“Joseph Anton”: Memoir as noir

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:58:00 +0000

IN A RECENT TED TALK, psychologist Eleanor Longden describes being joined in a particularly stressful time in college by “a disembodied voice which calmly narrated everything [she] did in the third person: She is reading, she is going to a lecture, she is leaving the room.” The voice was “neutral, banal, oddly companionate,” and when she told doctors about it, they linked it at once to schizophrenia, resulting in a period of institutionalization that did more harm than good. Years later, after Longden entered the field herself, she hit upon another theory: that the voice was not necessarily bad, but served as a sort of inner compass, a voice of suppressed or inconvenient reason, part of a seemingly ulterior self that struggles violently, vaguely, to combine all the disparate voices of the self into one, consistent whole.

Salman Rushdie: It was worth it

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When the phone call came that changed his life forever, a BBC reporter asked Salman Rushdie this: "How does it feel to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini." It was Valentine's Day 1989. Rushdie thought for a moment and replied, "It doesn't feel good." Then he closed the shutters and locked the front door.

That wouldn't be enough protection. The fatwa -- a death sentence handed down for writing a novel, "The Satanic Verses," which many Muslims believed stood "against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran" -- would stand for another nine years. For many months, fiery protests filled the streets of Muslim cities, but also in London, where Rushdie lived. His book was burned. His translators were attacked; one was even killed. Priests and politicians and protesters demanded he apologize. But Rushdie was an artist. His book was fiction. There was nothing to apologize for.

Principle came with a cost. The fatwa would erase Rushdie's 40s. It would stall the work of a novelist whose first book, "Midnight's Children," won the Booker Prize. It would cost him at least one marriage, and separate him from his young son far too many times. And as Rushdie writes in his new memoir, "Joseph Anton," he often thought that near-decade in hiding would cost him his sanity.

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“Joseph Anton”: Memoir as noir

Salman Rushdie: It was worth it