Free expression, courage and Salman Rushdie all go together.
The generational fiction writer lived for decades under a death sentence and survived a stabbing attack in 2022. Now, Rushdie’s pen triumphs over the sword as he publishes his first work of fiction since that attack 3 years ago.
“The Eleventh Hour” is a collection of short stories and novellas with his signature wit and magical realism.
Rushdie won the Booker Prize in 1981 for “Midnight’s Children.” His novel “Satanic Verses” came out in 1988, leading Iran’s Ayatollah to declare it blasphemous and announce a death warrant for Rushdie, who went into hiding for years.
Now, after surviving the knife attack that took his right eye and the use of one arm, Rushdie joins us to talk about “The Eleventh Hour.”
“ I think I surprised everybody, including my doctors, by my recovery,” Rushdie said. “So I guess I’m lucky.”
7 questions with Salman Rushdie
These stories are about the end of life. Why this topic?
“ I think partly it’s a consequence of my having had a close shave, you know? That focuses the mind on such subjects as mortality. It’s also just because, you know, I’m not in the first flush of youth anymore. I mean, I’m 78 now.
“So that in itself makes you think about the last act, you know, and there’s a brilliant essay by the writer Edward Said called ‘On Late Style,’ in which he discusses how artists have approached and should approach the kind of final act. And some people respond with serenity, and others respond with rage. Thinking about that, I thought it’s not necessarily either-all, you could be peaceful on Monday and angry on Tuesday, you know? So anyway, I began to think about how people engage with that final act. And there’s different stories and different approaches to that subject.”
Talk about the ghost story in the book.
“ The fact that it became a ghost story took me by surprise. I had thought I was going to write about this elderly gent living out his later years in this college, and it was supposed to be a friendship that he forms with a young Indian woman student. They both have a love of India in common and that brings them together.
“And then I sat down to write the story. For some reason, there appeared on my typewriter the words, ‘When he woke up that morning, he was dead.’ I thought, ‘Where’d that come from?’ And I just left the sentence sitting there on my laptop for a day or so thinking, ‘What is this?’ And then I thought, you know, ‘Okay.’ As it happens, I’ve never written a ghost story, so time to do one.”
The main character in the ghost story needs to clear his name before he can rest. Why is it important to write about that?
“ In a very much earlier novel, I think actually somewhere in ‘The Satanic Verses,’ one of the characters says, ‘I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.’ It’s just a passing remark in that novel. It’s not what the novel’s about, but I always thought of that idea of a ghost being unfinished business. In the case of this story, finishing that unfinished business became the action of the story. He had to take his revenge against the man who had wronged him.”
Justice and revenge are also themes in one other story in your new book, “The Musician of Kahani.” As a writer, is it important to think about art and power in this moment, when we know in this country and others, books are disappearing from shelves?
“ Yes. I do think that it’s a moment where artists have to consider how to respond to the times we’re living in, what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. I don’t believe that art should be didactic. Speaking as a reader, I don’t like writers who wag their finger at me and tell me what to think. But what I do think is writing can ask the questions which oblige the reader to answer those questions for himself or herself.
“ And one of the things that happens in ‘The Musician of Kahani’ is this young musician encounters a world of unbelievable wealth and privilege and selfishness and cavalier attitudes, and she has to think what she’s going to do about it. I was thinking about, for example, there’s one or two stories that we all know in which music acquires magical powers, and the one that I was thinking of was the Pied Piper, where the Pied Piper with his pipe can use it for good or for wrong. The first occasion, he uses for good to rid the town of its plague of rats, something which any New Yorker would be grateful for. And then he uses it as a kind of weapon of revenge and uses it for evil, if you like, by capturing the town’s children.
“So I had this idea of wanting to write about music having magical powers, and I had no idea what the story was or what the magical powers might be. But that germ was sitting in my head for quite a long time and eventually found its expression.”
In the last story, in this new book, “The Old Men in the Piazza,” you write of a time when it was illegal to argue and use language. In the story is embodied as a woman. What was your intent to give language that particular human form?
“ Well, again, you know, I always like it when it happens to me, when the story surprises me.
“For me, it’s always a sign that the story has life, when the story starts suggesting things to its author. I wasn’t expecting language to be embodied as a woman. And then one day, when I was working on the story, she just walked into the piazza and sat down on a stool in the corner and announced herself. And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s so interesting.’ I would never have, as it was sat down consciously to think, ‘I will characterize language as a person.’ But the moment it happened, I thought, ‘Oh, I really like that and I want to see what I could do with that.’”
Do you sometimes question whether it’s the right turn to make in the story?
“Of course. Sometimes you have to think, ‘That’s not where I wanted to go.’ But as I’ve got older, my way of writing has become freer and more willing to see the process as one of discovery, that you discover what you’re writing by writing it.
“The way I think about it is that, you know, when I was younger, I was much more structured as a writer. I needed architecture. I needed to hold onto that architecture. And I, the way I tell myself is that it’s the difference between composing a symphony and playing jazz. It’s as if my literary inclination has traveled from the symphonic to the more improvisational.”
What does the title “The Eleventh Hour” mean to you?
“ I think we live in a perilous time, and so ‘The Eleventh Hour’ is not just about individual mortality, but also about civilization. And the danger to that, which I find to be present in these three countries that I’ve spent my life thinking about, India and UK and America. There are variations of that theme in all those places, and so that was very much on my mind as well.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
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Book excerpt: ‘The Eleventh Hour’
By Salman Rushdie
Excerpted from “The Eleventh Hour” by Salman Rushdie. Copyright © 2025 by Salman Rushdie. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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