Book: THE ELEVENTH HOUR: A QUINTET OF STORIES
Author: Salman Rushdie
Published by: Penguin
Price: Rs 899
Salman Rushdie’s first fictional output after his near-fatal attack in 2022 offers a “quintet of stories” — three novellas and two previously published bookends. Rushdie’s return to the short story form recalls a remark he had once made about writing styles: “Good writers keep it short,” he had said.
Unlike the pleasures of the long novel form, the power of the short story resides in its ending; not necessarily ‘happy endings’ but ‘suitable conclusions’ to messy problems. Appropriately titled, The Eleventh Hour deals with climaxes and crises idiomatically associated with the ‘eleventh hour’, and with their final solutions. The satisfaction of a satisfactory ending is pithily summed up in the novella, “Late”, where the Honorary Fellow, SM, a ghost, tells his non-ghost friend, a young Indian woman student, that “In books it is necessary to bring things to a satisfying resolution. In real life things are not so neat.”
Spread over three continents, Rushdie’s quintet casts a long look at life and literature, concerns that befit an ageing writer who has survived fatwas and fatal attacks for his powerful and polemical writings. A prolific storyteller who tells incisive tales with humour and generosity, Rushdie is also innovative as far as endings are concerned. The Eleventh Hour presents unique endings, and not all are necessarily satisfying or neatly resolved.
Rushdie’s ruminations on death and mortality are comfortingly homely, funny and moving in the first story, “In the South”. He uses the domestic trope of “adjacent verandas” to fictionalise the themes of death and life through Senior and Junior’s cantankerous relations. Two old men who could have been “Like lovers” but because of their ingrained argumentative habits they refuse to acknowledge “so fond an idea”. Yet, they are shadows, duplicates, an alias or a doppelgänger of each other, and even death cannot part them. At the end, one feels a sense of poignant sympathy for Senior who carries on his harangue across the veranda well after Junior’s unceremonious exit from life.
Following the fictional logic of ‘satisfying resolution’, one is indeed pleasurably and decidedly persuaded by the final acts of poetic justice in “The Musician of Kahani”, which recreates a full-blown Bollywood musical, as well as in “Late”, a tale that looks sharply back at British racism and sexuality. Both novellas offer ‘positive endings’ as charlatans and wrongdoers are justly punished. But when fictional boundaries overtake the real, as in “Oklahoma”, the third novella, then the final solution is unsettling. In keeping with the quintet’s themes of disappearances and ghostly reappearances, the initial references in “Oklahoma” to Franz Kafka’s unfinished story of Karl Rossman galvanise the laws of incompleteness such that they overtake a stark story of disappearance. Hence, when the prodigious writer, Uncle K., haunted by Kafka’s unfinished story, pulls off a vanishing act, the narrator’s search plunges him into an encyclopaedic vortex of literary and visual madness and irrationality. After a surreal experience at the entry to Oklahoma, when the narrator finally confronts Uncle K selling candy chocolate ice cream in a bright pink store, the boundaries between the self and the other blur and dissolve because the self and the forged alter ego begin to merge. More than a real place, Oklahoma is a state of mind, the unfinished destination of an incomplete story. A satisfying resolution? The reader can decide.
But it is the last of the quintet, “The Old Man in the Piazza”, the shortest of the lot, that throws up the greatest challenge as far as neat endings are concerned. Nobody dies or lives a phantom life or reunites with others or recognises the other as self. Instead, the story ends with the fierce exit of Language, a character, who has seen it all. Initially, the titular old man is just a witness, a bystander at the piazza, the stage of the “public art form”, the vocal drama of noisy disagreements and obligatory agreements in sync with the universal yes and no cultures, respectively. Language, personified as a woman at the piazza, expresses the rise and the fall of cultures through her dress and demeanour. But when the old man gets drawn into the noisy debates and enjoys crossing “the invisible frontier between action and observation”, and becomes the judge of right and wrong, Language loses patience. Her enormous shriek paralyses the maelstrom of words, and with her exit silence reigns over disagreements, acquiescence and protests. The deeply depressive final words, “Our words fail us”, transform this language story into an all-out political allegory of our times. The ghostly Honorary Fellow had rightly opined, “In real life things are not so neat.”
Good literature is born out of conversation with other writings. In parts, The Eleventh Hour draws upon James Joyce’s words, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Elsewhere, the quintet keeps alive the music of the kahani. In short, there is much to disturb and delight.