"And I was asked to make it not an Indian name. "The police asked me to come up with a pseudonym, partly because I needed to rent properties and so on, and obviously couldn't do it in my own name," he says. He tells NPR's Steve Inskeep that Joseph Anton was an alias he created for himself when he was forced into hiding. Today, Rushdie is again living in the open, and he has finished a memoir about the experience, called Joseph Anton. Rushdie, who was born in India but lived in England at the time, went into hiding. Bounties were offered and translators and others were attacked, some even murdered. In 1989, Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling for the death of the author and anyone associated with the book's publication. In 1988, Salman Rushdie published a novel, The Satanic Verses, that many Muslims declared to be offensive, whether they'd read it or not. The recent violence sparked by the film Innocence of Muslims recalls a very different controversy from more than 20 years ago: However, readers who did like his books said to him, “Those families are exactly like my family.Salman Rushdie's other novels include Midnight's Children, Shame and Luka and the Fire of Life. People who did not like his books would sometimes criticize these fictional families for being unrealistic-not “ordinary” enough. The families in the novels he later wrote would be explosive, operatic, arm-waving, exclamatory, wild. “Far from being the basis of the good society,” Leach had said, “the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.” Yes! he thought. He remembered with what excitement he had listened, at the age of twenty, to the Reith Lectures delivered on BBC Radio by Edmund Leach, the great anthropologist and interpreter of Claude Lévi-Strauss who, a year earlier, had succeeded Noel Annan as provost of King’s. It was not normal, but surreal not humdrum, but filled with event not ordinary, but bizarre. The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us.
More typically, all hell was breaking loose, as people dealt with their angry fathers, drunken mothers, resentful siblings, mad aunts, lecherous uncles and crumbling grandparents. But everyone secretly knew that behind that door things were rarely humdrum. “People retreated behind their front doors into the hidden zone of their private, family worlds and when outsiders asked how things were they answered, Oh, everything’s going along just fine, not much to report, situation normal.
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