hardcover. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Rushdie accomplishes many wondrous and momentous feats in this profound and galvanizing memoir. He shares the now strangely foreshadowing fact that his ardent storyteller father invented their last name, paying tribute to Ibn Rushd, a twelfth-century Spanish Arab philosopher who argued for rationalism over Islamic literalism. He explains how, decades later, when British protection officers asked him to come up with an alias, really a nom de guerre, Rushdie concocted Joseph Anton in homage to Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. His first fictions, he observes, were the upbeat letters he sent to his parents in India, concealing his boarding-school miseries in cold and racist 1960s England. He learned to focus on his inner life, cherish kindred spirits, and navigate adversity, skills that served him well after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa, sentencing Rushdie to death for writing The Satanic Verses (1988). Rushdie tells the full, astonishing, and necessary story of his 13 hellish years of threats, risk, and protective isolation in a passionately detailed, sardonically witty, and intensely dramatic third-person chronicle of a landmark battle in the war for liberty in the Muslim world. Forthright about his personal struggles and immensely grateful to all who championed his cause, Rushdie elucidates what literature does for us and why artistic and intellectual freedoms truly are matters of life and death.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SALMAN RUSHDIE'S memoir is many books in one book. It's a personal story that takes place at the center of an international crisis: the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 denunciation of the author's fourth novel, "The Satanic Verses," as a work of blasphemy against Islam, and his call for Rushdie's death. It's a portrait of the artist as a young man that describes his influences, obsessions and ambitions as well as his rise in the publishing world. It's a record of his relocation from Bombay to London to New York, where he settled in 2000. It's an intimate tale of fathers and sons, of the beginnings and ends of marriages, of friendships and betrayals. At the same time, "Joseph Anton" is a large-scale spectacle of political and cultural conflicts during an era in which, Rushdie writes, "incompatible realities frequently collided with one another." The death decree, or fatwa, would come to be seen by some as an early signal of a clash of absolutes that would lead up to 9/11 and into our tinderbox present - of the continuing struggle between religious belief in the immutable word of God on one hand and secular faith in the unconditional right of free speech on the other. One unifying theme that emerges from this multilayered account is the concept of flight - though here that word assumes a double identity. Flight from the fatwa meant a "fretful, scuttling existence" in which the author, a 41-year-old British citizen, abandoned his home in the London neighborhood of Islington and dashed from one safe house to another around the United Kingdom. While Rushdie located and paid for these dozens of hide-outs himself, the British government provided him with nine years of round-the-clock protection by the "A" Squad of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, who in turn answered to Britain's intelligence services. If flight meant forced departure, for Rushdie it also meant an insistence on certain freedoms. Most critically, he would not give up his literary life, his flights of fancy. Battling depression and writer's block, he managed during this time to write a major novel, "The Moor's Last Sigh," along with a charming children's book called "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," at his young son's insistence. He collected a volume of short fiction ("East, West") and another of essays ("Imaginary Homelands"). He wrote book reviews, poems and op-ed essays. Whether large or small, every completed piece of writing felt, to him, like "victory over the forces of darkness." "Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told?" Rushdie is right to pose the conflict over "The Satanic Verses" as a question not of ideology but of power and control. And he is right to claim his own story after many humiliating years of surrendering that story to other people, most of whom transformed it for their own purposes. But the question of control is also a tricky issue in Rushdie's own writing. His novels are giant winged contraptions, packed to capacity, hurtling across time and space, "pitting levity against gravity," as he describes one of his airborne protagonists at the beginning of "The Satanic Verses." At their best, Rushdie's imaginative machines attain lift and remain thrillingly aloft. At their worst, their centers cannot hold, and they spin into pieces. In "Joseph Anton," which Rushdie has composed very much like a novel, both these scenarios come to pass. There are sections where the narrative soars, and more than a few in which it plummets. One of the memoir's novelistic approaches is its perspective, which shifts from the autobiographical "I" to "he." It's not as mannered a choice as it sounds in a narrative consumed, as much of Rushdie's writing is, with the multiplicity of identity. "He was a new self now," he realized after news of the fatwa reached him. In fact he split into several selves: not just the Salman his friends and family knew bu¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ also a "Rushdie" reviled by screaming demonstrators in England and abroad, "an effigy, an absence, something less than human"; and reproached, too, by many unsympathetic compatriots in the Western press. The sense of fracture was heightened when the police insisted he invent an alias so he could write checks without being identified. He came up with "Joseph Anton," the first names of two favorite writers, Conrad and Chekhov. Not lost on him was the peculiarity that a man who invented characters for a living had now "turned himself into a sort of fictional character as well." IN early sections - among the best in the book - the author reveals that his actual surname was itself an invention. His father, a nonpracticing Muslim, changed his "fine old Delhi" name to Rushdie in homage to Ibn Rushd, the 12th-century Spanish-Arab polymath who wrote commentaries on the works of Aristotle and made a forceful case, 800 years before the uproar over "The Satanic Verses," for rationalism over Islamic literalism. Yet if his father's "fearless skepticism" was his gift to young Salman and his three sisters, a dire home environment was his curse, for Anis Rushdie was so wrathful an alcoholic that Salman's mother admitted she survived the marriage by developing a "forgettery" instead of a memory. In 1961, 13-year-old Salman was only too willing to leave his hometown, Bombay, for boarding school in England, where he was lonely and unpopular, and on to Cambridge, where, as a history student, he first learned about the "satanic verses," a set of lines expunged from the Koran. These absorbing coming-of-age passages are followed by equally engaging recollections of Rushdie's London jobs as an advertising copywriter, where he developed his distinctive verbal bounciness. Those jingly effects and aphorisms pop up in the memoir as well ("Life was lived forward but was judged in reverse"). And he vividly conveys the exhilaration he felt in the mid-1970s while dreaming up his first big success, "Midnight's Children," scene by scene, finding the tools and tone to tell his story: "India was not cool. It was hot. It was hot and overcrowded and vulgar and loud and it needed a language to match that and he would try to find that language." Rushdie also comes across as tenderly devoted to his two sons, Zafar and Milan, and grateful to many of the individual police officers who guaranteed his and his family's safety for nearly a decade. If "Joseph Anton" builds up a lot of reader-friendly capital in these sections, it exhausts that capital rather too freely as the story continues. While the first days of the fatwa unfold grippingly, there's a steep drop in momentum as the years drag on. Not even as talented a writer as Rushdie can avoid writing about tedium without becoming tedious himself. Clichés abound: "The house was beautiful but it felt like a gilded cage"; "What was he," he wonders while contemplating moving to America after his ordeal is over, "but a huddled mass yearning to breathe free?" As that last quotation suggests, Rushdie shows a cheerful willingness throughout the memoir to show off his less than dignified side. These scenes can be bleakly funny: when the police persuade him to wear a wig to avoid recognition in public, he tries it out on Sloane Street in London and is immediately the center of amused attention. "Look," he hears a man say, "there's that bastard Rushdie in a wig." But there are occasions in which his goofiness grates and creates an uncomfortable dissonance in what is, after all, a sobering chronicle of state-sponsored terrorism that resulted in the murder of Rushdie's Japanese translator and near-fatal attacks on his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. It's of course lots of fun to read of the author's unflagging bedazzlement at mingling with all kinds of celebrities, from Playboy bunnies to heads of state, and in his access, post-fatwa, to every sort of party. ("Willie Nelson was there! And Matthew Modine!") 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Guardian Review
"Politics and literature," Salman Rushdie wrote in 1984, in what now seems an innocent time, "do mix, are inextricably mixed, and that . . . mixture has consequences." Criticising George Orwell for having advocated political quietism to writers, Rushdie asserted that "we are all irradiated by history, we are radioactive with history and politics" and that, "in this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss." Five years later, his novel The Satanic Verses would be abruptly inserted into a series of ongoing domestic and international confrontations in the west and Muslim countries. Sentenced to death by an Iranian theocrat, Rushdie himself would embody the perils of mixing politics and literature in an interconnected and volatile world, where, as Paul Valery once warned, "nothing can ever happen again without the whole world's taking a hand" and where "no one will ever be able to predict or circumscribe the almost immediate consequences of any undertaking whatever." In his new memoir Joseph Anton, which describes his life in hiding for more than a decade, Rushdie claims that The Satanic Verses was his "least political book". It was "an artistic engagement with the phenomenon of revelation", albeit from the perspective of an "unbeliever", but "a proper one nonetheless. How could that be thought offensive?" But then authorial intentions barely seemed to matter to readers bringing to the book their own particular backgrounds, worldviews and prejudices. No one among Rushdie's early readers in Europe and America seems to have suspected that parts of the novel constituted, as Eliot Weinberger wrote in 1989, an "all-out parodic assault on the basic tenets of Islam". A pre-publication review in the Indian newsweekly India Today revealed that Rushdie had irreverently rewritten the life of the Prophet, the paradigmatic figure of virtue for all Muslims, naming him Mahound, the term used to identify him as a devil in medieval Christian caricature, and placing his 12 wives in a brothel. Rushdie claimed in the accompanying interview that the image out of which his book grew was of the Prophet "going to the mountain and not being able to tell the difference between the angel and the devil." Responding to the coverage in India Today, some self-proclaimed leaders of Indian Muslims demanded a ban on The Satanic Verses. The Indian government rashly obliged, prohibiting the novel's importation (though copies were already in circulation). "You own the present," Rushdie appealed unsuccessfully to the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, "but the centuries belong to art." The following month South Africa proscribed the book. Nearly 70 per cent of Bolton's Muslim population turned up for Britain's first major demonstration against the book. Most of the Muslims protesting against the book had not read it; but many of those who had were no less "transfixed with fear, anger and hatred", as the writer Ziauddin Sardar, himself a critic of Islamic fundamentalism, confessed. Rushdie's exemplary record of anti-racism amounted to little as demonstrators in Bradford ceremoniously burnt a copy of The Satanic Verses. As with the film Innocence of Muslims last week, news of the novel's alleged insult to Islam travelled speedily to politically combustible regions. Some Kashmiris in Srinagar, fighting a corrupt and brutal Indian rule, found in the book another pretext to ventilate their rage, and a differently motivated crowd of Pakistani protesters attacked the American Center in Islamabad, claiming the first of many lives consumed by a fast-spreading global wildfire. No one, however, weaponised the novel with more devastating effect than Iran's chief cleric, then bloodily consolidating his young theocracy and Iran's claims to global Muslim leadership after a catastrophic eight-year war with Iraq. Khomeini's unconscionable fatwa, though immediately condemned by most critics of The Satanic Verses, widened the already great chasm of perception and historical memory between white westerners and the Muslim inhabitants of former western empires. In Britain, it became another pretext for rants about Muslim barbarism, and fresh assaults on the straw man of "multiculturalism". "We fell for the idea," Michael Ignatieff admitted last week, speaking for many liberal intellectuals, not to mention quasi-racist right-wingers, "that the ayatollah was speaking for the whole faith." In this atmosphere of "anti-Muslim feeling", as Bhikhu Parekh described it, most Muslims were seen as fundamentalists or "illiterate peasants preferring the sleep of superstition to liberal light, and placed outside civilised discourse". Christopher Hitchens's gloss on Islam was not untypical: "the very word is like the echo of a forehead knocking repeatedly on the floor, while the buttocks are proffered to the empty, unfeeling sky." Not surprisingly, as Malise Ruthven wrote, "Muslims in Britain and abroad" who already felt the sharp edge of the "power of the west", responded "to The Satanic Verses as an assault on their collective cultural identity". Simple assertions of the principle of free speech did not persuade those Muslims who were aware of laws that protected Christians from blasphemy. Edward Said, while correctly defending Rushdie's right to untrammelled expression, tried to ventriloquise the Muslim sense of hurt and bafflement: "Why must a Muslim, who could be defending and sympathetically interpreting us, now present us so roughly, so expertly and so disrespectfully to an audience already primed to excoriate our traditions, reality, history, religion, language, and origins?" But the question suffered from many misunderstandings about Rushdie's position and role as an expatriate novelist from a former imperial possession. Like many writers of non-western backgrounds in the west, Rushdie had suffered the ambiguous fate of being hastily appointed as a representative and spokesperson of India, South Asia, the "third world", multiculturalism, the immigrant condition - whatever seemed alien and incomprehensible to the white majority. In reality, there was little in common between Rushdie, an atheistic, Cambridge-educated upper-class intellectual from Bombay, and the devout guest-worker from Anatolia (representative of the mostly working-class Muslims of rural origins who had been imported to service Europe's post-war economies), or the Pakistani trade unionist chased out by the torturers of Zia ul-Haq, the CIA-backed radical Islamist who had spent most of the 1980s facilitating an anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The Satanic Verses itself is less about the immigrant condition than a helplessly Anglophilic Indian's profound ambivalence about a British ruling class that regards him as a wog. Attacked for having defamed the Prophet, Rushdie withdrew from the terrain of history and politics he had previously staked, insisting that his novel was a "work of art", and not reducible to an anti-Islam polemic. Upholding an exalted post-Christian notion of literature, he argued that the novel was the privileged realm of polyphony, doubt and argument. As such, it was naturally opposed and superior to the "unarguable absolutes of religion" and incomprehensible to the Muslims protesting against his book - people prone to "mass popular irrationalism". The world of unreformed Islam in this view presented a clear and present danger to the cherished beliefs, institutions and art forms of the secular and rational west. In his memoir, where Rushdie bizarrely decides to write about himself, or "Joseph Anton", his Conrad-and-Chekhov-inspired alias, in the third person, he repeatedly points to his early intuitions and warnings about the atrocity suffered by the west on 9/11. "He knew, as surely as he knew anything, that the fanatical cancer spreading through Muslim communities would in the end explode into the wider world beyond Islam." Indeed, Rushdie's writings from this period anticipate many declarations of war on "Islamofascism" after 9/11. As he wrote in 1990, defending The Satanic Verses: "'Battle lines are being drawn in India today,' one of my characters remarks. 'Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on.' Now that the battle has spread to Britain, I only hope it will not be lost by default. It is time for us to choose." The ayatollah's cruelty and malice made many of Rushdie's choices for him. Joseph Anton conveys a clear and shaming picture of his ordeal - the soul-numbing humiliations of a subterranean existence, the scurrying from one safehouse to another, and the endless negotiations with security staff for a few slivers of ordinary life. The reader is fully on Rushdie's side, and outraged when, in one of the book's few superbly rendered scenes, fear and confusion force him to re-embrace Islam before some Muslim scholars/busybodies. There are fascinating details about Rushdie's parents in the memoir's early pages, which also appealingly evoke his years as a struggling writer with his first wife, Clarissa; few readers would fail, later in the book, to be moved by the account of her death and Rushdie's grief-tinged recall of his superseded self. Rushdie engagingly reveals the autobiographical energies that went into the making of such novels as The Satanic Verses and Fury. Anton's Herzog-style letters, addressed variously and randomly to famous people, critics, and even God, effectively evoke the mind of an isolated and hunted man. Yet the memoir, at 650 pages, often feels too long, over-dependent on Rushdie's journals, and unquickened by hindsight, or its prose. Ostensibly deployed as a distancing device, the third-person narration frequently makes for awkward self-regard ("The clouds thickened over his head. But he found that his sentences could still form . . . his imagination still spark"). A peevish righteousness comes to pervade the memoir as Rushdie routinely and often repetitively censures those who criticised or disagreed with him. The long list of betrayers, carpers and timorous publishers includes Robert Gottlieb, Peter Mayer, John le Carre, Sonny Mehta, the Independent (evidently the "house journal for British Islam"), Germaine Greer, John Berger and assorted policemen "who believed he had done nothing of value in his life". Small darts are also flung at James Wood, "the malevolent Procrustes of literary criticism", Arundhati Roy, Joseph Brodsky, Louis de Bernieres and many others. Not just individuals, entire countries, even races are judged, and frequently found wanting. The Danes lay on a battleship to protect Anton, who falls "in love with the Nordic peoples because of their adherence to the highest principles of freedom". "America," we are told, "had made it impossible for Britain to walk away from his defence." Also, outside Britain, Anton "was seen as likeable, funny, brave, talented and worthy of respect". There are some exceptions to British mean-mindedness. After one "lovely evening" at Chequers, where the singer Mick Hucknall's "hot girlfriend" is distractingly present, Anton confesses to a "soft spot" for Tony Blair. "You set out sincerely to change my life for the better," he writes, and though this "may not quite cancel out the invasion of Iraq", it does weigh in his "personal scales". Oddly, Anton seems to require no such moral balancing for the Sri Lankan strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is commended for resisting Iranian pressure and green-lighting the filming of Midnight's Children; the responsibility of this authoritarian president and his brother in the massacre of tens of thousands of Tamil Hindus is passed over in silence. Nor does Anton record the piquant fact that the Hindu nationalists who noisily protested against the Indian decision to ban The Satanic Verses and, once in power, allowed him to visit India are implicated in the killings of thousands of Muslims in the previous two decades. All this was also on the front pages into which, as Martin Amis famously remarked, Rushdie "vanished" soon after the fatwa. However, Joseph Anton describes more accurately, if inadvertently, how Rushdie re-emerged, after the strangest ever writerly journey, in the gossip pages, aureoled by the wealth, power and glamour of the western world. Understandably, proximity to doting US senators in the "heart of American power" would prove exhilarating for someone miserably on the run from a murderous regime; and it is one of the grotesque ironies of Rushdie's situation that freedom for him should become synonymous with a private plane with a "Ralph Lauren interior", and a nine-car motorcade with motorcycle outriders. But the moral autonomy of literature, or the dignity of the individual artist, is not affirmed when a celebrated writer exults over being in the same "mighty room" as Bernard-Henri Levy and Nicolas Sarkozy. A naive beguilement rather than sly irony frames Rushdie's accounts of hanging out with such very famous people as Jerry Seinfeld and Calista Flockhart. Madonna, narrowly missed at Tina Brown's immortal launch party for Talk magazine, is finally encountered at Vanity Fair's Oscars bash in the company of Zadie Smith. At lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Warren Beatty confesses that Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie's fourth wife, is so beautiful that it makes him "want to faint". And William Styron's genitalia are unexpectedly on display one convivial evening at Martha's Vineyard. In this remembrance of parties and celebrities past, as in much of Rushdie's later fiction, eclecticism amounts to a disconcerting absence of discrimination - and tact. We learn uneasily of, among other infidelities, his wine-induced adultery with Jack Lang's "beautiful and brilliant daughter". His wives themselves are described much less flatteringly as gold-diggers or nags, squeezing Anton for more alimony or progeny. Cuttingly titled "His Millenarian Illusion", the chapter about his marriage to Padma Lakshmi tries to show that his fourth wife's "grand ambition and secret plans" for wealth and fame had "nothing to do with the fulfilment of his deepest needs". A similar longing for self-affirmation fuels Rushdie's geopolitical analysis, where an obsession with the "poison" of "actually existing Islam" suppresses all nuance suggested by political and historical facts. He accuses Khomeini of taking "his country into a useless war with its neighbours" and sees more evidence of Muslim irrationalism in the frenzied mourning provoked in Iran by the old fanatic's death. In fact, it was Saddam Hussein who invaded Iran, and then assaulted it with chemical weapons, with the consent, even support, of western countries. This not only stoked a long-simmering anti-westernism in Iran, which had been occupied by Russia and Britain during both world wars, and then suffered for decades the brutal dictatorship of the pro-American shah. The second longest intra-nation war of the 20th century, which killed nearly one million Iranians, also entrenched the Basij militia and Revolutionary Guards, made life harder for the moderates who cancelled Khomeini's fatwa, and eventually helped bring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. One would respect Rushdie's wish to decline close scrutiny of a radioactive history and politics that have caused him so much distress. But he is too invested in his self-image as an unpopular "Cassandra for his own time". Back in 1989, he claims, "nobody wanted to know what he knew" - that a "self-exculpatory, paranoiac Islam is an ideology with widespread appeal" - and we didn't get this even after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, which, among other things, vindicated his critically ill-treated but evidently prophetic novel Fury "Of course this is 'about Islam'," Rushdie quickly retorted in a New York Times op-ed to those who argued that 9/11 "isn't about Islam", or like Susan Sontag, a loyal friend and supporter, described the attacks as "a consequence of specific American alliances and actions", such as the support of Saudi Arabia and fundamentalists in Afghanistan. According to him, "the restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticisation, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern." This French-style secularisation was and remains a tall order - even in the United States and much of Christian Europe. In the meantime, Rushdie seemed content to endorse the Anglo-American assault on Afghanistan, and, claiming that another "war of liberation might just be one worth fighting", hailed the CIA-sponsored conman Ahmad Chalabi as "the most likely first leader of a democratised Iraq". Joseph Anton, obscuring these stumbles, presents Rushdie as confidently in step with the march of history. "The world of Islam," he reminds us he had written in 2001, "must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based"; in 2011 "the young people of the Arab world" "tried to transform their societies according to exactly these principles". Since Egyptians and Tunisians have subsequently elected Islamic parties to power, Rushdie has now changed his mind. Things have "gone very wrong", he recently told Foreign Policy. "One has to say that the Arab Spring is over." Maybe, but long before Egypt and Tunisia, large majorities elected Islamic parties in the biggest and economically most successful Muslim countries, Turkey and Indonesia, where they supervised a transition from military despotism to electoral democracy. In Iran itself a mass movement drawing on Islamic notions of justice and morality has ranged itself against Khomeini's discredited heirs. Fanatics and fundamentalists, non-Muslim as well as Muslim, remain a blight on many South Asian and Middle Eastern societies; sometimes, they violently disrupt public life in the west. But, arguably, it is the institutionalised procedures of torture, rendition, indefinite detention, extrajudicial execution through drones, secret trials and surveillance that have emerged in the west as the more serious threat to civil and human rights. The icon of free speech today is the Wikilieaks source Bradley Manning, fully exposed in his degrading confinement to the malevolence of an omnipotent intelligence and military establishment. Meanwhile, cut-price white supremacists gunning down Sikhs, bombing mosques and burning the Qur'an, and the Nordic nationalist massacring multiculturalists and left-wingers have taken Rushdie's reform-minded diagnosis of a "fanatical cancer" within Muslim communities to another level. "Islam is a cancer, period," according to the sinister California-based film-maker whose calumnies about the Prophet provoke riots across the Muslim world. At the same time, western states, after waging calamitously ill-conceived wars that killed and mutilated hundreds of thousands of Muslims, pursue a face-saving deal with people described by Rushdie as "fascist, terrorist gangsters" - the Taliban. Certainly, Rushdie's neat oppositions between the secular and the religious, the light and the dark, and rational literary elites and irrational masses do not clarify the great disorder of the contemporary world. They belong to an intellectually simpler time, when non-western societies, politically insignificant and little-known, could be judged solely by their success or failure in following the great example of the secular-humanist west; and writing literary fiction could seem enough to make one feel, as Tim Parks wrote in a review of Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, "engaged on the right side of some global moral and political battle". Indeed, such complacencies of imperial intellectual cultures were what Rushdie had bravely attacked in his brilliant early phase. "Works of art, even works of entertainment," he had pointed out in 1984, "do not come into being in a social and political vacuum; and . . . the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context." No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical. Pankaj Mishra's From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia is published by Allen Lane. To order Joseph Anton for pounds 17 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Pankaj Mishra Caption: Captions: Rushdie at his publisher's offices in New York and, below, attending the Vanity Fair Oscars party in 2002 with Padma Lakshmi; With Martin Amis (top) at the 1995 British Book awards and,; below, with Karen Elson in 2011 Khomeini's unconscionable fatwa, though immediately condemned by most critics of The Satanic Verses, widened the already great chasm of perception and historical memory between white westerners and the Muslim inhabitants of former western empires. In Britain, it became another pretext for rants about Muslim barbarism, and fresh assaults on the straw man of "multiculturalism". "We fell for the idea," Michael Ignatieff admitted last week, speaking for many liberal intellectuals, not to mention quasi-racist right-wingers, "that the ayatollah was speaking for the whole faith." In this atmosphere of "anti-Muslim feeling", as Bhikhu Parekh described it, most Muslims were seen as fundamentalists or "illiterate peasants preferring the sleep of superstition to liberal light, and placed outside civilised discourse". The world of unreformed Islam in this view presented a clear and present danger to the cherished beliefs, institutions and art forms of the secular and rational west. In his memoir, where [Salman Rushdie] bizarrely decides to write about himself, or "[Joseph Anton]", his Conrad-and-Chekhov-inspired alias, in the third person, he repeatedly points to his early intuitions and warnings about the atrocity suffered by the west on 9/11. "He knew, as surely as he knew anything, that the fanatical cancer spreading through Muslim communities would in the end explode into the wider world beyond Islam." Indeed, Rushdie's writings from this period anticipate many declarations of war on "Islamofascism" after 9/11. As he wrote in 1990, defending The Satanic Verses: "'Battle lines are being drawn in India today,' one of my characters remarks. 'Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on.' Now that the battle has spread to Britain, I only hope it will not be lost by default. It is time for us to choose." There are some exceptions to British mean-mindedness. After one "lovely evening" at Chequers, where the singer Mick Hucknall's "hot girlfriend" is distractingly present, Anton confesses to a "soft spot" for Tony Blair. "You set out sincerely to change my life for the better," he writes, and though this "may not quite cancel out the invasion of Iraq", it does weigh in his "personal scales". Oddly, Anton seems to require no such moral balancing for the Sri Lankan strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is commended for resisting Iranian pressure and green-lighting the filming of Midnight's Children; the responsibility of this authoritarian president and his brother in the massacre of tens of thousands of Tamil Hindus is passed over in silence. Nor does Anton record the piquant fact that the Hindu nationalists who noisily protested against the Indian decision to ban The Satanic Verses and, once in power, allowed him to visit India are implicated in the killings of thousands of Muslims in the previous two decades. - Pankaj Mishra.
Kirkus Review
The frightening, illuminating and disturbing memoir by the author of The Satanic Verses, the book that provoked a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Rushdie (Luka and the Fire of Life, 2008, etc.) chose for his cover name (and for the title) the first names of Conrad and Chekhov--appropriate, for the author seemed caught in a tangled novel filled with ominous (and some cowardly) characters driven by an inscrutable fate toward a probable sanguinary climax. The author uses third person throughout, a decision that allows him a novelist's distance but denies some of the intimacy of the first person. Perhaps he viewed himself during those 13 years (the duration of his protection by British security forces) more as a character than a free agent. He returns continually to an image from Hitchcock's The Birds: the black birds gradually filling up a jungle gym on a school playground (these represent the threats to personal freedom presented by fundamentalists). Rushdie also includes unmailed letters to actual people (Tony Blair) and to ideas (the millennium). The organization is unremarkable: The author begins with his learning of the fatwa, retreats to tell about his life before 1989, then marches steadily toward the present with only a few returns (a section about his mother's love life). Bluntly, he tells about his wives, divorces, affairs, successes and failures of pen and heart and character; his various security guards; and, very affectingly, about his two sons. He tells about his travels, many awards and celebrity friends. Emerging as heroic is the United States, where Rushdie realized he could live more freely than anywhere else. Aspects of a spy novel, a writer's autobiography and a victim's affidavit pulsing with resentment and fear combine to reveal a man's dawning awareness of the primacy of freedom.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue The First Blackbird AFTERWARDS, WHEN THE WORLD WAS EXPLODING AROUND HIM AND THE lethal blackbirds were massing on the climbing frame in the school playground, he felt annoyed with himself for forgetting the name of the BBC reporter, a woman, who had told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She had called him at home on his private line without explaining how she got the number. "How does it feel," she asked him, "to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?" It was a sunny Tuesday in London but the question shut out the light. This is what he said, without really knowing what he was saying: "It doesn't feel good." This is what he thought: I'm a dead man. He wondered how many days he had left to live and thought the answer was probably a single-digit number. He put down the telephone and ran down the stairs from his workroom at the top of the narrow Islington row house where he lived. The living room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and barred them. Then he locked the front door. It was Valentine's Day but he hadn't been getting on with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins. Six days earlier she had told him she was unhappy in the marriage, that she "didn't feel good around him anymore," even though they had been married for little more than a year, and he, too, already knew it had been a mistake. Now she was staring at him as he moved nervously around the house, drawing curtains, checking window bolts, his body galvanized by the news as if an electric current were passing through it, and he had to explain to her what was happening. She reacted well, beginning to discuss what they should do next. She used the word "we." That was courageous. A car arrived at the house, sent by CBS television. He had an appointment at the American network's studios in Bowater House, Knightsbridge, to appear live, by satellite link, on its morning show. "I should go," he said. "It's live television. I can't just not show up." Later that morning the memorial service for his friend Bruce Chatwin was to be held at the Orthodox church on Moscow Road in Bayswater. Less than two years earlier he had celebrated his fortieth birthday at Homer End, Bruce's house in Oxfordshire. Now Bruce was dead of AIDS, and death had arrived at his own door as well. "What about the memorial," his wife asked. He didn't have an answer for her. He unlocked the front door, went outside, got into the car and was driven away, and although he did not know it then, so that the moment of leaving his home did not feel unusually freighted with meaning, he would not go back to that house, his home for five years, until three years later, by which time it was no longer his. The children in the classroom in Bodega Bay, California, sing a sad nonsense song. She combed her hair but once a year, ristle-te, rostle-te, mo, mo, mo. Outside the school a cold wind is blowing. A single blackbird flies down from the sky and settles on the climbing frame in the playground. The children's song is a roundelay. It begins but it doesn't end. It just goes round and round. With every stroke she shed a tear, ristle-te, rostle-te, hey-bombosity, knickety-knackety, retroquo-quality, willoby-wallaby, mo, mo, mo. There are four blackbirds on the climbing frame, and then a fifth arrives. Inside the school the children are singing. Now there are hundreds of blackbirds on the climbing frame and thousands more birds fill the sky, like a plague of Egypt. A song has begun, to which there is no end. When the first blackbird comes down to roost on the climbing frame it seems individual, particular, specific. It is not necessary to deduce a general theory, a wider scheme of things, from its presence. Later, after the plague begins, it's easy for people to see the first blackbird as a harbinger. But when it lands on the climbing frame it's just one bird. In the years to come he will dream about this scene, understanding that his story is a sort of prologue: the tale of the moment when the first blackbird lands. When it begins it's just about him; it's individual, particular, specific. Nobody feels inclined to draw any conclusions from it. It will be a dozen years and more before the story grows until it fills the sky, like the Archangel Gabriel standing upon the horizon, like a pair of planes flying into tall buildings, like the plague of murderous birds in Alfred Hitchcock's great film. At the CBS offices he was the big news story of the day. People in the newsroom and on various monitors were already using the word that would soon be hung around his neck like a millstone. They used the word as if it were a synonym for "death sentence" and he wanted to argue, pedantically, that that was not what the word meant. But from this day forward it would mean that for most people in the world. And for him. Fatwa. "I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the 'Satanic Verses' book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Qur'an, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all the Muslims to execute them wherever they find them." Somebody gave him a printout of the text as he was escorted toward the studio for his interview. Again, his old self wanted to argue, this time with the word "sentence." This was not a sentence handed down by any court he recognized, or which had any jurisdiction over him. It was the edict of a cruel and dying old man. But he also knew that his old self's habits were of no use anymore. He was a new self now. He was the person in the eye of the storm, no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of Satanic Verses, a title subtly distorted by the omission of the initial The. The Satanic Verses was a novel. Satanic Verses were verses that were satanic, and he was their satanic author, "Satan Rushdy," the horned creature on the placards carried by demonstrators down the streets of a faraway city, the hanged man with protruding red tongue in the crude cartoons they bore. Hang Satan Rushdy. How easy it was to erase a man's past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight. King Charles I had denied the legitimacy of the sentence handed down against him. That hadn't stopped Oliver Cromwell from having him beheaded. He was no king. He was the author of a book. He looked at the journalists looking at him and he wondered if this was how people looked at men being taken to the gallows or the electric chair or the guillotine. One foreign correspondent came up to be friendly. He asked this man what he should think about what Khomeini had said. How seriously should he take it? Was it just a rhetorical flourish or something genuinely dangerous? "Oh, don't worry too much," the journalist said. "Khomeini sentences the president of the United States to death every Friday afternoon." "On air, when he was asked how he responded to the threat, he said, "I wish I'd written a more critical book." He was proud, then and always, that he had said this. It was the truth. He did not feel his book was especially critical of Islam, but, as he said on American television that morning, a religion whose leaders behaved in this way could probably do with a little criticism. When the interview was over they told him his wife had called. He phoned the house. "Don't come back here," she said. "There are two hundred journalists on the sidewalk waiting for you." "I'll go to the agency," he said. "Pack a bag and meet me there." His literary agency, Wylie, Aitken & Stone, had its offices in a white-stuccoed house on Fernshaw Road in Chelsea. There were no journalists camped outside--evidently the world's press hadn't thought he was likely to visit his agent on such a day--and when he walked in every phone in the building was ringing and every call was about him. Gillon Aitken, his British agent, gave him an astonished look. He was on the phone with the British-Indian member of Parliament for Leicester East, Keith Vaz. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered, "Do you want to talk to this fellow?" "Vaz said, in that phone conversation, that what had happened was "appalling, absolutely appalling," and promised his "full support." A few weeks later he was one of the main speakers at a demonstration against The Satanic Verses attended by over three thousand Muslims, and described that event as "one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain." Excerpted from Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
