Salman Rushdie’s
Joseph Anton, subtitled
A Memoir, was published in 2012, twenty-three years after he received his sinister Valentine message from Iran on February 14, 1989. Rushdie, in an interview conducted by Boyd Tonkin, explained that he had decided, almost immediately after Khomeini issued his fatwa, to start writing down what was happening to him, in the hope that one day he would still be alive to tell the tale. The memoir was thus compiled “with the help of a hundred and twenty boxes of personal papers, donated to Emory University in Georgia and then classified over four years” (Tonkin). The result is a fat tome offering a hybrid mixture of autobiography, essay, political memoir, literary criticism, intertextual play, and authorial discourse on Rushdie’s own work.
“Joseph
3661 words
Citation: Pesso-Miquel, Catherine. "Joseph Anton". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 May 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=34694, accessed 25 November 2024.]
