American writer Eudora Welty accurately describes my own relationship with books when she states, ‘I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them – with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.’ I remember reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women many times when I was young and each time the book revealed different secrets, insights, and understandings, even though the words obviously hadn’t changed. This book, along with many others, held a kind of magic which took me on journeys to different places and different times, where I met an array of wonderfully interesting characters who taught me a great deal about the mystery of life and the complexity of the human condition.  

During these last school holidays, I started to read a book entitled Joseph Anton. Published in 2012, this 700-page memoir written by Salman Rushdie, had a most unusual genesis. On 14 February 1989, Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist who warned him that he had been ‘sentenced to death’ by the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was the first time Rushdie had heard the word fatwa. He was accused of having written an earlier book deemed to be “against Islam”. Faced with death threats, Rushdie spent nearly a decade largely in hiding, appearing in public only sporadically. He moved from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team who asked him to choose an alias that they could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and decided on two very famous ones – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. In combining their given names, he came up with the alias Joseph Anton. Hence, the title of his memoir.

In Joseph Anton Rushdie writes about his childhood stating that when he was a small boy his father at bedtime told him ‘the great wonder tales of the East…told them and retold them and remade them and reinvented them in his own way.’ Growing up steeped in these stories, Rushdie had a sense that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, ‘and to everyone else’. They were all his – ‘these bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life by them in return.’

At our Parent Library event last week, I picked up the novel Midnight’s Children. Who was the author? None other than Salman Rushdie.  I’ll tell you what I think of this book in a few weeks’ time.

Mrs Clare Murphy

English Coordinator & Literacy Instructional Coach