Book review: Joseph Anton - diary of a heretic

Spoiler alert.

‘Ajeeb Mamouli’

The book in my hand could very well have had this decidedly tasteless name were it not for Salman Rushdie’s police protection team’s disapproval.

They thought it was a “bit of a mouthful, too hard to remember, and far too Asia” to work.

He had to find a new alias or, as some might suggest — not including yours truly — a nom de guerre.

Joseph Anton was what he came up with after combining the names of two of his favorite writers: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.

Written in the third person, Joseph Anton talks about Rushdie’s relationship with his father, his troubled married life and his professional struggle in becoming an established writer.

Rushdie’s is a story of a boy who goes to a boarding school thousands of miles away from his beloved hometown and abusive father. In this alien land, he searches for his identity.

He wants to be an Indian without giving up his life in the west and remain a Muslim without being asked to believe in Islamic myths.

Most people can’t keep a balance in such situations and sooner or later fall to one side, but not Rushdie; he is of that curious race which is “godless, but fascinated by gods and prophets, and doesn’t forget its home even after abandoning it.”

At Cambridge, he is the only student to take the course ‘Muhammad’, offered for the first time.

During the course, he reads about ‘the satanic verses’, an apocryphal incident in Islamic history.

To Rushdie, for whom religion is little more than popular mythology, this is simply the seed for a ‘good story.’

There is no need to critically analyse the text for his is a storyteller’s mind and it only searches for stories.

After the lukewarm reception of his first few books, he flies to India to “drink deeply” from her well and starts working on Midnight’s Children.

The book receives favourable reviews and thus begins, for the next nine years, the life Rushdie always dreamt of. The Satanic Verses receives lucrative offers for obtaining its English-language publishing rights and the first few reviews treat it as a piece of literature.

Then comes Ayatollah Khomeini and his fatwa, and all becomes dark. In hiding, he would write: “I am gagged and imprisoned, I can’t even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son.”

Just one story and an “ordinary, banal life” became an impossible dream.

Rushdie feels that all hell truly broke loose the day the Indian newspaper India Today published an inflammatory review of his book before the actual publication date of the book.

Later on, following agitation by two Indian Muslim MPs, the book was banned in India, prompting Rushdie to write an angry and — as he admits himself — “arrogant” letter to former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

For him, the segregation from his one half (Muslim) was bad enough, to know that the other was severing the connection too was terrible.

And now I must digress. Rushdie hates Pakistan. The Pakistanis hate him too, and I didn’t think there was any reason to recommend this book until September 21, when I read an article written by Ayaz Amir.

Amir wrote that “all the books Salman Rushdie has written didn’t bring him a tenth of the notoriety or fame our rage against him did.” I am no statistician but his assertion seems wrong.

Midnight’s Children had won the Booker Prize eight years before the publication of The Satanic Verses, and Shame was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and its Persian translation received an award in Iran.

Joseph Anton is a book that comes once in a while. It’s not a book that has to be read because it was written by someone with seven bestsellers to his credit.

It has to be read because it’s a book which transforms a condemned heretic who wrote a collection of blasphemous words into a human being.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, October 14^th, 2012.

Like Express Tribune Magazine on Facebook and follow at @ETribuneMag