According to Rushdie, unlike fiction, the book's arc was clear even before being written: the author knew its first and last scenes. I purport to explore to what extent and in what sense Rushdie's memoir is fiction, and also what distinguishes it from a novel. Rushdie argues that in Joseph Anton he wrote about himself novelistically in the third person, putting a distance between his real self and himself as a character, through fiction. Before being a title, this used to be Rushdie's pseudonym when he had to recede into a fictional character during the period he spent in hiding. The title is a conflation of the first names of two writers, Rushdie's favourite authors: Joseph after Joseph Conrad, and Anton after Anton Chekhov. Rushdie put off writing his story of the fatwa years until September, 2012, when Joseph Anton came out. This paper looks into Salman Rushdie's latest book, his memoir titled Joseph Anton.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |