Salman Rushdie: Joseph Anton (Book Review)
Reader's backstory first: of Rushdie's novels, I've read Midnight's Children (fascinating, but something keeps me at an emotional distance to all the characters), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (loved that one, my favourite of the books of his I know), The Moor's Last Sigh (somehow here I don't have the emotional distance problem while seeing it in it all the virtues of MC; MC is supposed to be the big masterpiece, but if I had to reccomend or reread one of the two, I'd go for the Moor every time); I browsed through but couldn't connect with The Ground Beneath Her Feet at all, which is why I didn't read it properly; haven't tried any of the later novels; I did read, enjoy, mentally argue with but was always entertained by his essays. The Satanic Verses I haven't read, but at some point want to get around to it. I am old enough to remember the so called "Rushdie affair" unfolding in real time, as an adult. The only conversation about Rushdie entirely unrelated to the fatwa on him I can ever recall having was with the Indian writer Shobha Dé, who was hostile towards him for what struck me as competitive reasons. (Basically it was about which of them depicted Bombay/Mumbai better. She said he didn't know the current day city at all but wrote about the Bombay of his childhood, not the Mumbai of the present. Also she resented that he was seen as representative for Indian writers when he spent most of his life, including his adolescence, in the West and thus to her was a British writer.) So I approached his memoirs about the years he spent with a death sentence because of a book - the title is the alias he was forced to adapt - with great interest.
If you're familiar with some of Rushdie's novels, the first thing that strikes you about Joseph Anton stylistically is the restraint - the multilingual puns, for example, which are his trademarks are only minimally present (though they do show up). Also, as every reviewer notes first and I have to, too: Joseph Anton is written in third person, not as a first person narrative (which several of his novels are). Whyever he did it - a psychological need to distance himself from those years, an awareness of the trickiness that comes with the autobiographical genre (which as someone, I think it was Oscar Wilde, once said for more wittily than I can remember it, tends to to be written from two basic impulses - self justification and revenge, and those are far more apparent in first person than with an attitude of seeming neutrality), it works. It's a compelling book, capturing the claustrophobia, the fear of those years, but also the courage and compassion a lot of his friends showed. And I don't think something like the chapter dealing with his rock bottom moment of fear - when he declared to have re-discovered Islam and to be a faithful Muslim now and got his picture taken with some fundamentalists, which appalled his defenders and didn't even work, could have been written without the safety of the third person. Which allowed for the stark honesty that yes, "he" was that afraid.
Rushdie is at his most endearing when writing about his children. His older son Zafar (for whom Haroun and the Sea of Stories was written) goes from child to adult during the course of the book, and the occasion where Rushdie panicks because Zafar and his mother, Rushdie's first wife Clarissa, are over an hour late for the daily phone call and imagines the worst is one where I as a reader despite being vaguely aware Rushdie's children are both alive in the back of my mind was panicking as well, utterly and completely. And when Zafar hits puberty and becomes a teenager I reacted as you would when this happens to the child of a friend (thinking, steady on, Rushdie, it'll pass). Or a fictional character (those years). Incidentally, Rushdie by no means presents the teenage years one sided and makes fun of himself there, too; poor Zafar has to go through the indignity of seeing his dad boast he'll sing on stage with Bono (and promptly warns him that he'll have to kill himself if his father really does that).
But of course Salman Rushdie, father, isn't the main sales point of this book. While it starts with third person Rushdie getting the news about the fatwa, there is an extensive flashback which comes in handy, describing his background and life until that point. As it turns out, the disgruntled Shobha Dé had something of a point in that Rushdie with thirteen is sent to a British public school (Rugby) and from this point onwards is in India, and later Pakistan (which he dislikes exceedingly; he never understood why his parents moved there instead of staying in Bombay, and Later Developments only made the Pakistan grudge more intense) only on visits and holidays. However, being abroad makes for its own experience of what used to be called AngloIndianness. Rushdie wryly notes that in a British public school in the Sixties, there were three mistakes you shouldn't make: being a foreigner, being smart and being bad at sports, and while two out of three were forgivable, three were not. I haven't yet read memoirs of a writer who went to a British public school and didn't hate it (seriously: Robert Graves' hatred for his in Goodbye To All That is matched by C.S.Lewes loathing his so much he calls it "Belsen" in Surprised By Joy, and then you have Neil Gaiman saying the school parts in Seasons of Mist were somewhat autobiographical), so that wasn't a surprise, and Rushdie's take on Rugby (the school, not the sport) is comparatively mild when put against the visceral hatred of those three gentlemen. Also he has nice words for some of the teachers and points out he was by nature a conformist, not a rebel (again making fun of himself as well as of the various institutions when mentioning that he defended Fagging at the debatting club (and then they finally got rid of the practice after he left school). But in general, yes, this book does nothing the impression of yours truly that apparantly if you're a future writer, then to visit a British boarding school is A Fate Worse Than Death and means years of torture (in this case with added subtle and not so subtle racism).
Because Rushdie as an exile is an ongoing theme in the book, it's also worth noting that emotionally, India seems to be Bombay (and he consciously writes Bombay, not Mumbai; the one passage where he switches to "Mumbai" he makes a point about it) for him, and also something longed for and increasingly out of reach. His four marriages get their own extensive page time, but none of the break-ups comes with the sense of "why, why did this happen, why are you doing this?" which bleeds of the page when he gets, as he sees it, betrayed and rejected by India (first when, post-Fatwa, he's not allowed to enter the country anymore and later when Midnight's Children, which is very much about India from the moment of Independence onwards, finally get filmed, but not in India, because permission isn't given. If you're familiar with the "Mother India" passages from The Moor's Last Sigh: in that vein.
Speaking of the marriages: two of the wives are described as heroines (the first and the third one), one is a villainess and one is a satire. This again is where the third person as opposed to first person narrative comes in handy, and lures you more in as a reader; the sharp portrait of wife No.2, Marianne Wiggins, as an unbalanced pathological liar, would perhaps invite more skepticism if accompagnied with a lot of "I"s. (By contrast, the fourth marriage, to actress Padma Lakhsmi is occasional for much self criticism; it's your avarage story of middle aged man falls for glamourous young woman and the illusion of renewed youth and freedom and having only himself to blame when she as a real person is someone other than his middle aged fantasy.) Whereas, as mentioned, Clarissa (wife 1) and Elizabeth (wife 3) are described as kind, courageous (Clarissa despite being divorced from him and never gettting any personal protection for their son and herself is supportive throughout the fatwa years, stoic when battling cancer later, and the description of her death is one of the most touching passages of the book; Elizabeth meets him when he's already on the run, and volunteers for the madness of that existence) and pretty much blame free for what goes wrong in the respective marriages. Not so coincidentally, they are also the two he has children with. (I don't mean that in a sarcastic fashion. Just: if you care about your very much alive and reading children, who care for their mothers, you're not going to insult their mothers in print for the world to read. Unless you're that much of an egotist.) But as often with fiction, this unfortunately means Mad Marianne is a more vivid character than Kind Elizabeth or Stoic Clarissa.
When it comes to friends and foes, Rushdie is in an unforgetting and mostly unforgiving mode. Those who stood by him are praised. (Thus, for example, we get a far more positive portrait here than was possible for the newspapers to make for the last decade or so for Günter Grass, whom Rushdie meets at a PEN congress in the late 70s, and who later championed his cause.) Those who didn't get eviscerated. (Cue John Le Carré, who had a very public mud slinging match on the pages of the Guardian with Rushdie, later with Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens. ) This goes across the political spectrum, which btw makes a big difference to how Rushdie's friend Christopher Hitchens later recalled the "affair", which he saw as a failure of the left to condemn Muslim fanaticism; by contrast, Rushdie himself took as much note of conservative historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's wish he, Rushdie, should get beaten up in an alley, Margaret Thatcher's and the Archbishop of Canterbury's expression of understanding of Muslim outrage as he did of various left-leaning personalities presenting similar sentiments. (Not just on a British scale. The German goverment of the time, which was conservative, gets accused of occasionally playing Iran's representative in the EU, because Germany is Iran's biggest export partner. Which we are and were since before the Shah era; it's like the US and China, in a way. They give us the occasional dissident because of this, including several of the Iranian exile writes I've met via PEN, our various goverments, conservative and social democrats alike, are very restraint in their criticism vis a vis Iran - except when there's another Holocaust denial, that's too much for even trade hungry goverments to overlook.)
As for the trigger itself: he's been an atheist since his school days, and his father, while nominally a Muslim, saw this mostly as a cultural identity and chose the name "Rushdie" - which hadn't been the family name until then - as a homage to Ibn Rushd, Avorraes, one of great Andalusian-Arab philosophers in battle with the orthodoxy of his day. Early on, addressing the "the book is an insult" argument, he says "I can insult faster than this" and points out he worked on it for four years. Joseph Anton describes the germination of ideas for all his novels, including The Satanic Verses, and basically the core themes he wanted to address in it were migration, Thatcher England and the question how something new came into the world. Being used by the dying Khomenei as a way to distract from the increasingly unpopular Iran/Iraq war was something he couldn't have anticipated. Which one as a reader can believe completely, although much later when Rushdie writes about when his Japanese translator got murdered, he wrote to the widow and got no reply from her, this particular reader was tempted to throw her hands up and say "well, there wouldn't be! In the woman's place, how would you feel?"
The paranoia (only it isn't paranoia when they're really after you), claustrophobia and plain weirdness of an existence with body guards and ever changing houses and flats is palpably rendered, but what to me is even more impressive, from a writing pov, is that he gets across what losing the ability to write and regain it again (with Haroun), of going from idea to finished work, feels like. It's something few authors manage, and manage to do so in an interesting way: the process of creation, itself rendered in writing. (In a weird parallel the pop-culture loving Rushdie might appreciate, the only one I can think of who managed this sucessfully was Stephen King in his novel Misery. The film, which otherwise has its own virtues, missed out this dimension completely.)
In the end, we leave Rushdie, who has sad goodbye to his last police officer, calling a cab for the first time in years unprotected, feeling free again but also feeling the world to be an irrevocably changed place. His book is one of many attempts to make sense of it all. It's a readable one.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/825305.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
If you're familiar with some of Rushdie's novels, the first thing that strikes you about Joseph Anton stylistically is the restraint - the multilingual puns, for example, which are his trademarks are only minimally present (though they do show up). Also, as every reviewer notes first and I have to, too: Joseph Anton is written in third person, not as a first person narrative (which several of his novels are). Whyever he did it - a psychological need to distance himself from those years, an awareness of the trickiness that comes with the autobiographical genre (which as someone, I think it was Oscar Wilde, once said for more wittily than I can remember it, tends to to be written from two basic impulses - self justification and revenge, and those are far more apparent in first person than with an attitude of seeming neutrality), it works. It's a compelling book, capturing the claustrophobia, the fear of those years, but also the courage and compassion a lot of his friends showed. And I don't think something like the chapter dealing with his rock bottom moment of fear - when he declared to have re-discovered Islam and to be a faithful Muslim now and got his picture taken with some fundamentalists, which appalled his defenders and didn't even work, could have been written without the safety of the third person. Which allowed for the stark honesty that yes, "he" was that afraid.
Rushdie is at his most endearing when writing about his children. His older son Zafar (for whom Haroun and the Sea of Stories was written) goes from child to adult during the course of the book, and the occasion where Rushdie panicks because Zafar and his mother, Rushdie's first wife Clarissa, are over an hour late for the daily phone call and imagines the worst is one where I as a reader despite being vaguely aware Rushdie's children are both alive in the back of my mind was panicking as well, utterly and completely. And when Zafar hits puberty and becomes a teenager I reacted as you would when this happens to the child of a friend (thinking, steady on, Rushdie, it'll pass). Or a fictional character (those years). Incidentally, Rushdie by no means presents the teenage years one sided and makes fun of himself there, too; poor Zafar has to go through the indignity of seeing his dad boast he'll sing on stage with Bono (and promptly warns him that he'll have to kill himself if his father really does that).
But of course Salman Rushdie, father, isn't the main sales point of this book. While it starts with third person Rushdie getting the news about the fatwa, there is an extensive flashback which comes in handy, describing his background and life until that point. As it turns out, the disgruntled Shobha Dé had something of a point in that Rushdie with thirteen is sent to a British public school (Rugby) and from this point onwards is in India, and later Pakistan (which he dislikes exceedingly; he never understood why his parents moved there instead of staying in Bombay, and Later Developments only made the Pakistan grudge more intense) only on visits and holidays. However, being abroad makes for its own experience of what used to be called AngloIndianness. Rushdie wryly notes that in a British public school in the Sixties, there were three mistakes you shouldn't make: being a foreigner, being smart and being bad at sports, and while two out of three were forgivable, three were not. I haven't yet read memoirs of a writer who went to a British public school and didn't hate it (seriously: Robert Graves' hatred for his in Goodbye To All That is matched by C.S.Lewes loathing his so much he calls it "Belsen" in Surprised By Joy, and then you have Neil Gaiman saying the school parts in Seasons of Mist were somewhat autobiographical), so that wasn't a surprise, and Rushdie's take on Rugby (the school, not the sport) is comparatively mild when put against the visceral hatred of those three gentlemen. Also he has nice words for some of the teachers and points out he was by nature a conformist, not a rebel (again making fun of himself as well as of the various institutions when mentioning that he defended Fagging at the debatting club (and then they finally got rid of the practice after he left school). But in general, yes, this book does nothing the impression of yours truly that apparantly if you're a future writer, then to visit a British boarding school is A Fate Worse Than Death and means years of torture (in this case with added subtle and not so subtle racism).
Because Rushdie as an exile is an ongoing theme in the book, it's also worth noting that emotionally, India seems to be Bombay (and he consciously writes Bombay, not Mumbai; the one passage where he switches to "Mumbai" he makes a point about it) for him, and also something longed for and increasingly out of reach. His four marriages get their own extensive page time, but none of the break-ups comes with the sense of "why, why did this happen, why are you doing this?" which bleeds of the page when he gets, as he sees it, betrayed and rejected by India (first when, post-Fatwa, he's not allowed to enter the country anymore and later when Midnight's Children, which is very much about India from the moment of Independence onwards, finally get filmed, but not in India, because permission isn't given. If you're familiar with the "Mother India" passages from The Moor's Last Sigh: in that vein.
Speaking of the marriages: two of the wives are described as heroines (the first and the third one), one is a villainess and one is a satire. This again is where the third person as opposed to first person narrative comes in handy, and lures you more in as a reader; the sharp portrait of wife No.2, Marianne Wiggins, as an unbalanced pathological liar, would perhaps invite more skepticism if accompagnied with a lot of "I"s. (By contrast, the fourth marriage, to actress Padma Lakhsmi is occasional for much self criticism; it's your avarage story of middle aged man falls for glamourous young woman and the illusion of renewed youth and freedom and having only himself to blame when she as a real person is someone other than his middle aged fantasy.) Whereas, as mentioned, Clarissa (wife 1) and Elizabeth (wife 3) are described as kind, courageous (Clarissa despite being divorced from him and never gettting any personal protection for their son and herself is supportive throughout the fatwa years, stoic when battling cancer later, and the description of her death is one of the most touching passages of the book; Elizabeth meets him when he's already on the run, and volunteers for the madness of that existence) and pretty much blame free for what goes wrong in the respective marriages. Not so coincidentally, they are also the two he has children with. (I don't mean that in a sarcastic fashion. Just: if you care about your very much alive and reading children, who care for their mothers, you're not going to insult their mothers in print for the world to read. Unless you're that much of an egotist.) But as often with fiction, this unfortunately means Mad Marianne is a more vivid character than Kind Elizabeth or Stoic Clarissa.
When it comes to friends and foes, Rushdie is in an unforgetting and mostly unforgiving mode. Those who stood by him are praised. (Thus, for example, we get a far more positive portrait here than was possible for the newspapers to make for the last decade or so for Günter Grass, whom Rushdie meets at a PEN congress in the late 70s, and who later championed his cause.) Those who didn't get eviscerated. (Cue John Le Carré, who had a very public mud slinging match on the pages of the Guardian with Rushdie, later with Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens. ) This goes across the political spectrum, which btw makes a big difference to how Rushdie's friend Christopher Hitchens later recalled the "affair", which he saw as a failure of the left to condemn Muslim fanaticism; by contrast, Rushdie himself took as much note of conservative historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's wish he, Rushdie, should get beaten up in an alley, Margaret Thatcher's and the Archbishop of Canterbury's expression of understanding of Muslim outrage as he did of various left-leaning personalities presenting similar sentiments. (Not just on a British scale. The German goverment of the time, which was conservative, gets accused of occasionally playing Iran's representative in the EU, because Germany is Iran's biggest export partner. Which we are and were since before the Shah era; it's like the US and China, in a way. They give us the occasional dissident because of this, including several of the Iranian exile writes I've met via PEN, our various goverments, conservative and social democrats alike, are very restraint in their criticism vis a vis Iran - except when there's another Holocaust denial, that's too much for even trade hungry goverments to overlook.)
As for the trigger itself: he's been an atheist since his school days, and his father, while nominally a Muslim, saw this mostly as a cultural identity and chose the name "Rushdie" - which hadn't been the family name until then - as a homage to Ibn Rushd, Avorraes, one of great Andalusian-Arab philosophers in battle with the orthodoxy of his day. Early on, addressing the "the book is an insult" argument, he says "I can insult faster than this" and points out he worked on it for four years. Joseph Anton describes the germination of ideas for all his novels, including The Satanic Verses, and basically the core themes he wanted to address in it were migration, Thatcher England and the question how something new came into the world. Being used by the dying Khomenei as a way to distract from the increasingly unpopular Iran/Iraq war was something he couldn't have anticipated. Which one as a reader can believe completely, although much later when Rushdie writes about when his Japanese translator got murdered, he wrote to the widow and got no reply from her, this particular reader was tempted to throw her hands up and say "well, there wouldn't be! In the woman's place, how would you feel?"
The paranoia (only it isn't paranoia when they're really after you), claustrophobia and plain weirdness of an existence with body guards and ever changing houses and flats is palpably rendered, but what to me is even more impressive, from a writing pov, is that he gets across what losing the ability to write and regain it again (with Haroun), of going from idea to finished work, feels like. It's something few authors manage, and manage to do so in an interesting way: the process of creation, itself rendered in writing. (In a weird parallel the pop-culture loving Rushdie might appreciate, the only one I can think of who managed this sucessfully was Stephen King in his novel Misery. The film, which otherwise has its own virtues, missed out this dimension completely.)
In the end, we leave Rushdie, who has sad goodbye to his last police officer, calling a cab for the first time in years unprotected, feeling free again but also feeling the world to be an irrevocably changed place. His book is one of many attempts to make sense of it all. It's a readable one.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/825305.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.