Who is Salman Rushdie? The most famous author in the world is someone we barely know. His novel, The Satanic Verses, has created more controversy and raised more fundamental questions than any work of art this century. And yet, the man himself has been, until this book, a figure whose personality and history are little understood. W.J. Weatherby has written a biography of Salman Rushdie that reveals and clarifies the influential events and people in the writer’s life. But it is more than the life story of one of the most elusive of contemporary authors. The book also explains and makes even more significant the sentence of death ordered by the Ayatollah Khomeini. By tracing Rushdie’s progress from his birth in Bombay, to his education in England, his return to the Indian subcontinent and subsequent flight back to London to begin his literary career, Weatherby has achieved a singular portrait of this remarkable man of two worlds.
That part of the book, which deals with “The Satanic Verses“ affair is a penetrating account of an issue that should be of great concern to anyone in the West, who values the principles of free speech and separation of church and state. This is especially true given Weatherby’s argument, that it was almost inevitable that Rushdie would write the fiction deemed blasphemous by the world’s Muslims and that he was well aware of the fury, if not the consequences, that would greet the publication of his novel. This biography will enlighten and surprise readers, with its description of the agents, editors and publishers who control the book business in New York and London; with its frank opinions voiced by authors such as John le Carré; and with the unavoidable proposition that around Rushdie and his novel, swirl the current of perhaps the most troublesome question facing the international community in the last decade of the 20th century: the irreconcilable clash between cultures and nationalities.
