Book Review | A Quintet Of Successful Endings
21 Dec 2025 12:53 AM IST21 Dec 2025 12:53 AM IST
In truth, death pervades Eleventh Hour.
Cover page of The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories
As its name suggests, Salman Rushdie’s latest offering, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories, is all about endings — the end of life, the end of illusion, perhaps even the end of language as we know it.
The 78-year-old author, who came viciously close to death when an assailant stabbed him multiple times in 2022, feels his mortality, and these stories are powerful meditations on life and death and the way they appear when the curtain is about to come down on one part of this confounding two- act play.
The two elderly Chennai neighbours of In the South, the first story in the volume, squabble continually, but they are allies underneath, joined to each other by their advanced age, their various infirmities, and their sense of impending death. The older, angrier, of the two men actively wishes for the end. But death does not indulge him. It strikes his friend instead, and the very next day, it ups its game, opens its huge maw higher and wider, swallowing thousands in a monster tsunami that rises in the Indian Ocean, leaving a trail of destruction in the city’s coastal areas.
In truth, death pervades Eleventh Hour. Rushdie dwells on it again and again — on the vanishing of friends and family as one ages, the wiping out of generations until there is no one left to stand between you and your grave. In Late a writer who produced just one celebrated book in his entire career, dies, only to rise as an apparition and haunt the precincts of the ancient college in England
where he has lived as an Honorary Fellow for decades. He is perplexed that though his life is finished, his body despatched, his spirit is stuck in limbo, in a liminal nowhereland between life and death. Gradually we find out that the ghost of this writer past has unfinished business — secrets to tell and injustices to avenge. But the plot is incidental here. What animates Late are Rushdie’s reflections on the end of life. Could it possibly spell another sort of beginning? Or is it an inevitable passage into eternal oblivion?The thought is explored further in Oklahoma, clearly the most outstanding story of the collection, one where the master of magic realism draws upon myth, art, literature and his own undiminished brilliance to contemplate life and death, youth and age, creativity and its flight, heaven and hell, the microcosm and the unfathomable macro, and suggest that they are all connected at once and at alltimes, and are perhaps two faces of the same ineluctable cycle of existence.
Preoccupied as it is with death — the other two tales are parables on the death of illusion and the corruption of language — Eleventh Hour is a far cry from the effervescence of the stories in East,West (1994). Nevertheless, it is lit up with Rushdie’s radiant imagination, his formidable erudition, and shot through with his customary revulsion of dictatorship, fraudulence and social humbug. The lion in winter continues to warm us with his literary fire.
Shuma Raha is a journalist and author
The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories
By Salman Rushdie
Penguin
pp. 264; Rs 899
( Source : Deccan Chronicle )
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