The Eleventh Hour review: Salman Rushdie's meditations on mortality

Salman Rushdie's latest work blends fiction, memory, myth, and mortality, offering a deeply personal meditation shaped by near-death, nostalgia, and literary playfulness

The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories

Edited by Salman Rushdie

Published by Penguin

254 pages, ₹899

 

Salman Rushdie’s latest opus is a many-splendored offering. It is a radiant display of the treasure trove of artefacts in the attic of his memory, some priceless gems, some not quite shiny, but none pallid, all placed in dazzling arrays of words. It is a now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t game where Rushdie has readers guessing the real-life person (or a mix of them) on which a fictionalised character is based. It is a serenade for the one true love of Rushdie’s, the siren city of Bombay before she was