Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie (EPUB)

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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The Seattle Times • The Economist • Kansas City Star • BookPageOn February 14, 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been “sentenced to death” by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being “against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.” So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov—Joseph Anton. How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom. It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day.Praise for Joseph Anton “A harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie’s work throughout his career.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “A splendid book, the finest . . . memoir to cross my desk in many a year.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “Thoughtful and astute . . . an important book.”—USA Today “Compelling, affecting . . . demonstrates Mr. Rushdie’s ability as a stylist and storytelle. . . . [He] reacted with great bravery and even heroism.”—The Wall Street Journal “Gripping, moving and entertaining . . . nothing like it has ever been written.”—The Independent (UK) “A thriller, an epic, a political essay, a love story, an ode to liberty.”—Le Point (France) “Action-packed . . . in a literary class by itself . . . Like Isherwood, Rushdie’s eye is a camera lens —firmly placed in one perspective and never out of focus.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Unflinchingly honest . . . an engrossing, exciting, revealing and often shocking book.”—de Volkskrant (The Netherlands) “One of the best memoirs you may ever read.”—DNA (India) “Extraordinary . . . Joseph Anton beautifully modulates between . . . moments of accidental hilarity, and the higher purpose Rushdie saw in opposing—at all costs—any curtailment on a writer’s freedom.”—The Boston Globe

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Editorial Reviews: Review “A harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie’s work throughout his career.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “A splendid book, the finest . . . memoir to cross my desk in many a year.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “Thoughtful and astute . . . an important book.”—USA Today “Compelling, affecting . . . demonstrates Mr. Rushdie’s ability as a stylist and storytelle. . . . [He] reacted with great bravery and even heroism.”—The Wall Street Journal “Gripping, moving and entertaining . . . nothing like it has ever been written.”—The Independent (UK) “A thriller, an epic, a political essay, a love story, an ode to liberty.”—Le Point (France) “Action-packed . . . in a literary class by itself . . . Like Isherwood, Rushdie’s eye is a camera lens —firmly placed in one perspective and never out of focus.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Unflinchingly honest . . . an engrossing, exciting, revealing and often shocking book.”—de Volkskrant (The Netherlands) “One of the best memoirs you may ever read.”—DNA (India) “Extraordinary . . . Joseph Anton beautifully modulates between . . . moments of accidental hilarity, and the higher purpose Rushdie saw in opposing—at all costs—any curtailment on a writer’s freedom.”—The Boston Globe About the Author Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America. His books have been translated into over forty languages. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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.” Read more

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⭐Joseph Anton: A MemoirBy Salman RushdieNew York: Random House, 2012.Reviewed by C. J. Singh (Berkeley, CA).The Roots of Salman Rushdie’s Secular HumanismIn his 636-page memoir, Salman Rushdie writes in detail about his years of hiding under repeated death threats issued against him by fundamentalist Muslims that began in the late 1980s, upon the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses.” The memoir’s title, “Joseph Anton,” is the pseudonym he adopted during his years of hiding. It combines the first names of two of his favorite authors Conrad and Chekov. The memoir details his schooling in India and in England (Rugby and Cambridge), the ups and downs in his four marriages, and the publication of his many books.This brief review focuses on the sources of his secular humanism. There is no chapter with the title secular humanism in the book; indeed, the phrase occurs nowhere in it. The roots go back his father, Anis, who adopted the family name, Rushdie, after the 12th century Aristotelian, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd (page 23). Anis, a Cambridge-educated Muslim lawyer in Bombay, preferred to raise his children in an “atmosphere of open inquiry…. Everything, even holy writ, could be investigated and just, possibly, improved” (page 25).Salman’s mother, Negin, hired a “maulvi,” to impart the basics of the faith, but the children ridiculed him, and when the parents joined in, laughing, the maulvi quit, cursing the infidel family (page 26).At Cambridge, Salman Rushdie studied history and chose as one of his special subjects Muhammad and the rise of Islam (page 39). Salman learned that at Mecca at the city gates stood the statues of three goddesses al-Lat, al-Manat, and al-Uzza. To secure their blessings, the trading caravans paid tribute to them. In Kaaba, there were statues of hundreds of gods, including a statue, al-Lah. Muhammad plucked “al-Lah from near obscurity” and became his Prophet (pages 41-42).Although at first the prophet worshipped the three goddesses, at “a later point, he came down to state that he had been deceived on his previous visit; the Devil had appeared to him in the guise of the Archangel, and the verses he had been given were therefore not divine, but Satanic, and should be expunged from the Qur’an at once” pages 43-45). Clearly in Rushdie’s interpretation, the issue was the gender of these divine beings.Several years after the extraordinary success of his secular novel “Midnight’s Children,” Rushdie drafted a new novel incorporating some of the above themes and submitted the completed manuscript to Viking Penguin. The publishing house consulted the legendary Indian journalist, short-story writer, and novelist Khushwant Singh (now 98 years old and actively publishing columns, books). He wisely counseled against publishing the manuscript, anticipating the offense it would provoke among Muslims worldwide (page 113).Evidently, the publishing house did not communicate Khushwant Singh’s advice to Rushdie. The Satanic Verses was published; the publisher, no doubt counting on banking huge profits as from Midnight’s Children. Khushwant Singh’s prediction of offense was spot-on: bloody riots erupted in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and elsewhere, resulting in the loss of many lives. The government of India was the very first to ban The Satanic Verses; the government no doubt counting on banking Muslim votes in the next election. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a “fatwa” for the execution of Rushdie. When Rushdie first heard the term “fatwa” on St. Valentine’s day, it was new to him. In Afghanistan, the ancient giant statues of the Buddha in Bamian were demolished. In Tokyo, the Japanese translator of the novel was murdered. In Oslo, his Norwegian publisher was grievously wounded.Rushdie’s defense all along has been that in his novel, “The Prophet was not called Muhammad, lived in a city not called Mecca, and created a religion not (or not quite) called Islam. And he appeared only in the dream sequences of a man being driven insane by his loss of faith. These many distancing devices were, in their creator’s opinion, indicators of the fictive nature of his project” (page 75).After the “fatwa” was announced, Rushdie received immediate support from eminent writers like Norman Mailer, Paul Auster, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Gunter Grass, Amis Martin, Ian McEwan, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Later, more than a hundred Muslim writers from Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere published a book of short essays, “For Rushdie,” strongly supporting his right for free speech.With the intercession of Norman Mailer, William Styron, and other eminent American writers, Rushdie met POTUS Bill Clinton. Rushdie said to him, “Mr. President, when I leave the White House I have to go to the Press Club and there will be a lot of journalists waiting to find out what you had to say. I’d like to be able to tell them that the United States is joining the campaign against the Iranian `fatwa’ and supports progressive voices around the world.” Rushdie writes: “Clinton nodded and grinned. ‘Yes, you can say that because it is true. It should send a message around the world. It’s intended to be a demonstration of American support for free speech and of our desire that First Amendment-style rights should grow all around the world’ ” (pages 403 – 404).At an NPR talk-in literary program a few years ago, a caller asked Rushdie, “Are you a Muslim?” Rushdie responded firmly, “No sir, I am not.” The memoir makes it clear that he would not agree that he is “Islamophobic”In fact, he contests the neologism “Islamophobia” itself.”A new word has been created to help the blind remain blind: `Islamophobia.’ To criticize the militant stridency of this religion in its contemporary incarnation was to be a bigot. A ‘phobic’ person was extreme and irrational in his views, and so the fault lay with such persons and not with the belief system that boasted over one billion followers worldwide. One billion believers could not be wrong, therefore the critics must be foaming at the mouth. When, he [Rushdie] wanted to know, did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get described as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood or fell because they were strong enough or too weak to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent….Only the weak and the authoritarian turned away from their opponents and called them names and sometimes wished to do them harm” (pages 344 – 345).Compared to one of Rushdie’s closest friends, Christopher Hitchens’ views, the above is restrained. Hitchens, of Jewish heritage, called Judaism, Christianity, Islam — the three Abrahamic religions — “the Axis of Evil.” Tempted to create a fresh neologism? Abrahamophobia?The excessive details about his marital rifts and his self-exonerations in them make the memoir drag in places. But his intellectual honesty shines throughout. Unlike some other reviewers who accuse him of name-droping, I don’t find that valid; Rushdie narrates his interactions with his writer friends, many of whom are famous. There’s no crime in that.Eleven years ago, secular humanist V. S. Naipaul’s books, “Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey,” (1982), and “Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples” (1999), based on his extensive interviews with Muslims in Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia, led to his winning the Nobel prize in 2001. Will Salman Rushdie’s brilliant memoir that unpacks the secular humanistic critique of Islam lead to his winning the Nobel in 2013? He deserves it, in my opinion for his many brilliant novels and short stories, in particular for his Booker-of-Booker-winning novel “Midnight’s Children.”

⭐”Where you going with that Gun in your hand … ” The Jimi Hendrix version of that old folk song kept rippling through my head as I was reading Salman Rushdie’s harrowing, compelling, and occasionally exasperating memoir Joseph Anton. The book itself is the story that had to be told, the story that anyone who is not a member of the infamous “Page 15 Club” but who actually read The Satanic Verses beginning to end and recognized its brilliance has always, always wanted to hear — not to mention the millions of fellow travelers who did not or could not read the book but were incensed at the mullahs’ attempted crimes against humanity and free expression. Rushdie tells the story with consummate skill, and for reasons that will be explained later in this review, it is far and away his best work since The Satanic Verses appeared in 1988.To his critics, however, “Joseph Anton” had a gun in his hand. He “shot down” “his” “religion”; a capital crime, in the eyes of the misguided and inflexible. He offended The People, that hydra-headed excuse for irrational thinking embraced by his leftist friends, and in a particularly bitter passage, he explains that his situation: “was a tough one for the left to deal with: How should one react when the masseswere being irrational? Could `the people’ ever be, quite simply, wrong? …It was notpossible, in the thinking of socialist intellectuals, that the people had misjudged him.The people could not be wrong.” “Hey JoeWhere you gonna run, where you gonna hide … “The position presented here is that the Special Branch honchos orchestrating his survival in those first two or three awful years just didn’t like the man, didn’t like the arts or brown-skinned people or lefties, didn’t understand and didn’t care and didn’t want to. At the official level, Rushdie reports, he was “treated like a naughty child,” and at the personal, what he went through shouldn’t happen to the worst enemy of one’s own choice. An electrician in the house could compel hours of sweaty concealment behind the shower curtain, for all the world like the actually existing Joseph Conrad’s secret sharer cowering in the captain’s bath. An alcoholic bodyguard blabbing in a pub leads to a wrenching move and the loss of some six months’ rent on a house that has been “blown.” An Indian politician delivers a ringing excoriation of an opposition colleague only to find out he was condemning “the wrong Salman.” And so on.With admirable patience and self-control Rushdie takes us from the outwardly confident, inwardly terrified first days of the fatwa through the Grand Guignol of his second marriage (an operatic mashup of Der Fliegender Hollander and Lucia de Lammermoor) into the sappy, semi-happy days between 1992 and 1998, when he found love with a much younger woman of limited ambition while actually “moving the f[*]cking mountain” of hate, inertia, and excuses. He wearily recounts the avalanche of snark sent hurtling down upon him every day by the sadistic British media (what he calls the “Daily Insult”), and is clearly hurt by those who argued he cost too much to protect (in one of the famous ironic tropes surrounding his history, The Satanic Verses made him a wealthy man). As the 90s progress and his way becomes easier thanks to private machinations, we see the writer slowly transform, becoming stronger, braver, less driven by emotion, more informed by events taking place outside his precious literary world, more cautious, more nuanced, less needful. That last was bad news for the unambitious woman, by now the mother of his second child.At any rate, almost as soon as the fatwa is officially lifted, Rushdie leaves the knife sticking in Wife #3 and resettles in NY.”I’m going …Where I can be free.”Surprisingly for one who, pre-89, trashed America in his fiction, R. comes across as sincerely appreciative of this country’s freedoms, not to mention the fact that the American press left him alone. However, once more he takes up with an inappropriate woman, this time an airhead fashion model who hauls him out to Los Angeles for her own purposes (the opera switches to Tannhauser). I had the pleasure of seeing R. during his stay here, when he addressed an overflow crowd one evening at UCLA; he seemed quite pleased with the world and himself at that time. None of the questions put to him had anything to do with books.The memoir ends shortly after 9/11/01, when as R. quite accurately says, “The story of his little battle … was coming to an end. The prologue was past and now the world was grappling with the main event.” That the world, in particularly the U.S. under Barack Obama, has shown little interest in grappling but a great deal in apologizing, may yet be giving the author – who wants so desperately to be Left, despite the overwhelming evidence that those on that side are not his friends – tension headaches and gut-level fear. The publication of this memoir, after all, has prompted new cries of “ex-ter-mi-nate” from plunger-limbed robots in the Middle East.So what’s wrong with this book? Name-dropping is its worst offense. Those who have no interest in celebritude will be mystified by the author’s apparent infatuation with boldface names from Harold Pinter to Madonna. The London/New York literary worlds have never seemed smaller, more blinkered, and less relevant to the planet as a whole as they appear in this otherwise outstanding work. Los Angeles is not just a series of restaurant names; although, to be fair, it’s hard to get a decent grasp on one’s environment while hanging out with airheads.This is Rushdie’s best book since The Satanic Verses, as I said at the beginning, because it is large, sprawling, complex, digressive, achingly witty, and honest. While The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet were brilliant in parts and largely unforgettable, the three shorter novels Rushdie has published since the millennium have not rung true. Fury was, frankly, bad; Shalimar the Clown disappointed with its surface and cliche-filled treatment of L.A., and The Enchantress of Florence dissolved into sci-fi improbability sans flair and fun. It’s painful to run down an idol, but the fatwa took its toll (caveat: there may have been a fourth book, but after being burned three times I didn’t bother). This reviewer hopes Joseph Anton will be the first of many more oversized canvases, that Rushdie’s unique creativity will triumph over groundless literary self-restraint, that he will continue to explode upon the scene and rip the tops off peoples’ heads for years and years to come(I myself, as must be obvious by now, have had nothing but a stump upon my shoulders for two decades). He may be a cad about women, and the worst bet in the world for a long-term relationship, but when it comes to intestinal fortitude, Salman Rushdie has grown kishkes of steel.”Ain’t no hangmanGonna hang his noose on me.”

⭐Early in Joseph Anton Salman Rushdie contrasts the Christian poles of Guilt and Redemption with the Islamic ones of Honour and Shame, and indeed this memoir of a cultural Muslim is not short of examples of the latter. Here he is, for instance, honoured one moment by a telephone call of support from the director of the Frankfurt Book Fair and the next forced to hide in his own home while its dodgy fixtures are examined by a ‘West Indian plumber’. Hold on a moment. What exactly is the significance of his tradesman’s ethnicity to this sense of shame? But before you jump to the obvious conclusion there’s a context here: this is the same Rushdie who castigates his police protectors for breaking his floors with their big feet and his chairs with their plebeian arses, while offending his amour propre by reducing his carefully crafted literary pseudonym to the more manageable monosyllabic ‘Joe’. So less the racist, perhaps, more just the old school snob?This is very much the style of Joseph Anton: the philosophical/theological/literary asides, the intrusions of PC Plod as the attractive if clumsy mechanics, the initially, at least, quite exciting chase story, the almost autistic descriptions of other people and that constant guarding of honour, at different points including threats of verbal fisticuffs with Arundhati Roy and actual ones with Louis de Bernieres for their daring to dis the Great Indian Literary Authority. But, above all, what Joseph Anton provides is hundreds and hundreds of pages of grade-A celebrity gossip featuring everyone from Bill Clinton and Warren Beatty to Bono and Harold Pinter. It’s the print version of those horribly addictive side stories on dailymail.com: an unputdownable guilty pleasure; naughty but nice. One does wonder at times, though. Can a writer really be quite so lacking in self awareness that after 600 odd pages of literary self congratulation he’s the one gasping at his fourth wife’s `majestic narcissism’ or putting down Delia Smith for talking in the third person when this entire book is written in it or railing at the mullahs for depriving him of his growing son’s company when it’s actually rather more the consequence of his having deserted the boy’s mother when she wasn’t providing our hero with enough sex. And mustn’t someone who constantly reminds us of his historical knowledge be trying to trick us when he describes his early nineteenth century hideaway as Queen Anne, or his High Victorian school chapel as having been designed by a late 20th century historian? Are we on the receiving end of some sort of literary game? Perhaps the seeming indignation at the shortening of his name is actually a fable of the down to earth cops knowingly pricking the balloon of his literary pretensions and part of the same game? Who knows? But perhaps not, given the immense seriousness with which Rushdie treats himself.

⭐I grew up with the consistent tabloid and news articles regarding the publication of the Satanic Verses; at that time, I didn’t really care, it was another consistent, monotone dull item of news. I decided to read this book as I became older, as it became apparent how limited and restricted our view of what it means to be ‘free’ means. This book was necessary; it was necessary to finally illuminate the following when the Satanic Verses was written:1. How deceitful the tabloids were – i.e. a character reference was always provided by the newspapers that actually seemed to the absolute opposite of the author himself.2. How much abstract ‘crap’ was written in the newspapers and their reluctance to approach and accept the fact that the author actually lived in a democracy and performed a normal act of only writing a novel.3. How utterly incompetent and deceitful the particular government at that time was in dealing with the fact that a foreign state had decided to pass a decision whereby a citizen of another country could be ‘rightfully’ murdered.4. To clarify in detail the utter hell the author and his family had to endure for several years.5. Finally, to emphasise the true value of friendship and humanity in assisting him through such a terrible time.To all those who at the time had the audacity to cry out, ‘he brought it upon himself’, please read, how much it costs to preserve freedom in today’s world and what a limited luxury it is.

⭐This is a truly astonishing account of years of incarceration under the Khomeini’s threat of death after the publication of The Satanic Verses. It is frightening, tragic, depressing, heartwarming, heartbreaking, and occasionally hilariously funny. It is also a brick of a book, so bedtime reading is a workout, but I don’t share other criticisms of over-repetition.Though I lived through the period described in the book I was shocked by how few supported Rushdie, who advocated his death, who blamed him for his woeful position, who disregarded him as he was “ugly”; how both conservative and labour politicians sided with the hate-filled as their constituencies had large Muslim population; how airlines refused to carry him; who was killed or attacked because of the book; and much much more.It is a wonderful example of the strength of human spirit.

⭐Slightly irritated by the use of the third person narration but otherwise fascinated by Salman Rushdie’s own description of his life following the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah. I remember some of the headlines he writes about. At the time I had read the Satanic Verses and couldn’t understand the rantings from the opponents of the book. To me it gave insight into the origins of Islam. Good luck to Salman Rushdie in the future.

⭐In this account of that part of his life spent under threat of death for writing a novel, Salman Rushdie sets the record straight by presenting his version of events for the first time . The book is both a gripping account of his life under the fatwa, and a ringing defence of the importance of creative literature, and its need to be free of political or religious censorship.Rushdie (justifiably) settles a number of scores. While fulsome in his praise of the rank and file protection officers who kept him safe, he is outspoken about the behaviour of their seniors who insisted on his virtual imprisonment as the price for continuing to protect him. All the while, of course, we all assumed (assisted by a mendacious and hostile press) that it was his own faint-heartedness that kept him in hiding.He is highly critical of politicians, both Tory (Douglas Hurd, as I think was no secret anyway, wouldn’t recognise a principle if it hit him in the face) and many on the left, who were already starting their hideous love affair with far-right Islamism. Also of religious leaders of all persuasions, who closed ranks against a secular writer who had the temerity to offend some of their number.He is also unsparing of his own behaviour, and this gives credibility to the book.There are heroes too, however. Michael Foot and Jill Craigie, Neil Kinnock (all representing an older, more principled leftism), and many of Rushdie’s fellow writers (though with some sad exceptions, such as Roald Dahl and John Le Carre).Mainly, however, this is a beautifully-written and gripping story, whose overall impression is one of the eventual triumph of art over bigotry. Read it.

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