Joseph Anton
by Salman Rushdie
Joseph Anton is Salman Rushdie’s memoir of life after hearing a fatwa that called for his death had been issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. His crime was writing The Satanic Verses, a novel. Joseph Anton is the new name he chose as he went into hiding, a combination of two of his favourite writers, Anton Chekhov and Joseph Conrad. Curiously, the memoir is written in the third person. At more than 600 pages it is a doorstopper but a revealing read and often funny.
