Reading Rushdie’s new book is like watching Melania play filmstar
Reading Salman Rushdie’s The Eleventh Hour is a wearying experience, akin perhaps to watching Melania Trump play film actress.
The celebrated author can write – of course he can – just like Mrs Trump can, the reviewers swear, sashay with a model’s grace through her expensively commissioned film impeccably balanced on five-inch stiletto heels.
But does Mr Rushdie have any stories worth telling after 44 years in the business? I’m reminded of Somerset Maugham’s wise acceptance in his later years of literary mortality, but more about that to come.
Consider The Musician of Kahani, one of five stories in The Eleventh Hour collection that appeared late last year.
It’s about a child born at midnight in India (reprising the author’s brilliant novel Midnight’s Children) and it’s full of bursts of action that are meant to surprise but don’t and cliches that do surprise only because you don’t expect Rushdie to belabour such language. As Rushdie-devotees know, he once invented, then reinvented, then re-re-reinvented how you told the tale.
Alas, my complaint is not just about one story in one book.
Victory City, the novel he published in 2023, had a buoyant start but became tedious in its goody-goody attempt to show a 15th-century southern Indian empire as an inclusivist haven of gender parity, religious tolerance and justice.
In between Victory City and The Eleventh Hour there was Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. It was acceptable as an autobiographical account of a great author’s recovery from a life-changing event – the hideous 2022 stabbing. But the book was not easy to read, larded with self-regard and a desperate eagerness to assure that life with a perfect fifth wife is perfectly perfect (nay, blissful, like those Facebook photos of homecooked meals and holidays).
Next: Rushdie’s eleventh hour and initimations of literary mortality
