Rushdie's throwback to his glorious past

The writer's latest collection of five short stories is entertaining in parts, though uneven, clumsy and unsatisfactory in its overall execution

- Somak Ghoshal

Salman Rushdie's new book of stories, The Eleventh Hour, ends with a definitive statement: "Our words fail us." It comes as a coda to a fantastical, albeit clumsily executed, allegory titled The Old Man in the Piazza, where language is imagined as a lone woman in a crowded piazza.

She is pursued, exploited and mistreated by the crowd, until one day, unable to bear the torment, she lets out a mighty scream and disappears. The eponymous old man, like the character in Ernest Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea, is a stand-in for the elderly writer, exhausted and spent after a lifetime's struggle to nail his prize catch—in this case, the ever-elusive texture of the world itself, made out of words.

For an author as voluble as Rushdie, who has always put much stock in the power of language, the conclusion feels dire, reeking of finality and despair that he has never let stand in his way. In fact, the weight of the sentence stands in stark contrast to the rousing faith the author had put in the redeeming qualities of words in his last book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, published in 2024. "Language, too, was a knife," as he wrote. "It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people's eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife."