With Salman Rushdie's memoir, Joseph Anton, due out soon (pre-order your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk -- I hope to review it once/if I get my hands on a copy ...) the publicity machine has started up, beginning with a nice big chunk of it excerpted in The New Yorker where Rushdie writes on: 'How the fatwa changed a writer's life', The Disappeared.
Meanwhile, The Telegraph has Sameer Rahim tread over well-trod ground in The Satanic Verses and me.
(I remain a big The Satanic Verses-fan -- and not for its supposedly blasphemous reputation (which I'd heartily approve of were there any truth to it, but it's a stretch by any imagination). Not at the level of Shame -- easily Rushdie's best -- or Midnight's Children, but a solid number three in the Rushdie-œuvre rankings (and, really, those three are the only ones you have to bother with -- though I hold out high hopes for Joseph Anton, which sounds like something he could pull off nicely; generally, I don't like to see writers forsake fiction for non, but I'm afraid it's pretty clear that Rushdie blew his fiction-wad quite a while ago but his talents might do nicely for this sort of self-centered rumination (and the material is certainly promising)).
Meanwhile, The Telegraph has Sameer Rahim tread over well-trod ground in The Satanic Verses and me.
(I remain a big The Satanic Verses-fan -- and not for its supposedly blasphemous reputation (which I'd heartily approve of were there any truth to it, but it's a stretch by any imagination). Not at the level of Shame -- easily Rushdie's best -- or Midnight's Children, but a solid number three in the Rushdie-œuvre rankings (and, really, those three are the only ones you have to bother with -- though I hold out high hopes for Joseph Anton, which sounds like something he could pull off nicely; generally, I don't like to see writers forsake fiction for non, but I'm afraid it's pretty clear that Rushdie blew his fiction-wad quite a while ago but his talents might do nicely for this sort of self-centered rumination (and the material is certainly promising)).