Joseph Anton Opens the Universe

Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton, is an operatic 650 pages, an embrace of continents and countries, India, Europe, America; a roll in the dirt and shine of humanity, literature, art, love, children, freedom, courage and vulnerability, ugliness and beauty.  

It took me two months to wander across these pages. I paused often to consider and reconsider the sentences,words, people, sensibility and many-sided truths revealed therein. I underlined and bracketed and dotted margins with asterisks. There  is so much in this story to cherish, question and love. 

“Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before.” (from Joseph Anton)

Thank you, Mr. Rushdie, for taking me into your world, for opening up your universe so that I might see differently.