Book Review: The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie
1 min read
Dr. Ramlal Agarwal reviews Salman Rushdie’s latest short story collection, The Eleventh Hour (Random House Inc, 2025), observing how it is a captivating read with its imaginative novelty but lacks an emotional connection.
Salman Rushdie is a renowned novelist of our era. His writing is full of exuberance, buoyancy, irreverence, and playfulness. It elevates readers above the heavy seriousness of modernist literature and has won both the Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers.
His most famous novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), is a story of a Kashmiri Muslim family’s unbridled downslide from the lush pastures and quiet-flowing rivers of Kashmir to the hustle and bustle of Bombay’s smoking factories and chawls. His other well-known, perhaps controversial, novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), is about Mohammad, the prophet’s temptation to abdicate his philosophy of monotheism and include three goddesses, Lat, Monat, and Uzza, in the Koran as divine and deserving people’s offerings, and his final rejection under violent circumstances and pressure from his followers, calling them Satanic Verses.
