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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 • BookPage
On 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
- Sales Rank: #262095 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Random House Trade Paperbacks
- Published on: 2013-09-10
- Released on: 2013-09-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x 1.41" w x 5.14" l, 1.06 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 656 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Booklist
*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. --Donna Seaman
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
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), 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, and Luka and the Fire of Life—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published three works of nonfiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, and Step Across This Line, and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a former president of American PEN.
Most helpful customer reviews
123 of 135 people found the following review helpful.
Joseph Anton
By S Riaz
Joseph Anton was the alias that Salman Rushdie chose (a combination taken from Conrad and Chekhov) when he was in hiding, after being 'sentenced to death' after publication of "The Satanic Verses". On a sunny morning in London in 1989, a few months after the book had been published, a call from a BBC reporter changed his life. "How does it feel to know that you have been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?" she asked. With those few words, everything changed for him forever. In his Islington house, Salman Rushdie, understandably, shuttered the windows and locked the door. When he later left for an interview, he had no idea that he would not sit foot in the house again for many years...
This memoir is always totally honest and never less than gripping, especially in the first half of this enormous book. The author discusses his education, family, relationships and his behaviour during those incredibly stressful years with immense openness. During the first two or three years of the fatwa, Rushdie was constantly on the move, reliant on his friends for places to stay. His second marriage was less than a year old at the time and already in trouble, so the stress and intrusion certainly did not help that situation either. The author was criticised, even at the time his life was in danger, by press articles claiming he was costing the country huge amounts of money, the government were imposing limits on what he was allowed to do (including how and when he could see his beloved son) and he was accused of selfishness for wanting to publish a paperback version of "The Satanic Verses" when the lives of hostages, such as Terry Waite, hung in the balance. Eventually, he would almost be blamed for being an author, for writing, for opening his mouth or putting pen to paper.
Salman Rushdie admits frankly that many people saw him as arrogant and unrepentent during that time. He also allows that his need to be loved made him make misguided attempts at conciliation, which he later regretted. He knew little of what was going on - there were vague rumours or threats of hit squads, contracts and assassins, but he was told few details. He was simply moved again - and again and again. His freedom limited and, when he rebelled, he was told simply, "If you want to live, you will move." Much changed for the author, and the world, during that time. There were major world events and huge social changes. Rushdie tells how he wrote his first book on a computer, instead of a typewriter, during those years.
As a book, it has to be admitted, that the first half is certainly the most interesting. I certainly enjoyed reading about his early years and how he strived to become a successful author. The news of the death sentence and how the author reacted to it is certainly both shocking and gripping to read about. This is a very important book for those who recall the furore caused, so long ago, by a novel. I was quite young in 1989, in my first job, and I recall the huge outpouring of rage and hate that swept the country at the time. There was a real threat - bookshops were firebombed around the world and those who had translated the book were attacked (in one case killed). I did doing something I never did then, which was to buy a hardback copy of a book (too expensive on my low wage at that time) and that book was, of course, "The Satanic Verses". As the author says, "The freedom to write is closely related to the freedom to read". As we do not wish to be told what we can read - as we, as readers, feel we have the right to read whatever we want, then authors have to have the freedom to write those books for us. As a reader I am grateful for the stand this author took, which took immense bravery and which he tells with a great deal of humour (his brief attempt at using a wig as a disguise is priceless) and humility. This is a book you will be glad that you have read and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
84 of 91 people found the following review helpful.
"It had been about something important"
By Foster Corbin
At a Salman Rushdie lecture that I attended a couple of years ago, a well-intentioned member of the audience asked him to contrast his life during the years when the Iranian fatwa loomed over his head and his now time of freedom. If I recall Mr. Rushdie's words , there were only two: "bad" and "good." This author, beloved by many and still hated by others, has finally told us what his life was like during the decade or so-- the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa on February 14, 1989 for Rushdie having published THE SATANIC VERSES-- when there was a price on his head by Islamic fundamentalists in his memoir JOSEPH ANTON. (Forced to live in hiding, he chose the two first names of two of his favorite authors Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov for his pseudonym.) His one word answer has stretched to over six hundred pages. He has a lot to say.
Mr. Rushdie seems to omit nothing. At times he is angry-- although from where I sit he usually shows remarkable control-- but always honest (about both himself and others, even telling the reader about some of the most intimate details of his marriages) and he never loses his sense of humor, as anyone who has had the pleasure of hearing him speak knows. But what Mr. Rushdie says over and over and what makes his story so important is that freedom of speech, i.e., the freedom both to write and to read is something worth dying for. In his own instance Professor Hitoshi Igarashi, the translator of THE SATANIC VERSES into Japanese was murdered and did pay the ultimate price. Dr. Ettore Capriolo was stabbed; William Nygaard, THE SATANIC VERSES Norwegian publisher, was shot. Both these men survived. While heads of government in the western world were not always so brave, often putting politics over the freedom of writers to publish and publishers caved in to fear-- it was years after the initial publication of THE SATANIC VERSES that a major company in the U. S. would come out with the paperback edition-- writers around the world came to Mr. Rushdie's defense: "I have been given a lesson, in these years, in the worst of human nature, but also in the best of it, a lesson in courage, principle, selflessness, determination and honor, and in the end that's what I want to remember: that I was at the center of a group of people behaving as well, as nobly, as human beings can behave." Practically every major writer spoke out for him. The list is long. Two who did not were Roald Dahl, who called Rushdie "a dangerous opportunist" in print, and John le Carre, who also spoke out against him early on. He and Mr. Rushdie exchanged fire in a series of letters to THE GUARDIAN in November, 1997 after Mr. le Carre complained that he had been called anti-Semitic in the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW by Norman Rush. "He (Rushdie uses the third person for his memoir) should have kept his feelings to himself, of course, but he couldn't resist replying." Then Christopher Hitchens "joined the fray unbidden" and you can imagine how that fire got fanned. My favorite essayist compared the writer of THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD to someone who urinates in his hat and then wears it-- a bit of comic relief in a very serious book.
Mr. Rushdie, during much of the 1990's lived as a virtual prisoner in the many places he lived with members of the British secret police, whom almost to a person he praises, twenty-four hours a day. He looked forward, however, to his trips to the U. S. where he could move about with more freedom. He was well received here as a celebrity of sorts and met many famous people. One of my favorite stories among many is his account of meeting Meg Ryan when she went into rhapsodies over visiting India, and her love of what Mr. Rushdie calls the "guru industry." He reminded her that if you grew up in India, it was easy to conclude that those people were fakes-- a real conversation stopper. He does describe with great emotion his visit with his son Zafar to the land of his birth after he was finally given a visa after not being allowed to go to India for so many years. When in Mexico City he spoke to Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a telephone call arranged by Carlos Fuentes. Marquez paid him what he says is the greatest compliment he ever received when he said that the only two writers he followed outside the Spanish language were J. M. Coetzee and Rushdie.
Even though Mr. Rushdie lived as a hunted man for so long, he worked diligently to have as normal a life as possible, trying sometimes unsuccessfully to keep writing and spending as much time as possible with his son Zafar whose mother was his first wife Clarissa and with his second son Milan by his third wife Elizabeth. Some of the most poignant passages in the entire book have to do with his descriptions of these two sons. He loves them dearly and it shows. Rushdie has a lot to say about love. When he writes of his beloved mother who would not seek out her first love, her first husband, after the death of Rushdie's father although she lived for sixteen more years alone and never responded to any of her first husband's letters, this brilliant writer reminds us that "sometimes love is not enough."
In conclusion, has anyone described literature and its importance better than Mr. Rushdie? "Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider than before. . . Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war." He reminds us his fight had been about something important.
We in Atlanta are so fortunate to have this fine writer, whose novel MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN was chosen as the Best of the Bookers of all the Booker Prizes, from time to time pitch his tent amongst us.
41 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
Love never came at you from the direction you were looking in.
By Rubens
In 1989 I was in the last year of high school in Tehran. After a break and before the "religion study" (of course), a student wrote in English "Satanic Verses" on the blackboard, since that was the news the night before, and since the phrase sounded cool. I still remember the handwriting. For weeks to come, he wet his pants why he did that. For entering university in Iran, you needed to be cleared by the school that you have pure thoughts and strong islamic belief (definitely not satanic).
Fast forward to 1998, I was a student in Europe enjoying a scholarship to study Science. I started reading the Satanic Verses, just to find out why the grand Ayatollah and the Iranian regime is so keen to kill its author. It took me one non-interrupted year for the first reading (thanks to my full scholarship to do Science). For a science conference I needed to get a visa to Britain (having Iranian passport, you are only qualified to enter Heaven, but pretty much no place in Earth). I am sitting in the British consulate reading my book. I turned back and saw two Pakistanis with long beard (an old and a young guy) sitting behind me. The type who wanted to kill the author. I freaked out having the book Satanic Verses in my hand. I changed my seat so that they can't see what I am reading. Then I realised the British behind the counter now can see an Iranian guy reading the book, wanting to enter the United Kingdom (and probably is familiarising himself with his target).
That was my thought: if a student in Iran wetting his pants for just writing the name of the book and an average guy wetting his pants (both ways) by just having the book in his hand, what would the writer himself must go through?
The book Joseph Anton answers that. It is a brutally honest account of 10 years of hiding. Rushdie writes of the confusion the event created "he realised,..., that he no longer understood his life". He writes about his shame, "While all this and much more was happening (referring to publishers and bookshops bravely continuing the publication) the author of the Satanic Verses was crouching in shame behind a kitchen worktop to avoid being seen by a sheep farmer". And here is why "...the working of Muslin 'honour culture' at the poles of whose moral axis were honour and shame, very different from Christian narrative of guilt and redemption. He came from that culture even though he was not religious, had been raised to care deeply about questions of pride. To skulk and hide was to lead to dishonourable life. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed. Both shamed and ashamed".
The book is an account of tremendous pressure and assault from all fronts. From his wife, from the British police, tabloids and not to mention the faithfuls and Iranian. "His biggest problem, he thought in his most bitter moments, was that he wasn't dead...He was supposed to be dead, but he obviously hadn't understood that. That was the headline everyone has set up, just waiting to run"... "two shots to the head and one to the chest"...
But the book, 630 pages, is also an account of how he put on a fight. Along the way, how literature and his passion for literature kept him sane, "The greatest danger of the growing menace was that good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace. Good men would give in to fear and call it respect."
Throughout the work, Rushdie's humour is present, something he always complained people missed in his work:
A woman asking, "Mr. Rushdie, I have read your novel, Midnight's Children. It's a very long novel, but never mind, I read it through. And my question for you is this: Fundamentally, what's your point?". In a letter to his mother "...an imam wants to ban the 'blasphemous' Barbie doll. Would you ever have thought that poor Barbie and I would be guilty of the same offence?"
The book is long and very detailed. This could become a bit frustrating as one feels giving too much details (nights with friends, going for take away food, etc) could hide the bigger picture. This was accurately noted in a review by Kenan Malik:
"it is in exploring the wider issues of the Rushdie affair that Joseph Anton is, perhaps surprisingly, at its weakest. The memoir is extraordinarily rich in detail. It provides a blow-by-blow account of the meetings, the arguments, the feuds, the emotions. And yet that detail is rarely used to illuminate the big picture, to explore the bigger social, cultural, political and intellectual changes that the Rushdie affair has wrought, or at least symbolised. It was through the Rushdie affair that many of the issues that now dominate political debate - multiculturalism, free speech, radical Islam, terrorism - first came to the surface. It was also through the Rushdie affair that our thinking about these issues began to change. Few people are better placed than Rushdie himself to talk about these changes and to link the details to the historical shifts. Yet, that broader frame is largely missing in Joseph Anton. And without a frame the richness of detail can appear as a case of `one damn event after another'."
I enjoyed reading through the book. One thing is clear: This book is not in the same league as his masterpieces Midnight's Children and the Satanic Verses. There one has a brilliant author who worked on each of the books for 5 years. There, one can feel each paragraph has been worked on, thought about, and researched.
Despite that "he told his friends...his life has turn to a bad novel", Rushdie manages to write a good book out of that!
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