Sensitive reading, the power of language and the spirit of freedom: Salman Rushdie, scarred by the assassination attempt, gives a cheerful and great speech at the “Peace Prize” award ceremony in Frankfurt.
No bird is viewed more suspiciously than this one crow. It’s just an urban corvid that happens to be hopping around in front of Frankfurt’s Paulskirche on Sunday morning, but for the readers of Salman Rushdie’s masterful, tragicomic memoirs (published under the title “Joseph Anton” in 2012) gathered here, it is of course much more: In his autobiography he describes his great misfortune in a laconic and sometimes bitterly funny way; the fatwa of the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, which hit him on February 14, 1989, like the beginning of a classic horror film: Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”. There the whole horror begins with a single black bird, followed by another, then another, followed by millions, and they attack. The first bird doesn’t matter. It is the beginning of a great story.