Joseph Anton

In February 2023 David Remnick appeared on the Stay Tuned With Preet podcast to discuss a profile he’d just written about Salman Rushdie. Their discussion focuses on how the novelist has fared in the months since he was viciously attacked, and nearly killed, in Chautauqua, New York.

That brutal assault resulted from a more than thirty-year-old fatwa, or death order, issued against Rushdie by Iranian hardline fundamentalists because of his novel, The Satanic Verses.

In the course of the interview Remnick, a New Yorker editor, mentioned Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s nonfiction account of his fatwa years. Curious, I got it from the local library. It is astonishingly good. The prose is superb; within a page or so its hooks were in me. Why on earth have I never read anything by Salman Rushdie before?

Published in 2012, Joseph Anton describes life under the constant threat of violent death. It is riveting, chilling, and in places, even funny. In has, in short, all of the elements needed to grab the reader’s attention and hold it to the last page.

The book was published ten years before that murderous attack by a knife-weilding zealot, on a public stage before hundreds of eyewitnesses. Knowledge of the attack haunts the book, and from the perspective of 2023 makes for some disturbing reading.

During the worst of the fatwa Rushdie lived under near-siege conditions, in a series of secret locations and with round-the-clock security. On a visit to New York his wife arrives at his hotel room unexpectedly. For security reasons they did not travel together, and she is confronted by a guard who doesn’t recognize her. “Elizabeth’s cool,” Rushdie quickly intercedes. “Elizabeth’s with me.”

The guard replies that if he wanted him dead, she is exactly the type of person he would send to do the deed. He gestures toward a table, and its array of snacks and cutlery. “If she were to take one of those forks and stab you in the neck...”

It’s presented as a light moment. But when the attack finally came in 2022, something very much like it happened. “He was stabbed in the neck, you know," David Remnick told Preet Bharara. “A quarter of an inch, one way or another, he would’ve hit his carotid artery and he would’ve bled out immediately.”

Elsewhere, Rushdie describes coping with what, in ordinary circumstances, would be considered writer’s block. His inability to focus and create is completely understandable. Yet he overcomes it and writes several new books, along with various shorter pieces.

Rushdie’s protectors insist that he take a pseudonym for them to use. That way, they explain, if they inadvertantly refer to him in a public place, it won’t give anything away. He comes up with Joseph Anton (after Conrad and Chekhov), and because of this pseudonym (presumably), Joseph Anton is written in the third person. In places it confused me –  the he did this and the he said that got me a little mixed up. But you back up a sentence or two, and are straightened out.

A longing to be free of 24/7 security is one of Joseph Anton’s through-lines. Toward the end of the book Rushdie, by then in hiding for seven years, reflects on this. It “might not just be a phase of his life ... the rest of his life might be like this.” A few pages later high-ranking counterintelligence types tell him of Iran’s “long-term plan to find and assassinate” him.

And sure enough, the attempt to murder Rushdie happened in the long term: more than three decades after the fatwa began. It coincided with the rising tide of fascist intolerance in the United States (and globally). There are book bannings and the suppression of free thought and intolerant fundamentalism – the very elements that nearly cost Salman Rushdie his life.

Salman Rushdie was attacked by a man younger than the fatwa itself, someone brainwashed into believing words printed on a page are so dangerous that the person who wrote them must forfeit his life. Rushdie is fortunate to have survived, though Remnick told Preet he is now blind in one eye, one of his hands doesn’t work right, and he must surely cope with PTSD, among other aftereffects.

Yet (to pivot slightly) even as I write this, some think tank reports that a seventeen year, global decline in democracy shows signs of turning around. “This is, I think, some glimmer of hope,” says the president of Freedom House, which produced the report.

Be that as it may, Joseph Anton is a powerful book that deserves to be widely read. Next up on my reading list: The Satanic Verses.