The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories by Salman Rushdie
Somehow I managed to get to this point in my life without having read anything by Salman Rushdie. Like just about everyone else, I’ve read plenty about him, from the issuing of the notorious fatwa to the ghastly knife attack at Chautauqua in 2022. When I started seeing notices of a new work of fiction by Rushdie, I decided it was time to remedy this omission in my reading life.
The stories in The Eleventh Hour range from just a few pages in length to almost novella length. (Two of the shorter tales appeared originally in The New Yorker.) Rushdie makes liberal use of what is usually termed magical realism. This is a device that I’m not ordinarily fond of, but Rushdie’s artistry and humor won me over right away.
My favorite story in this delightful collection is “Late.” It begins this way:
‘When the Honorary Fellow S. M. Arthur woke up in his darkened College bedroom he was dead, but at first that didn’t seem to change anything.’
Rushdie’s narration of what happens next is strangely convincing, not to mention oddly compelling. I felt grateful to him for this tender, almost lighthearted evocation of an afterlife, for a character that I came to care about deeply.
(That opening sentence reminded me a bit of Kafka’s Metamorphosis:
‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect’
But the element of fear and desperation so vivid in Kafka’s chilling novella is absent from “Late,” replaced instead by a sense of wonder.)
The writing throuhout is beautiful and contains welcome touches of wit.
Highly recommended.
Photo above from an article in The Guardian
Bone Valley: A True Story of Injustice and Redemption in the Heart of Florida, by Gilbert King
It was August 2017 when author/photographer/investigator Gilbert King made his way to Naples, Florida. He was slated to deliver the keynote address to the Florida Conference of Circuit Judges, which was taking place at a venue in that city. During a lunch break, as King was chatting with some of the judges, a man approached and handed him a business card. On the back of the card was written the following:
LEO SCHOFIELD #115760 HARDEE C.I.
NOT JUST “WRONGFULLY CONVICTED,”
HE’S AN INNOCENT MAN.
As the man walked away, he turned to King and indicated that he should call him.
As summarized on Gilbert King’s website, here is how matters stood:
‘In 1988, 22-year-old Leo Schofield—a heavy metal guitarist from Lakeland, Florida—was arrested and charged with the murder of his 18-year-old wife, Michelle. Leo maintained his innocence from the beginning, but he was failed at nearly every turn: the investigation was shoddy, the defense inadequate, and critical evidence was overlooked. Convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, Leo exhausted his appeals and seemed destined to remain in the shadows.’
Author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning narrative Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, a Pulitzer-Prize winning narrative, as well as Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found, Gilbert King was a busy man with a full schedule; nevertheless, he was immediately intrigued by this situation. He followed up on the lead he’d been given. The result was a podcast, the exoneration of a wrongly imprisoned man, and ultimately the book Bone Valley.
Highly, highly recommended.
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
‘”Mr Toby! Mr. Toby!”‘
A chance encounter on a London street causes Juliet Armstrong call out excitedly to a man she’s sure she recognizes – someone she worked beside in ‘the old days.’ But Godfrey Toby frostily informs her that she must be mistaken – he does not know her, has never seen her before. Juliet is bewildered. Why would he refuse to acknowledge her? It must have to do with their former employment….
For Juliet and Godfrey Toby worked in Intelligence, during the Second World War. They were installed in an apartment directly adjacent to where a cell of collaborators were busy passing information to the enemy. Juliet’s group secretly recorded their conversations; it was Juliet’s task to generate transcriptions of these forbidden revelations.
Type, type, type…
Juliet came to join this operation at a very young age. She was guileless and naive, at the time. As she burrows deeply into her remit, this changes. Unavoidably, her mindset alters, and her whole life changes.
‘Juliet had been easy to recruit. She had believed in fairness and equality, in justice and truth. She believed that England could be a better country. She was the apple ripe for plucking and she had also been Eve willing to eat the apple. The endless dialectic between innocence and experience.’
Kate Atkinson is an author I have long admired. An early novel, Case Histories, was hugely entertaining and highly irreverent. Then came Life Histories, a completely different kind of a novel, on a grand scale, profound and riveting.
Transcription boasts that rarity in contemporary fiction: a terrific conclusion. In fact, the whole novel is terrific – I loved it!
;
Books to the Ceiling