"Imagine that you knew nothing about me, that you had arrived from another planet, perhaps, and had been given my books to read, and you had never heard my name or been told anything about my life or about the attack on The Satanic Verses in 1989. Then, if you read my books in chronological order, I don't believe you would find yourself thinking, Something calamitous happened to this writer's life in 1989."
"Fury (2001), published after the Iranian president Mohammad Khatami declared the fatwa finished in 1998, is transparently the giddy, hyped-up novel of a man set free. Shalimar the Clown (2005) began, as Rushdie tells us, with a single image that I couldn't get out of my mind, the image of a dead man lying on the ground while a second man, his assassin, stood over him holding a bloodied knife."
Salman Rushdie's post-fatwa fiction bears the imprint of attempted assassination and its lingering effects. The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) opens with Moraes Zogoiby fleeing unknown pursuers, embodying persistent fear and flight. Fury (2001), appearing after the fatwa's formal end, radiates exhilaration and a sense of liberation. Shalimar the Clown (2005) arose from a single violent image of an assassin over a corpse, serving as both foreshadowing and retrospective reckoning. The 2012 memoir Joseph Anton records the immediate thought 'I'm a dead man' on hearing the fatwa. The Eleventh Hour's stories dwell on death and afterlife, functioning as a coda.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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