Rushdie on death: funny and full of life

Death stalks the pages of Salman Rushdie's latest book, The Eleventh Hour, and it's there in the first story in this collection. "They were eighty-one years old," he writes. "If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour."

- Melanie McDonagh

Salman Rushdie is 78 now and conscious of his mortality. Thank goodness, though, it's ordinary death — the bloke with a scythe — that invests these stories, not an assassin. It's three years since a young Islamist almost killed Rushdie, leaving him blind in one eye with paralysis in one hand.

In fact, the attempt on his life may have galvanised him into greater productivity. As he said in an interview: “I have this very strong feeling of ‘don’t waste your time’. If you survive something which, in a way, I had no business surviving, then you think, 'This is a gift.' How do you use the gift? It clarified my thinking.”

That's laudable. And if death is a preoccupation in these stories, it’s natural in a man who has survived many of his friends. Sometimes it’s funny. The first story, In the South, concerns two old men living on neighbouring verandahs, Junior and Senior, one 17 days older than the other.