Joseph Anton

A Memoir

By: Salman Rushdie

Narrated by: Sam Dastor, Salman Rushdie

Length: 27 hrs

Publisher's summary

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.

This audiobook includes a prologue read by the author.

©2012 Salmon Rushdie (P)2012 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"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 Times)

Exhilarating!

An incredible account of Salman Rushdie's post fatwa life according to Mr. Rushdie himself.

20 years perspective may be too early

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

At his best, Mr. Rushdie offers his insights and perspective of his own experience as harbinger of the age of Islamic terrorism. Mildly interesting is his detailed recounting of the proud support of allies and the insults and betrayals of bad actors. But what really bedevils this book is his obsessive chronicling of mundane events inside his golden cage. I would not recommend the bood to a friend because there is not enough of insight or perspective to make wading through the settling of scores and diary-like review of events satisfying. The best part of the book is the prologue. My advice: read that and then read one his fiction books. Leave this one for the graduate students.

What was most disappointing about Salman Rushdie’s story?

That the writer was so possessed of his own story, that he failed to consider his reader and tell an interesting story.

Which character – as performed by Sam Dastor and Salman Rushdie – was your favorite?

Some of the police officers are rendered sympathetically.

Could you see Joseph Anton being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

Of course this will be a movie and Daniel Craig or Daniel Day-Lewis will play Salman Rushdie and get nominated for an oscar because they managed to so convincingly convert themselves from all the past roles we have seen them play.

Fantastic and Sad

A riveting telling of an amazing writers' struggle through the fatwa that nearly ended his life.

Awful narration

It seems that there are two schools of thought on book narration: a reading, or a performance. Personally, I can’t stand the performers. I find them distracting, and more often than not, awful. In this case, the narrator’s accents were so bad I had trouble focusing on what he was saying. (Has he ever actually heard an American speak? And did he really mimic the Thai takeout owner THAT way?) Additionally, the number of very famous places and people he mispronounced was shocking. Telluride? DAVID BOWIE!? The narration in this case substantially affected enjoyment of the book.

Captivating Memoir

Joseph Anton is Rushdie's memoir of the years he spent, mostly in hiding, under the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa. The fatwa, which was announced on Valentine's Day, 1989, has never been officially revoked; in 1998, the Iranian government proclaimed that it would neither support nor hinder attempts to assassinate the author, but there is still a $3 million-plus bounty on his head. The title of the book is the name Rushdie assumed while in Scotland Yard's protection and is taken from two of his favorite writers: "Joseph" from Conrad and "Anton" from Chekhov. In a recent interview, Rushdie claimed that during this time he felt as if he was watching another person's life from a distance, a person separate from himself--hence the book is written in third person.

It's hard to imagine what life would be like if you were forced to move at a moment's notice--dozens of times. To live with a squad of armed policemen (one of whom accidentally blew a hole through a wall). To be unable to visit a dying parent, have dinner with friends, attend a memorial or an activity at your child's school, or, as a writer, give public readings of your work. Rushdie details all of this, as well as his efforts to live as normal a life as possible. For this, he credits a cadre of trusted friends, including Christopher Hitchens, Paul Auster, Bill Buford, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Bono, among others. Rushdie also engaged in a constant legal battle to get The Satanic Verses distributed worldwide in paperback format.

Of course, Rushdie's personal life suffered during this time. His greatest regret is the difficulty the fatwa caused for his son Zafar, who was 10 at the time it all began. Although divorced from his first wife, Clarissa Luard, the two remained friendly and strove to maintain as normal a relationship as possible for father and son. Marianne Wiggins, his second wife, to whom he was married when the fatwa was pronounced, does not come off so well; in fact, the American writer is depicted as a selfish, self-promoting wacko. Rushdie met his third wife, Elizabeth West, the mother of his second son, while under protection. Initially, West seems almost saint-like in her patience and devotion, but this image falls apart as the marriage falters due to her depression over not bearing more children and Rushdie's desire to move to the US, where he felt he could live a more open, normal life. Wife Number Four, model, would-be actress, and reality show host Padma Lakshmi,is referred to as "The Illusion," and Rushdie rather shamefacedly admits to falling into a fairly typical mid-life crisis (homely older man, beautiful younger woman), as well as pursuing a somewhat elusive American dream that she came to represent. Lakshmi, like Wiggins, comes off as self-absorbed and ambitious (when he attempts to visit her in LA after a new threat has been announced, she says she is going on a lingerie shoot), and Rushdie makes short shrift of her.

On the whole, Rushdie's memoir is insightful and engaging. If one thing is made clear, it is that he wouldn't have endured, had it not been for the love, help, and encouragement of his close friends, family, and associates. And it is this humanization of Salman Rushdie, more than his literary achievements or politicized position, that allows readers to relate to his plight.

The reader, Sam Dastoor, was brilliant, with one caveat: his American accent, which never varied. Whether he was impersonating Bill Clinton, Kurt Vonnegut, George Stephanopoulos, or Susan Sontag, they all sounded like sarcastic cowboys.

A revealing memoir by a great writer

Any additional comments?

My only annoyance with the otherwise superb narrator was his tendency, when creating a variety of national accents, to make all Americans sound like idiots. Naturally, with a book this long, it was a pleasure to sit passively or attend to the third-person narrative while walking. Yes, it's a third-person narrative: Rushdie refers to himself as 'he" -- meaning, of course, his adopted persona whilst hiding from the fatwa assassins as Joseph Anton.

Rushdie rarely flatters himself and frequently reveals his weaknesses. As far as food for thought is concerned, the whole memoir seems like a metaphor for a world stripped of logic and common sense. It's a theater of the absurd, potentially and often actually tragic. Men and women act on unreasoned fears, they are victimized by their prejudices and ignorance, and almost nobody knows what's going on or what they are talking about.

The book also chills the spine with its enormous specter of religious fanaticism.

And for those who believe the victim is too often blamed for the crime, this is wonderful fuel for your argument.

I couldn't stop listening

I love Salman Rushdie's fiction and this memoir matches up with the best of it. It is very artfully crafted and the level of prose blows other memoirs out of the water. I read a fair number of biographies and auto-biographies; the sections on the subject's childhood is usually intolerable--full of incidents the author thinks are symbolic and often made worse by pop-psychoanalysis. Rushdie's childhood story is at the other end of the spectrum. He uses it to talk about religion and literature and all sorts of cool things you wouldn't expect to come up in a section of boyhood stories.

The narrator is very good, but Rushdie read the introduction and I do wish he had read the entire book.

Great book, but the accents were painful

Overall I loved the book, but the narrator’s accents were really awful and twangy.
Maybe just don’t do them in future recordings.

Talk About Sacrificing for Your Art!

The memoir is often thrilling, insightful, and beautiful--all the things you'd expect from Salman Rushdie. He is at his best considering the implications of the fatwa, and the larger questions of the artist's role of the documentarian in cultures both hostile and indifferent to art. Rushdie's thoughts on his own work, the origin and inspiration for his novels, are equally intriguing. He is less objective, of course, about his personal life and the narrative sags when he considers the emotional strains on his marriages and his pop-culture "successes" (particularly when they collide in his last marriage; and his association with the Famous Rock Band).

The narrator of this audiobook, when performing the "dialogue" of American "characters," affected such a strange "accent"- - snide parody - - not at all what I experienced on the page when reading and not listening. Was this an actor's choice? Director's? Did this audiobook have a director? In any case, it snapped me out of the dream of this memorable and fascinating story each time the narrator switch from his sophisticated, Euro-Indian accent to the "Valley Girl/hillbilly" American grunt.

Indignation, Love, Imagination and Art

Salman Rushdie, writing his memoir in the third person, illustrates the relationships and values and mistakes and triumphs that characterized his response to the outrage of being a writer targeted by the Iranian fatwa. He writes about his loves and imperfections, his angers and the pain he felt at the frequent criticism (often distorted) in the British press as the Fatwa and the risk to his life extended on year after year. Vivid friendships with many notable writers, artists and musicians run throughout the text, and were the web that helped him and his family survive the emotional burden of maintaining security in face of repeated renewals of the threats against him coming from the Iranian government each year. This is a memoir in which the multiple losses-- through divorce, death, estrangement, and personal vulnerability-- play next to the threat of violent death as the result of terror. Perhaps it is most moving when the 65 year old Salman writes to his 52 year old self that it is time to grow up. In this moment, he remembers some of the most painful (and unfortunate) choices he made and faces them with grace and responsibility. Throughout, his love of imaginative worlds and their possibilities shines through, as does his absolute commitment to the sacred values of free speech and human rights.

Sam Dastor is a wonderful reader and creates an amazing variety of voices and accents. Great performance!

This is a long and lovely listen.