Joseph Anton
A Memoir
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4.5 • 10 Ratings
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children comes an unflinchingly honest and fiercely funny account of a life turned upside-down.
On Valentine's Day, 1989, Salman Rushdie received a telephone call from a BBC journalist that would change his life forever: Ayatollah Khomeini, a leading Muslim scholar, had issued him with a fatwa. This is his own account of how he was forced to live in hiding for over a decade; at once intimate and explosive, this is the personal tale behind the international story.
In Joseph Anton, Rushdie tells the remarkable story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech.
Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography Prize
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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-wives "when he mentioned a pre-nup, the conversation became a quarrel" sex gossip and incessant name-dropping ("Willie Nelson was there! And Matthew Modine!"). There's preening self-dramatization by the celebrity author but a persistent edge of real drama, and fear, makes Rushdie's story absorbing.
