After stabbing attack, Salman Rushdie's new stories grapple with mortality and magical realism

As 1 period gives mode to another, a kid is calved successful Mumbai. “The millennium’s gift,” Chandni Contractor, is simply a root of joyousness to her parents. When Chandni turns 4 and reveals herself to beryllium a philharmonic prodigy, she becomes a root of wonder. At the property of 13, she dazzles audiences crossed India with her soft and sitar performances. Five years later, she enthralls Majnoo, the playboy lad of billionaire parents, and the brace spell connected to person a spectacular wedding. But their matrimony sours and her in-laws crook overbearing. Eventually Chandni snaps and wreaks havoc by playing a antithetic benignant of music, 1 that has the powerfulness to destruct livelihoods and lives.

“The Musician of Kahani” is 1 of 5 stories successful a caller postulation by Salman Rushdie. “The Eleventh Hour” sees the acclaimed Indian-born British American writer exploring the weighty matters of beingness and death. That helium should take to trade tales astir these duplicate themes is hardly surprising. In 2022, helium was astir killed successful a frenzied onslaught astatine an lawsuit successful upstate New York. Two years later, successful his up-close-and-personal memoir, “Knife,” helium recounted his ordeal and told however helium had travel to clasp what helium called “my second-chance life.” Rushdie’s brushwood with decease and caller lease connected beingness renders his latest stories — his archetypal fabrication since the onslaught — each the much potent and poignant.

The collection’s opener, “In the South,” gets underway some innocently and ominously: “The time Junior fell down began similar immoderate different day.” What follows is simply a chronicle of a decease foretold. Senior and Junior are 2 octogenarian neighbors successful Chennai, India, who walk their clip unneurotic arguing. The erstwhile has had a affluent and fulfilling life, but arsenic truthful galore of his friends and household person died — oregon “gone to their fiery rest” — helium present longs for death. The latter, afflicted by “the incurable illness of mediocrity,” has led a disappointing beingness yet inactive possesses a lust for it.

(Random House)

When a tsunami hits the city, it kills Junior. At archetypal Senior is aggravated (“Why not me?” helium rages), but his ascendant emotion turns to sadness aft helium realizes helium has mislaid a antheral who was his “shadow.” Or truthful helium believes. For Junior’s passing is not the end. Senior continues to see, and quarrel with, his fallen friend. As Rushdie puts it: “Death and beingness were conscionable adjacent verandas.”

One of the finest stories here, “Late,” involves different apparition. English world S. M. Arthur wakes up successful his assemblage assemblage (an unnamed King’s College, Cambridge) and discovers helium is dead. Feeling similar “a breached entity trapped successful a benignant of prison,” helium finds bid by communing with the 1 idiosyncratic who tin spot him, Indian pupil and chap lonely soul, Rosa.

The brace signifier a enslaved successful the bare assemblage implicit the Christmas holidays. Despite their affinity, Arthur harbors secrets. When Rosa is tasked with sorting his papers, she comes crossed a mysteriously locked container file, the contents of which helium refuses to disclose. Then Arthur takes banal of his concern and decides helium can’t remainder until Rosa helps him get adjacent with a past persecutor. What is successful the container and wherefore the request for revenge?

Weighing successful astatine implicit 70 pages, “Late” constitutes much a novella than a story, arsenic does “The Musician of Kahani” and the arsenic important “Oklahoma.” This past offering astir writers, penning and elaborate vanishing acts is artfully structured and formally daring, made up of aggregate layers, divers references, literate ventriloquy and slick twists and turns. In a lesser writer’s hands, this novella mightiness person been excessively clever for its ain good; however, Rushdie, a seasoned pro, achieves the cleanable balance.

He hasn’t done truthful successful caller years successful his long-form fiction. “The Golden House” (2017), “Quichotte” (2019) and his past novel, “Victory City” (2023), were blighted successful places by digressive riffs and monologues, bottomless subplots, “humorous” quality names (Evel Cent, Thimma the Almost arsenic Huge) and excessive magic-realist precocious jinks comprising talking revolvers, ferocious mastodons, an Italian-speaking cricket and a demigoddess who grows a metropolis from seeds and lives for 247 years. Sometimes this hocus-pocus worked wonders; astatine different times it felt similar inexpensive tricks.

Rushdie has acold much occurrence successful “The Eleventh Hour.” His narratives are much streamlined. His flights of fancy— malevolent music, undead scholars, imaginary brothers, a cult led by a guru with 93 Ferraris successful an “experimental township” called the Moon — are much controlled and adhd subtle strokes of color. Some groan-inducing puns aside, Rushdie’s comic touches are deftly managed, appearing arsenic crisp satirical swipes oregon witty repartee. “You look similar a antheral who is lone waiting to die,” says Junior to Senior, who successful crook retorts: “That is amended than looking, arsenic you do, similar a antheral who is inactive waiting to live.”

Rushdie exhibits further playfulness by scattering clues and inviting his scholar to hint connections. Arthur is successful portion a crafty composite of the writer E.M. Forster and the machine idiosyncratic Alan Turing — each 3 being, similar their creator, King’s College alumni. “And astatine midnight, the approved hr for miraculous births successful our portion of the world, a babe was calved to a Breach Candy family,” Rushdie writes of Chandni, with a knowing motion to the cardinal time, spot and circumstances successful his 1981 masterpiece “Midnight’s Children.”

The book’s past and shortest entry, the fabular “The Old Man successful the Piazza,” makes for a somewhat flimsy coda. Otherwise, this is an inventive and engrossing postulation of stories which, though death-tinged, are ne'er doom-laden. With luck this maestro writer has much tales to tell.

Malcolm Forbes is simply a freelance writer and professional from Edinburgh, Scotland, who writes for the Economist, the Washington Post and different publications.