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)

The mystery and power of interior lives

The writing was flawless. This was one of those stories that grip you from beginning to end because you don’t know what will happen. The three people present themselves with what they want to do but not what they choose to do. Each one affects the others’ choice and the reader is left with a cliff hanger. It’s a gift that a writer can tell a story that is so intimate but is like a mystery story.

Informative, Timely

Salman Rushdie is known for his fiction (Shame, The Moor’s Last Sigh and others), but it was The Satanic Verses which forced him into hiding and police protection. His memoir, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, tells the story of his life with particular focus on his experience following the publication of that book. Frankly, I have never finished any of Rushdie’s works of fiction and parts of this book I had to work through as well. However, the effort was well worth it because of the insights he provides into why he was forced to go underground, the full defense of his book and its literary origins, and how he finally was able to get back a modicum of normalcy. Readers also learn what it was like on a day-to-day basis to deal with living under full-time protection and what it meant to his family, career, and self-image. The book has, for me, more detail and repetition than necessary, but the emotional effect was profound. I began to identify with Rushdie and the frustrations he faced. Rushdie uses third person to tell his story, but I’ll not give away why the book is titled Joseph Anton: A Memoir. If you have an interest in what happened to Rushdie, his take on why it happened, and who Rushdie became as a result – this book is for you. A key learning? Life is not linear and circumstances will change with time – good times can turn bad; bad days may well pass from view. The narration of Rushdie and Sam Dastor is very good.

Excellent Memoir of the Fatwa years.

Excellent memoir of the fatwa years. Two things struck me about this book. First, life was predicably miserable while he was under the protection of MI5 for more than a decade after the flare-up with the Satanic Verses. Second, and most fascinating, is the support that he got from his network of author friends. Rusdie mentions at least 2 dozen authors from the second half of the last century who provided safe houses, letters of support, and more. Who knew that winning the Booker Prize (for Midnight's Children) put one in such an exclusive club.

While the book is a quick read, it could have been shorter. I would have cut out a lot of the difficulties he had with his teenage son. I know I'd hate to have my own adolescent awkwardness set down for history. Narrated dutifully by Sam Dastor (whose American accents, sadly, were laughable).

Excellent, mortifying story

I loved this whole book and, as a non-fiction author not nearly as gifted or smart as Rushdie, I highly recommend. Rushdie went through what no human should have to for speaking his mind. Besides being a brilliant engaging memoir, this story and Rushdie's enormously articulate rendering of it, stand as a reminder of the importance of freedom of speech to our humanity.

Rushdie reads prologue, a professional reader, the rest. The reader does a terrible American accent and an especially bad American female accent/falsetto, but is otherwise quite good.

A good thing because this is long! But I was sorry when it was over.

I'd like to add my thanks along with the author's to everyone who helped this writer through the nightmare and I'm hoping he can have a more normal life and keep writing great books and be the fullest artist that he can be.

A Tale of Intolerance

I enjoyed this book quite a bit and I found myself constantly stunned by the lengths to which Mr. Rushdie was forced to live for 13 years after the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses. This book gives the listener a glimpse of what it takes to survive a situation of that magnitude and gravity, and it definitely showed people in their true light, both for good and bad. It still astounds me that a writer of fictional stories could be forced underground based on his story and shunned so thoroughly; don't people around the globe understand what the word 'fiction' is? In my modest opinion, if a story challenges your perceptions, then that is a good thing. If I don't like a book, I know I have the option to put it down. Joseph Anton was a wonderful read and I applaud Mr. Rushdie (who is not without his faults and which he lays bare in the book), for not sitting passively by throughout the ordeal fighting for the ability to lead a relatively normal life.

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.

Exhilarating!

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

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.

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.