So I snuck away from my real world a few days ago and drove north to San Rafael, and waited in line for what seemed to be hours. When the double doors opened I gave the woman behind the table my name and she handed me a yellow ticket. A few minutes later, there I was sitting not fifty feet from Salman Rushdie, whose new memoir Joseph Anton details the life he led after the Iranian government placed a fatwa upon him in 1989 for writing the novel, The Satanic Verses.
It has been years since the death threat was lifted. And it has been even more years since the author of such amazing books as Midnight’s Children and Shame and The Enchantress of Florence has been able to put sufficient distance between himself and the “spy novel” life he once led “and didn’t care for” when he was being protected nonstop by the British secret service.
Using wit and humor, Rushdie highlighted some of his experiences and regaled the crowded auditorium at Dominican University with stories about the police who volunteered to protect him; about the effect that this fatwa had on his immediate family and friends; about former President Clinton’s efforts in the 1990s to have the death threat removed.
He spoke about the body of his work, and how he strove to write from a place that was in between “fear” and “anger:” Rushdie said he felt that by looking at all of the books he has written, readers could not point to a particular title and claim his writing had changed. He quoted a character from a Joseph Conrad novel, who’d said, “I must live until I die.” He said that he was inspired by that character to continue to write the books he wanted to write, and that this was his victory over the events that dominated his life for more than a decade.
In a recent NPR interview Rushdie spoke about the title of his memoir: “The police asked me to come up with a pseudonym, partly because I needed to rent properties and so on, and obviously couldn’t do it in my own name,” he says. “And I was asked to make it not an Indian name. And so, deprived of one nationality, I retreated into literature — which is, you could say, my other country — and chose this name from the first names of Conrad and Chekhov: Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov equals Joseph Anton.”
Also, when you have a moment, watch Rushdie dish with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
Devi, thanks for this blog post – it must have been amazing to hear Rushdie speak! The New Yorker ran a “Personal History” excerpt from his memoir a couple of weeks ago – I was riveted. I was struck by his use of third person to tell the story; and by this passage (among many others):
1984
There was a novel growing in him, but its exact nature eluded him. It would be a big book, he knew that, ranging widely over space and time. A book of journeys. That felt right. He had dealt, as well as he knew how, with the worlds from which he had come. Now he needed to connect those worlds to the very different world in which he had made his life. He was beginning to see that this, rather than India or Pakistan or politics or magic realism, would be his real subject, the one he would worry away at for the rest of his career: the great question of how the world joins up—not only how the East flows into the West and the West into the East but how the past shapes the present even as the present changes our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention, and, yes, faith, sometimes leaks across the frontier separating it from the “real” place in which human beings mistakenly believe they live.
The article is free, I think: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/17/120917fa_fact_rushdie#ixzz289znLPOD
thanks so much sylvia! it was really inspiring to be in the same room with him and hear him speak so frankly about the situation he found himself in — and to acknowledge how others (his family members, his close friends) were affected as well