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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.
Includes a prologue read by the Author.
Praise for Salman Rushdie
“In Salman Rushdie . . . India has produced a glittering novelist—one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling.”—The New Yorker
“Salman Rushdie has earned the right to be called one of our great storytellers.”—The Observer
“Our most exhilaratingly inventive prose stylist, a writer of breathtaking originality.”—Financial Timesa writer of breathtaking originality.”—Financial Times
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Creators
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Publisher
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Awards
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Release date
September 18, 2012 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780449807842
- File size: 777921 KB
- Duration: 27:00:40
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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September 24, 2012
Hailed as a literary martyr and derided as a prima donna, Rushdie emerges as both inspiring and insufferable in this memoir of his life following the 1989 fatwa issued against him by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. The British-Indian novelist's third-person account of the firestorm surrounding The Satanic Verses is harrowing as he's hounded, under the pseudonym "Joseph Anton," and moved from one hiding place to another under constant police guard while Islamists everywhere call for his death, and the British government treats him as an undeserving troublemaker. (Bookstore bombings and murderous attacks on a publisher and translators, he notes, show how serious the threat was.) But once Rushdie regains his nerve, his fetters accommodate much jet-setting lionization as he travels the world, collects awards and ovations, and parties with glitterati at the Playboy Mansion. Rushdie mixes stirring defenses of free speech with piquant observations on the subculture of maniacal high-level security, ripostes to detractors and ex-wivesâ"when he mentioned a pre-nup, the conversation became a quarrel"âsex gossip and incessant name-dropping ("Willie Nelson was there! And Matthew Modine!"). There's preening self-dramatization by the celebrity authorâ but a persistent edge of real drama, and fear, makes Rushdie's story absorbing. -
Starred review from December 24, 2012
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.
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