David Remnick is impressed with Salman Rushdie's new memoir,
Joseph Anton. His magazine published an
excerpt from the book recently. In
a post on the New Yorker's website, he says that the new book may be, in its own way, just as important as Rushdie's masterpiece
Midnight's Children. Interestingly, Rushdie had something to say recently about the "Innocence of Muslims" controversy. I hope you'll agree that it's the best response yet expressed on the issue:
Rushdie was in London this week preparing for publication of “Joseph Anton” and, when asked about the film and the related outbursts in Cairo and Benghazi, he told a writer for the Telegraph, “I always said that what happened to me was a prologue and there will be many, many more episodes like it. This is one of those.” Rushdie certainly did not defend the movie, but he went on to say, “The correct response would be to say it is garbage and unimportant. Clearly, it’s a piece of crap, is very poorly done and is malevolent. To react to it with this kind of violence is just ludicrously inappropriate. People are being attacked who had nothing to do with it and that is not right.”
Pankaj Mishra, however, has
fewer good things to say:
No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical.
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