Here’s a guide to Mr. Rushdie.
The second novel by Mr. Rushdie received the Booker Prize and became an international success. The novel, about the coming of age of modern India, is told through the life of Saleem Sinai, born at the time of India’s independence. “For a long time it seemed that novels from India write their own blurbs: balanced, witty, delicate, sparkly,” wrote our reviewer. “What this fiction has been missing is a different kind of ambition, something just a little crude, a hunger to swallow India in its entirety and spit it out.”
When Midnight’s Children Mr. Rushdie onto the worldwide literary stage, his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses,” brought him a painful level of visibility: The book, particularly its satirical depictions of the prophet Muhammad, caused a furore. After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader after the 1979 Iranian revolution, found the book blasphemous and issued a fatwa against Rushdie urging Muslims to kill the author, he went into hiding for years.
Rushdie’s first novel since ‘The Satanic Verses’, Michiko Kakutani wrote in The Times, ‘follows the downward spiral of expectations India went through as hopes for post-independence democracy crumbled during the 1975 state of emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. was proclaimed. and early dreams of pluralism gave way to sectarian violence and political corruption.” She went on to call it “an enormous, sprawling, lavish novel” and “a dark historical parable that rivals Mr. Rushdie’s 1981 masterpiece, Midnight’s Children, in scope, inventiveness and ambition.”
‘Anger’ (2001)
This novel, published after Mr. Rushdie had moved to New York follows a doll maker named Malik who recently arrived in the city after leaving his wife and child behind in London. While Rushdie “inhabits his novels in all sorts of guises and transformations, he has never been more literally present than in this one,” wrote our reviewer.
Rushdie wrote about his post-fatwa experiences in a memoir — a project he said he had long dreaded. “I felt it would be unsettling to go back into that time emotionally and immerse myself in it,” he said in a 2012 interview. “But I always knew I should.”
The book takes its name from the alias of Mr. Rushdie while in hiding, an amalgamation of the names of favorite authors – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Aside from the poignant depictions of the early days of the fatwa, the book also discusses Mr. Rushdie’s childhood (and particularly his alcoholic father), his marriages, and more.