*sighs, sighs, sighs, sighs and sighs*
Been reading this monster for a whole year & all I managed to complete was a mere 400 pages. With a firm resolution I sat down to complete it this evening and miraculously succeeded! Feels like a great achievement and I’m definitely proud that I was able to read 240 pages of Joseph Anton in a single sitting 😀
Joseph Anton is Salman Rushdie’s autobiography written in an extremely annoying, unnecessary & disruptive third person narrative. When a lot of characters are thrown in any particular scene and Rushdie himself is being referred to as “he”, more often than not we end up scratching our heads. Autobiographies are the most appealing when narrated in the first person.
Joseph Anton is actually a compilation of Rushdie’s journal entries and it is not particularly interesting or easy to navigate through. This is as dense as nonfiction could probably get.
Almost the entirety of Joseph Anton deals with Rushdie’s exile after the Persian Ayatollah Khomeini declared the fatwa and placed a bounty of a million dollars on his head. So it is a long parade of frustrating episodes where Rushdie is escorted between different locations, meets a lot of famous people, writes a lot of letters to his critics/supporters of fatwa, struggles with various governments, deals with depression, faces marital problems, hates his loss of freedom, misses his sons, deals with writer’s block, parties, meets new women, fights with indifferent security guards and stresses the importance of the freedom of speech.
The consequences of foolish religious extremism couldn’t have been presented in a better canvas! (Though the price Rushdie paid was huge) There are some great book recommendations scattered throughout the book which proved to be brilliant. I read at least five of the books mentioned in Joseph Anton and found all of them to be exceptional.
Quoting Rushdie:
“Writers have always worked close to the bull, like matadors and played complex games with autobiography, and yet their creations are more interesting than themselves.”
This sadly holds true even for Joseph Anton, which can only be recommended to the fiercest Rushdie fans. Not being one myself, I found it a terribly dull affair.
Literature Junkie 