(Random House)Īs that passage indicates, Rushdie has chosen to tell his story in the third person: to write not about Salman Rushdie but about Joseph Anton, the person who for more than a decade was himself yet not quite himself. ‘Joseph Anton: A Memoir’ by Salman Rushdie (Random House. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed. To skulk and hide was to lead a dishonorable life. He came from that culture even though he was not religious, and had been raised to care deeply about questions of pride.

In his novel ‘Shame’ he had written about the workings of Muslim ‘honor culture,’ at the poles of whose moral axis were honor and shame, very different from the Christian narrative of guilt and redemption. Maybe, he thought, to live like this would be worse than death. “To hide in this way was to be stripped of all self-respect. For anyone it would have been terrifying, but for this proud and passionately sociable man it was degrading as well: Thus the title of this, Rushdie’s memoir of his entire life, but mainly of those more than 11 years of torment, years often made bearable by the friendship and love of others, yet years unceasingly under the threat of the dire unknown, while Rushdie was squirreled away in secret London hideaways and remote farmhouses. These “were his godfathers now,” and “it was Conrad who gave him the motto to which he clung as if to a lifeline. and blow his cover.” After some thought Rushdie “wrote down, side by side, the first names of Conrad and Chekhov, and there it was, his name for the next eleven years”: Joseph Anton. Not long after the proclamation of this fatwa, the British police who had been protecting Rushdie told him that he needed an alias, not only for receiving payments and writing checks without being identified but “for the benefit of his protectors,” who “needed to get used to it, to call him by it at all times, when they were with him and when they weren’t, so they didn’t accidentally let his real name slip.

“I inform the proud Muslim people of the world,” Khomeini said, “that the author of the ‘Satanic Verses’ book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.” He “hadn’t been getting on with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins,” but that was nothing compared with the news from Iran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini made an announcement that plunged Rushdie into more than a decade of fear, sequestration and flight.

Valentine’s Day 1989 had nothing to do with love for Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie memoir