Review | Salman Rushdie’s Languages of Truth, his second non-fiction anthology, is engaging, funny and intimate
- Languages of Truth picks up where Step Across This Line left off in 2002 and is every bit as pleasurable as its predecessor
- Not short of praise, Rushdie’s real admiration is reserved for four Chinese writers brave enough to speak truth to power
Languages of Truth by Salman Rushdie, pub. Jonathan Cape
The 21st century essay collection feels like one of publishing’s weirder propositions. In one corner is the necessarily occasional content (articles written at different times about different things for different reasons); in the other is the book itself, which hopes to unify this content into a coherent, satisfying whole.
At their best, these anthologies curate an author’s scattered non-fiction output into a compact fusion of reportage, memoir, opinion and reviews. At their flagrant worst, they are the literary equivalent of a rock music B-sides album: hastily compiled pieces capitalising on a writer’s fame.
Writers don’t come much more famous than Salman Rushdie, which might explain why Languages of Truth is his second non-fiction anthology, picking up where Step Across This Line left off in 2002. Although his celebrity is, thankfully, less urgent these days, there are plenty of reasons to close-read his off-duty musings.
What might Rushdie reveal in “Autobiography and the Novel”, or appreciations of friends such as Philip Roth, Christopher Hitchens, Harold Pinter and Carrie Fisher? Did his experience of living with the fatwa help him with life in lockdown (see “Pandemic: A Personal Engagement with the Coronavirus”)?
