Salman Rushdie’s new short-story collection urgently reclaims his literary terrain. Its title, The Eleventh Hour, signals a preoccupation with time and old age; the book follows Knife (2024), written after the 2022 attack, and gathers stories that revisit themes and settings from across his career.
Several pieces return to India and questions of faith and doubt; others reinvent English literary history or experiment in the US to probe authenticity, censorship and fraud. The opening story, “In the South” (first published in The New Yorker), meditates on death and ageing in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. Two elderly neighbours—nicknamed Junior and Senior, who share an undisclosed first name—inhabit an ordinary world made startling by Rushdie’s structural and narrative skill. Junior is serene and alone; Senior is melancholic and surrounded by an intrusive family. A phrase in this story supplies the collection’s title and frames death as an “adjacent verandah” to life.
“The Musician of Kahani” is an ideal introduction for new readers. Spanning decades, it follows a gifted young woman in a Mumbai recast as Kahani (story), where streets are playfully renamed after writers. Events are delivered out of sequence like gossip, emphasizing that story itself matters more than plot. Its heroine’s magical talents echo Saleem Sinai from Midnight’s Children, and the tale revels in renaming and the power of narrative.
“Late” takes place in an Oxbridge college and features Simon Merlyn (S.M.) Arthur, a famed novelist who awakens to find himself dead at 61. The story assembles English clichés—Oxbridge, WWII, colonial manners—but is really about literature, myth and second chances. Rosa, an Indian undergraduate charged with organizing S.M.’s papers, can hear his ghost and uncovers sadness, betrayal and transformative archival materials—an echo of Rushdie’s own discovery that led to The Satanic Verses. Rosa functions as a partial stand-in for Rushdie himself, and the tale is shot through with autobiographical touches, even advertising slogans from his earlier career.
The final two stories shift to the US and are formally adventurous. “Oklahoma” is presented as an unedited posthumous autofictional manuscript: a literary exchange between a younger writer, M.A., and an admired uncle-figure, Uncle K. What begins as mentorship and the task of completing Kafka’s Karl Rossmann’s fate in Amerika deteriorates into doubt, deception and obsession. Manuscripts of uncertain provenance, including an 1819 tale of anguished murals, raise recurring concerns about art’s role in depicting corruption, violence and the corrosions of age—rage, madness, jealousy.
Where “In the South” accepts death as part of life and “Late” imagines a kind of fruitful afterlife beyond regret, “Oklahoma” is bleaker: life feels incoherent and truth seems attainable only in death. The closing fable, “The Old Man in the Piazza,” begins with an elderly man watching heated conversations around him and becomes a parable about the impoverishment that follows moralizing simplifications—where nuance and poetic language are replaced by thumbs-up or down judgments.
Taken together, the stories read like metaphorical fragments of Rushdie’s life, summoning his “brilliant early phase” without the celebrity detail that some found excessive in his memoir Joseph Anton. They reaffirm his obsession with storytelling, identity, ageing and the precariousness of truth.
Jenni Ramone is associate professor of postcolonial and global literatures at Nottingham Trent University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
