Book of the week: Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie

(Random House, $30)

“For anyone it would have been terrifying,” said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. On Valentine’s Day 1989, Salman Rushdie learned that his novel The Satanic Verses had inspired Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his assassination on the grounds that the novel blasphemed Islam. In this “splendid” memoir, Rushdietells the story of the decadehesubsequently spent living in hiding under a pseudonym and in fear for his life. The book has its quirks: It’s told in the third person, runs 600 pages long, and contains a fair amount of what could be called celebrity name-dropping. But it’s also “the finest new memoir to cross my desk in many a year.”

How quickly Rushdie’s life became “a nightmare weirdly like something out of one of his own surreal novels,” said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. The book gives “a palpable sense of what the fatwa years were like” for the author—moving between safe houses with a security detail of four, hiding from housekeepers in locked bathrooms. The alias, shortened to “Joe” by his bodyguards, began as Rushdie’s tribute to two favorite writers, Conrad and Chekhov. But it soon became a reminder of his increasingly fissured sense of self. Rushdie writes that he at first believed he could make the Muslim world understand that the fatwa reflected a misreading of the novel. His story today appears to have been “an opening skirmish in the battle against radical Islam” and a harbinger of terrorist acts to come.

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That observation seems even keener in recent context, said David Remnick in NewYorker.com. Though Iran rescinded the fatwa in 1998, a hard-line Iranian religious foundation last week seized on the furor over the Innocence of Muslims video to renew the call for Rushdie’s assassination, offering a $3.3 million reward for the deed. The publication of Rushdie’s “brilliant memoir,” meanwhile, illuminates the differences between the author’s struggle and the one we’ve witnessed in recent weeks. His story has a serious novel at its center, but that’s not the reason the work required defending. As Rushdie knows, his was always a fight for freedom of expression in the face of tyranny. Unfortunately, it is our “sometimes impossibly difficult” moral duty to go on defending that freedom—“even when the object at the center of things is as indefensibly offensive as Innocence of Muslims.”