Joseph Anton comes out in the thick of worldwide protests against the YouTube video “Innocence of Muslims.” But Rushdie rejects any comparison with the deliberately provocative video and The Satanic Verses. “I felt almost like someone from the NRA saying, ‘books don’t kill people people kill people,’” he said. Publisher and New Yorker editor Bob Gottlieb told Rushdie, that, of course, if he'd known people would die from publishing his book, he of course wouldn't have written it.Īlthough the remark was probably meant to be supportive, it infuriated Rushdie.

He also endured the backlash from the British press and politicians. That struggle included a life under surveillance, the isolation of riding in bulletproof vehicles and watching helplessly as his publishers and translators were attacked. “He’s just a human being with all the faults and qualities of human beings trying to struggle through this thing.” “I wanted to show in that novelistic way that this isn’t about somebody who’s either demonic or ideal,” Rushdie said. Giving up his name and its ethnicity, he felt himself becoming something of a fictional character in an international drama. When pressed by his security detail to come up with an alias, Rushdie chose the name Joseph Anton, a combination of from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. “What would this be like if it happened to your family?” how they faced up to this extraordinary international attack,” he said. “What’s interesting to me, not just as a person but as a writer, is the way in which this small group of people - a writer, his friends, his family, his publishers. he refers to himself in the third person. Rushdie rejected the idea of fictionalizing his life, sticking to a factual memoir, but using novelistic devices. He’s now published his account of that stranger-than-fiction time under the title Joseph Anton: A Memoir. Rushdie spent most of the next decade in hiding, accompanied by armed British agents. Midnight’s Children, his second novel, won the Booker Prize in 1981, when Rushdie was in his early 30s.īut not many Americans had heard of Rushdie until Valentine's Day in 1989, when the dying Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran issued the infamous fatwa calling for Rushdie’s head, for the supposedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses. He’s written stories about how nations come into being how new ideas come into the world and how the modern world connects to the ancient.

The novelist Salman Rushdie has always dreamed large.

Salman rushdie alias