A set of performative calisthenics more strained than satisfying; a meandering constitutional; a shake of the wrist spilling out a bag overpacked with tricks ... The references pile up and stories nest within stories and it all becomes impossible to peel apart, like slices of American cheese without the cellophane ... The heart wants badly to praise this valiant late-career offering from Salman Rushdie: teeming intellect, generous soul, survivor, bon vivant, lover of language ... But the brain struggles to find a way.
Rushdie’s towering talent is evident throughout The Eleventh Hour ... The prose here is Rushdie at his supple best, restrained yet daring ... While diverse in technique, each story in The Eleventh Hour springs from a common argument: Language, whether spoken or read or imagined, transforms us all.
More streamlined ... His flights of fancy...are more controlled and add subtle strokes of color. Some groan-inducing puns aside, Rushdie’s comic touches are deftly managed, appearing as sharp satirical swipes or witty repartee ... This is an inventive and engrossing collection of stories which, though death-tinged, are never doom-laden. With luck this master writer has more tales to tell.
Seems intended as a kind of coda to his career. The stories are death-haunted ... These stories are entertaining but not particularly strong ... ords have not yet failed Salman Rushdie, even if, in this self-consciously late book, the spectacular originality of his novelistic peak sounds more as an echo than as an urgently present voice.
Best of all is The Musician of Kahani which could have been crafted into a satisfying novel ... Perhaps this is his goodbye, or perhaps and preferably he’s clearing the decks for something new.
As a reading experience, it’s a mixed bag, varyingly successful. The weaker stories are weighed down by metafictional overcomplications and leaden polemic, but the strongest stories are those marked by a sense of place and character ... Rushdie still has plenty of good and wise things to tell us.
The opener is a beauty — it’s good to be back in Rushdie’s charming, witty world ... But if the first story is a joy, the second...is a weak spot ... But we allow our best writers a little leeway, and not all experiments can come off successfully. To ask Rushdie to restrain himself would be to lose the good parts too.
These are stories of old men approaching the end, or already past its threshold, gracefully told by a writer who has edged near enough to it himself ... The Eleventh Hour reminded me most of the beautiful ending of The Satanic Verses, when Saladin Chamcha returns home – 'after the long angry decades' – to bid farewell to his cancer-stricken father. 'He is teaching me how to die,' Saladin thinks. That was a book, Rushdie wrote in his apologia for it, about 'how newness enters the world'. Now, for all of us children of Rushdie, is a moving book about how oldness leaves it.
Rushdie is having fun with various late fellows of King’s ... The fun and nostalgia in 'Late' are spun into a profound meditation on the afterlife, or lack of it ... The real and the imagined intermingle, and again there is fun and nostalgia, and again there is a deeply intelligent exploration of personal identity, so fragile and absurd, so indispensable to fiction and nonfiction ... The comic timing...is perfect ... Rushdie has hundreds of imitators, in multiple languages, but no equals ... Meticulously constructed ... Though adamantly and amusingly clear that he is not a poet, he is poetic in his arrangement of stories.
Rushdie returns in full transfixing force ... Rushdie’s spectacularly imaginative eleventh-hour cautionary tales are enthralling, sagacious, and resounding.
