Salman Rushdie Joseph Anton

Posted on 30-04-2021 by admin

Salman Rushdie Bibliography
Salman Rushdie Wikipedia
Joseph Anton A Memoir Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie Joseph Anton

Salman Rushdie’s newest novel The Golden House is a modern American epic set against the panorama of contemporary politics and culture—a hurtling, page-turning mystery that is equal parts The Great Gatsby and The Bonfire of the Vanities. JOSEPH ANTON - A Memoir by Sir Salman Rushdie (2012). SIGNED to the Full Title page by Salman Rushdie, the author. Brand New and Never owned. This is a FIRST Edition, FIRST Printing copy, (number line 246897531), as stated on the copyright page. Dust jacket is in Brand New condition with Read more.

Guest blogger Tara Campbell attends a presentation by Salman Rushdie at George Washington University.

Joseph Anton: A Memoir is the autobiographical account of Salman Rushdie after a fatwa is issued against him for his authorship of The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie, a native of British India, is educated in England at Exeter University, and goes on to become a writer. His first hit is a book called Midnight's Children, which brings him. Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence, and Luka and the Fire of Life. Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a novelist and essayist. Much of his early fiction is set at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world.

Salman Rushdie is known for his sweeping, multigenerational family sagas featuring willful matriarchs and larger-than-life patriarchs. In his novels, history and magical realism intertwine, and the legends and burdens of family and nation follow the South Asian diaspora throughout continents and generations.

Even people who haven’t read any of Rushdie’s works know about the furor over his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses and the fatwa that followed. Islamic clerics whipped millions of Muslims around the world into a frenzy of protest and violence over his alleged blasphemy, and it wasn’t until ten years later that Rushdie began to emerge from under the death sentence issued by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton, chronicles the author’s life before, during and after his decade in hiding. Rushdie discussed the book and his experiences at a sold-out event at the George Washington University Lisner Auditorium on Monday night. Robert Siegel of NPR fame conducted the interview and presented written questions from the audience.

Rushdie and Siegel’s discussion covered a range of weighty topics including the role of the writer in confronting tyranny and speaking truth to power; the courage of authors, editors and publishers who risked their lives to defend Rushdie; and Rushdie’s steadfast defense of freedom of speech even when it meant actively defending speech calling for his own death.

Rushie’s comments regarding religion were, as could be anticipated, unapologetic. He described himself as a person with “less religion than you could inscribe on a chewed off fingernail.” When asked by an audience member how one can maintain an unbiased and respectful attitude toward Islam despite the turbulence and violence surrounding it, he replied “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

During the question and answer period, I was excited to hear Siegel read out my question: “Why did you write Joseph Anton in third person, when his story could only have been yours.” Rushdie answered that he had started in first person but didn’t like the way it sounded. He wanted to write it like a novel instead so he could write about all of the characters on the same level rather than having one character – the “I” – be different from the others.

Joseph Anton is a thorough memoir, almost to a fault. Rushdie describes his early days at boarding school in as much detail as the development of his novels; his multiple, troubled marriages; the logistics of living in hiding and the philosophical battle lines along which his supporters and detractors assembled themselves during his years under British protection. Reading about such momentous events as worldwide protests, bookstore bombings and debates between giants of the literary world alongside tell-all accounts of marital arguments and who slept with whom was at times a bit disorienting and disappointing.

In a memoir that revolves around a fundamental struggle for intellectual freedom and the clash between Islam and the West, Rushdie spends more time than one might expect describing his adventures in Hollywood and his tortured relationship with actress Padma Lakshmi, whom he describes as possessing “majestic narcissism.” Even in passages about his literary career, there are times when he crosses the line between describing interactions with colleagues and dropping names.

But, one might argue, that is exactly the point. In Joseph Anton, Rushdie describes a period of time in which his private life as the imperfect-but-human “Salman” diverges increasingly from the public figure “Rushdie.” “Salman” loses a decade of his personal life as “Rushdie” becomes more concept than author, alternately vilified and defended by other voices on the world stage. Regaining his ability to speak out for himself and make decisions about his own life is a central theme of the book, and in a touching moment in his remarks, he expressed gratitude toward the United States for giving him the time and space to start exercising more control over his life at a time when he was still under strict protection in Britain.

I’d had the pleasure of hearing Rushdie speak once before when he gave the keynote address at an international education conference I attended in 2010. Several Muslim nations boycotted the conference in protest of Rushdie’s selection as keynote speaker. Ironically, his speech was an eloquent but uncontroversial address about the importance of tolerance and education in the pursuit of international understanding.

This, it would seem, is Rushdie’s strength and his fate: arguing for reason and speaking truth to power in his own quiet, direct, thoughtful and unstoppable voice.

Salman Rushdie Bibliography

Tara Campbell is a university admissions professional by day and a writer by night. With a BA in English and an MA in German Language and Literature, she has a demonstrated aversion to money and power. Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, Tara has also lived in Oregon, Ohio, New York, Germany and Austria. She currently lives and works in Washington, D.C., and is a member of the Washington Writers Group and the D.C. Interdisciplinary Writers Group.

Joseph Anton
by
Salman Rushdie

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Joseph Anton
Author:	Salman Rushdie
Genre:	Memoir
Written:	2012
Length:	633 pages
Availability:	Joseph Anton- US
Joseph Anton- UK
Joseph Anton- Canada
Joseph Anton- France
Joseph Anton- Deutschland
Joseph Anton- Italia
Joseph Anton- España

A Memoir

- Return to top of the page -

Salman Rushdie Wikipedia

Our Assessment:

B+ : problematic, but with fascinating parts and quite well written -- but also way too long-winded

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The Atlantic	.	12/2012	Isaac Chotiner
Business Standard	.	15/9/2012	.	20/9/2012	Leo Robson
Financial Times	.	21/9/2012	John Lloyd
The Guardian	.	18/9/2012	Pankaj Mishra
Hindustan Times	.	22/9/2012	Seema Chishti
Independent on Sunday	A+	30/9/2012	Amanda Craig
New Statesman	.	19/9/2012	Colin MacCabe
The NY Rev. of Books	.	20/12/2012	Zoë Heller
The NY Times	.	18/9/2012	Michiko Kakutani
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	14/10/2012	Donna Rifkind
The Observer	A	22/9/2012	Margaret Drabble
San Francisco Chronicle	.	21/9/2012	Steven G. Kellman
The Spectator	.	29/9/2012	Rod Liddle
Sunday Times	.	23/9/2012	Robert Harris
The Telegraph	B+	20/9/2012	Nicholas Shakespeare
The Telegraph	D	21/9/2012	A.N.Wilson
TLS	.	9/11/2012	Eric Ormsby
Wall Street Journal	.	18/9/2012	Michael C. Moynihan
The Washington Post	A+	16/9/2012	Jonathan Yardley

Review Consensus:
Generally quite positive -- though many complaints about length and gossipiness
From the Reviews:

'Rushdie has become a New York socialite obsessed with name-dropping every celebrity he meets, lauding his own work with shameless abandon, and pointlessly denigrating his ex-wives. Joseph Anton shows both the resolve with which Rushdie confronted the threats to his life, and the sad degree to which the unhinged words of a demented ayatollah helped ruin a superb writer.' - Isaac Chotiner, The Atlantic
'In Joseph Anton many of these themes are skilfully and seamlessly interwoven, but perhaps the moments that stand out for their startling candour and clarity are ones of a person reduced to becoming a banal non-person, the unhinged days and months interminably stretching into years in hiding.' - Sunil Sethi, Business Standard
'You might have thought that a fatwa would put bad reviews in perspective but Rushdie has a tendency to conflate the unflattering with the unsupportive, as if he had enough on his plate without people expressing their opinions. Time has done little to dull old grievances. No press clipping is too insignificant to escape Rushdie’s attention. (...) Rushdie wants to tell the story from both the inside and the outside, to provide the personal narrative and the official history, with the result that wrenching descriptions of marital breakdown are juxtaposed with, and diluted by, long passages about who wrote what for which newspaper, or which television channel broadcast what headline at what time.' - Leo Robson, Evening Standard
'Joseph Anton is overlong and too richly endowed with famed authors and starry events: Rushdie, as he writes, loves to be loved. But as a story of refusal to be cowed the book speaks to the heart, and to conscience.' - John Lloyd, Financial Times
'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. (...) Yet the memoir, at 650 pages, often feels too long, over-dependent on Rushdie's journals, and unquickened by hindsight, or its prose.' - Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian
'There are gripping (and contentious) moments in the book when he locates his predicament in the larger debates on free speech, in which the idea of book-burning is seen as a reprehensible prelude to the killing of men. But what is most striking here is that while it tells the story of the Joseph Anton years very well -- in most parts, at least -- it is very thin when it comes to being self-critical or even mildly critical of Rushdie’s own actions.' - Seema Chishti, Hindustan Times
'(T)he most gripping, moving and entertaining literary memoir I have ever read.' - Amanda Craig, Independent on Sunday
'The story Rushdie tells is never less than gripping. And there are moments, particularly in his description of his now regretted reconversion to Islam, when he writes as well as he has ever done. And there are also the personal details: an account of a much-married, uxorious man and most insistently, perhaps, the thoughts of a devoted father.' - Colin MacCabe, New Statesman
'When faced with a choice between exercising magnanimity and exacting long-awaited revenge, the author of Joseph Anton almost invariably opts for the latter. (...) Compassion is certainly what he was owed during that troubled era. It is only regrettable that this quality should be so signally lacking from his own judgments on former friends and colleagues.' - Zoë Heller, The New York Review of Books
'(I)n this volume he shows us how the fatwa forced him to come to terms with his past, his craving for love and his deepest assumptions about the world.' - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
'There are sections where the narrative soars, and more than a few in which it plummets. (...) 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. (...) Rushdie shows a cheerful willingness throughout the memoir to show off his less than dignified side. These scenes can be bleakly funny' - Donna Rifkind, The New York Times Book Review
'Rushdie has now told his version of events and it is more gripping than any spy story. Having resisted commercial attempts to fictionalise his life, he has attempted to tell his own truth. (...) As gossip, this is very entertaining, though not always very edifying. There is also, in the second half of the book, too much about who won or didn't win the Booker prize: too many prizes and speeches, too much of internecine literary politics. (...) This memoir, like the novel it might have been, is full both of telling trivia and profound insights.' - Margaret Drabble, The Observer
'In 10 dramatic chapters, Joseph Anton captures the career of a fallible writer who struggled to sustain the fragile life of the imagination.' - Steven G. Kellman, San Francisco Chronicle
'Joseph Anton is a bid to hose off the crap and retrieve his reputation and character. (...) Though awfully long, solipsistic and of necessity self-serving, Joseph Anton is also funny, painfully moving and absolutely necessary to read.' - Nicholas Shakespeare, The Telegraph
'It really is a most peculiar book, written like the works of Julius Caesar or General de Gaulle, in the third person. If this comparison seems grandiose to you, it would not necessarily do so to the author (.....) As the book galumphingly unfolds, the cast of characters becomes enormous. Special Branch men, politicians and famous writers crowd its pages, yet very few of them come to life. (...) (A)s the narrative continues, this book conveys a bewildering emptiness.' - A.N.Wilson, The Telegraph
'Sad to say, the influence of either Conrad or Chekhov is little in evidence in this massive book. Its chief value is documentary; it is a meticulous account, complete with names and dates and verbatim conversations, of a gruelling experience witnessed from the inside. (...) For admirers of Rushdie's novels, the creeping pervasiveness of Anton's uninflected tone and grubbily obsessive preoccupations may help to explain why this book comes to seem so ponderous, so desperately leaden. Rushdie's decision -- or was it the covertly ambitious Anton's ? -- to cast his memoir in the third person seems particularly questionable.' - Eric Ormsby, Times Literary Supplement
'Joseph Anton demonstrates Mr. Rushdie's ability as a stylist and storyteller. It also serves as an important moral balance sheet. It is quite stunning to be reminded of the craven 'religious leaders' who openly suborned Mr. Rushdie's murder, to no response from the police or courts. Mr. Rushdie hasn't forgotten, though it seems everyone else has.' - Michael C. Moynihan, Wall Street Journal
'Joseph Anton is a splendid book, the finest new memoir to cross my desk in many a year. Some may complain that, at more than 600 pages, it is too long, but it never seemed so to me, and as one who reads for a living I am acutely if not excessively sensitive to authorial self-indulgence. To the contrary, the length of the book, and its wealth of quotidian detail, serve to draw the reader into the life that Rushdie was forced to lead, to make his isolation and fear palpable.' - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

Joseph Anton A Memoir Salman Rushdie

The complete review's Review:

If you're the subject of something as ridiculous, outrageous, and obscene as the death-sentence fatwa invoked against Salman Rushdie for his alleged blasphemy in writing The Satanic Verses you pretty much get carte blanche to be a completely self-righteous asshole or anything else you care to be. Put all that on paper and it becomes a more difficult proposition: do people want to spend 600 pages in your company ?
Joseph Anton is a memoir, and it is largely the memoir of 'Joseph Anton', the code name Rushdie lived under all those years, the alternative identity that allowed him to write checks and the like without revealing who he really was; he combined names of favorite writers until he hit on the winning combination (discards included: 'Vladimir Joyce. Marcel Beckett. Franz Sterne'). A hundred or so pages do cover his pre-fatwa life, and Rushdie kills off (or rather sheds) Joseph Anton in the penultimate chapter, but the Joseph Anton years dominate the book completely. In a way this is a shame: while he rushes (and annoyingly elides) over much of his early life, the first hundred pages contain much of the most interesting material, and one is left wishing for Rushdie's memoir. But the fatwa is a defining and very long-lingering moment, and it's understandable that Rushdie concentrates on that.
The other major choice Rushdie makes in his memoir is to write it in the third person, rather than the first person. Rushdie chooses to approach his life, and Joseph Anton's, like a disembodied observer; the memoir becomes -- in outward appearance -- not a personal one but a would-be documentary one. This choice is, of course, a catastrophic one. Oh, the account still reads well enough, the reader easily adjusting to this particular perspective. But the third person approach gives the veneer of objectivity to what is, naturally, the most subjective of accounts, and this particular, very glossy veneer is so thin that it undermines (or even outright taints) any claims to objectivity. Since much of the account is documentary -- focused on 'the facts', as they were -- this is problematic: Rushdie presents many 'facts' and details, but his account remains entirely one-sided, from a very limited (and long-isolated) perspective. And while it's true that many of the counter-parts and actors hardly deserve space to present their often ridiculous sides, it becomes clear that Rushdie's version is a quite limited one.
Rushdie has a way with words, and his manipulation of them, and what is obviously also a very personal manipulation of the facts, makes much of the memoir suspect. In part one has to admire him: his takedown of former wife Marianne Wiggins could not be more devastating, and she comes off as a complete whacko -- but look at the details (he never mentions the book sales figures for The Satanic Verses (though he does mention that it topped the bestseller lists several times), but manages to slip in that: 'Marianne was upset because her just-published novel John Dollar has sold exactly twenty-four copies in the preceding week' ('exactly' !)) and it's obvious there's obviously at least a little (and probably a lot) more to the stories.
Indeed, a concomitant problem with the book is its emphasis on the personal, as Rushdie takes absolutely everything so damn personally -- and harps on it endlessly. Sure, he was in a situation where he could readily learn who his true friends were, and he was terribly reliant on and affected by the acts of others (including of course many with whom he had nothing whatsoever to do directly, from political and religious figures to newspaper columnists), but here again the one-sidedness of his account leaves a rather unpleasant aftertaste.
It does lead to some fascinating titbits along the way: among his heroes are his literary representatives, Andrew Wylie and Gillon Aitken (though he fails to consider that among the reasons for their undying support for the author -- and making sure The Satanic Verses stayed in print and got a paperback edition -- were surely also purely commercial (short- and long-term) considerations), and he reveals:

Actually, Andrew was driven by passion and emotion and was entirely capable of amazing you by bursting into tears. Gillon was the killer.

[Aside: if someone is capable of 'amazing you by bursting into tears' it's surely because you don't expect them to -- suggesting the bursting into tears is as much for effect (to amaze you !) as anything else.]
While many admirably stand completely behind him, Rushdie is less forgiving of many others who didn't step up -- and also takes a variety of offenses in other matters, large and small. While often justified, his nitpicking can get comically excessive, as when he suggests, after the publication of The Ground beneath her Feet, that:

There was no point dwelling on what critics said, they liked the book or didn't, but the strange case of James Wood merited a small footnote.

If you think -- out loud -- that something merits a 'small footnote' (even after just admitting there's not much point in dwelling ...) then address it ... in a footnote. Instead, Rushdie barrels ahead for sixteen lines of text, comparing Wood's review in The Guardian to the revised one he published in The New Republic, and suggesting:

A critic who contradicted himself according to the literary predilections of his paymasters had, perhaps, some explaining to do.

It's an interesting observation and point -- but Rushdie only offers the observation (from the subjective vantage point of the wronged (and confused) author) and doesn't do anything with it. Maybe he thinks pointing it out is enough, but after a while these litanies of slights -- perceived, and real -- without much exploration of what might be behind at least some of them becomes rather tiresome -- and also weakens the broader assault against the true outrages (like that death threat). (Just how far does Rushdie take things ? He prints an exchange of letters he had with Harold Pinter, chiding him for his behavior towards his other guests ('as your friend I must ask you to STOP IT') when he had Harold and Antonia over for dinner .....)
There are a variety of wonderful details in the book, such as Rushdie's attempt to go incognito in a wig, and bizarre titbits, such as Carrie Fischer ('his closest friend in Hollywood' !) having a party so she can fix him up with ... Meg Ryan (who she felt was more suitable than Padma Lakshmi). The incessant name-dropping is wearying -- though there are the occasional bits that make it all worthwhile, such as Ronald Harwood, after meeting with UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, reporting that: 'Boo-Boo was very sympathetic'. Of course, Rushdie finds validation in this kind of celebrity -- known and being known, seeing and being seen -- and part of his moving beyond his alter ego-identity of Joseph Anton (whose very name couldn't even be known) manifests itself in the complete immersion in being this kind of celebrity, in defining himself by it. He describes his liberation writing:

He would eat at Balthazar, Da Silvano and Nobu, he would go to screenings and book launches and be seen enjoying himself at late-night hot spots such as Moomba.

He was prepared for the jeering that might come from 'some quarters for turning into a party animal', but ultimately this was his response to the decade he had, in many ways, lost due to the fatwa.
So Joseph Anton is an interesting and (im)modestly revealing character study, but it's a very limited memoir. Even as a memoir of just the fatwa-years (which, readers should remember, still aren't completely over -- there are still nuts out there harping on this, and The Satanic Verses is still essentially banned in India, etc.) it is very limited in what it presents. While it does drone on a bit, Joseph Anton is certainly also a consistently engaging read -- but the closer one looks at it, the more frustrating the subjective nature of the account is, especially given the many complicated issues and personal relationships that are -- largely only superficially -- dealt with. It is a bizarrely introspective work that probes almost entirely only on the surface: perhaps another reason that Rushdie chose to write it in the third person.

- M.A.Orthofer, 10 October 2012

- Return to top of the page -

Salman Rushdie

Links:

Joseph Anton:

Jonathan Cape publicity page
Alfred A. Knopf publicity page
Folio publicity page
C. Bertelsmann Verlag publicity page

Reviews:

Deutschlandfunk(German)
Deutschlandradio(German)
L'Express(French)
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung(German)
les inRocks(French)
Известия(Russian)
Le journal d'un lecteur(French)
Libération(French)
Le Magazine Littéraire(French)
Le Monde(French)
Neue Zürcher Zeitung(German)
Die Presse(German)
Süddeutsche Zeitung(German)
Le Temps(French)
Die Welt(German)

Salman Rushdie:

Salman Rushdie at Literature Matters
Salman Rushdie at books and writers

Other books by Salman Rushdie under review:

[The Enchantress of Florence]

Other books of interest under review