Most critically, he would not give up his literary life, his flights of fancy. If flight meant forced departure, for Rushdie it also meant an insistence on certain freedoms. While Rushdie located and paid for these dozens of hide-outs himself, the British government provided him with nine years of round-the-clock protection by the “A” Squad of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, who in turn answered to Britain’s intelligence services. Flight from the fatwa meant a “fretful, scuttling existence” in which the author, a 41-year-old British citizen, abandoned his home in the London neighborhood of Islington and dashed from one safe house to another around the United Kingdom.

One unifying theme that emerges from this multilayered account is the concept of flight - though here that word assumes a double identity. It’s an intimate tale of fathers and sons, of the beginnings and ends of marriages, of friendships and betrayals.Īt the same time, “Joseph Anton” is a large-scale spectacle of political and cultural conflicts during an era in which, Rushdie writes, “incompatible realities frequently collided with one another.” The death decree, or fatwa, would come to be seen by some as an early signal of a clash of absolutes that would lead up to 9/11 and into our tinderbox present - of the continuing struggle between religious belief in the immutable word of God on one hand and secular faith in the unconditional right of free speech on the other. It’s a record of his relocation from Bombay to London to New York, where he settled in 2000. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young man that describes his influences, obsessions and ambitions as well as his rise in the publishing world.

It’s a personal story that takes place at the center of an international crisis: the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 denunciation of the author’s fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses,” as a work of blasphemy against Islam, and his call for Rushdie’s death. Salman Rushdie’s memoir is many books in one book.

Salman rushdie anton