Published by Random House on November 4, 2025
The Eleventh Hour collects five stories, three of novella length and two that are shorter. The most entertaining novella in the collection is “The Musician of Kahani.” It is, in part, the story of a man who loses his way and the daughter who guides his return. The man finds false meaning in life when he abandons his family to join a cult leader’s community as a preparer and ladler of soup. The daughter is a musical prodigy who marries into wealth and develops a sort of superpower that allows her to project her music to her distant father’s ears. It is also the story of a mother whose “brilliant husband falls for a stupid fraud” and whose “brilliant daughter falls for a stupid playboy,” leaving her “alone in our home without the two people who were my whole world.” The story touches on familiar themes in fiction that focuses on India: the dominance of men, parental control of children throughout their lives, the disparity of wealth, the misplaced importance given to high social status (recast as “brand identity”). Satirical observations lighten the mood, but the reconciliation of a family, decent people who stray from their paths before reuniting, is moving.
“Late” tells the story of a gay British professor who achieved fame with the only novel he ever wrote — a classic work set in India. He lived a reclusive life in an “ivory tower of infirm old men” until he woke up one morning to discover that he had died. Only one person, a student from India studying the history of religion and its intersection with the state, can see his ghost. She volunteers to act as a guide to the professor’s rooms, left untouched as a tribute by the university that employed him. Contrary to his solitary nature, the professor is displeased that nobody ever visits his rooms, but he is also unhappy to discover that his spirit will disintegrate if he leaves the campus. He views death as “proof of the pointlessness of life,” particularly his own not-quite-death that has him dwelling in a literal fog (perhaps a soup made from the remains of other souls) as what’s left of him decays. Death focuses his mind on revenge against the College Provost, who gave him a choice between sexual freedom and a place at the College, but how can he pursue that goal without a body?
The theme of disappearance also animates “Oklahoma,” purportedly an unfinished manuscript that tells a story of ambiguous meaning, building on Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika, a novel whose central character will never find peace, having been abandoned by his creator. The story includes an extended riff about Francisco Goya, told from his unhappy point of view. The writer-narrator has a writer uncle who, though presumed dead, has apparently continued writing. Or is the narrator carrying on his dead uncle’s work? By the time the story generates an “apparition, this sci-fi incarnation of beauty,” who “was not real, she was a phantom I had brought into being to express my need for love,” I lost interest. “Oklahoma” showcases Rushdie’s astonishing prose but, sad to say, its full meaning escaped me. My fault more than Rushdie’s, I’m sure.
The two short stories address the problem of aging — a problem that eventually vexes everyone who survives youth and middle age. The characters in “In the South,” though known as Senior and Junior, are both 81. Senior’s other friends have died, along with his “kindly” wife. He used a broker to find a new one, a woman with a wooden leg who is unkind, perhaps in response to his own unkindness. “Instead of unhappy solitude they found themselves trapped in unhappy togetherness.” Senior feels like a shadow: “The old move through the world of the young like shades, unseen, of no concern.” Particularly in the story’s last pages, Senior would rather be dead, but as he comes to understand: “Death and life were just adjacent verandas.”
The more interesting short story, “The Old Man in the Piazza,” makes the argument that soaring prose depends on conditions of dissent. In times of agreement, language is muted. Language is a character in the story, sitting in a corner of the piazza during a time when the word “no” was outlawed (although rejection was not, as an old man learned: “The old man was younger then, and his heart ached a lot, thanks to the repeated rejections of its sincerely offered emotions by young women with hair of different colors.”). It was forbidden to debunk even the most risible propositions: “the nocturnal metamorphosis of the immigrant population into drooling sex monsters, the benefits of raising the taxes paid by the poor.” Finally fed up, Language screams and the age of argumentation begins. What takes center stage is an outpouring of unattractive words, “not our language’s beautiful and justly celebrated poetry,” but “Go fuck yourself” and similar expressions.
“The Old Man in the Piazza” explodes the myth (less prevalent in the US than other nations) that aging inevitably bestows wisdom upon those who survive it. Language favors nuance over the simplistic certainties that pass for wisdom: “She cares only for words of many-layered beauty, for fineness of expression, for the subtlety of what is spoken and the resonance of what is better left unspoken, for the meanings between the words, and the illumination of those meanings that only her greatest disciples can provide.”
Readers expect insightful observations about society from Rushdie. Each entry in this volume delivers. Characters contemplate the tension between liberty and goodness (does the ideal of freedom include freedom to be bad?), between individualism and social norms, between definitions of morality that benefit the ruling class and those that are more objective. Rushdie illustrates the conflict that people raised in the conservative political climate feel when they experience the freedoms that are taken for granted in most of western Europe, including sexual freedom and the ability to make choices that are not restricted by family traditions. He explores generational change, contrasts the old and the young, and compares the fear of death to the fear of living.
Chattering characters explore questions of philosophy, sometimes by accident. Some of their theories border on lunacy (stars are just the sun shining through a colander that covers the city at night) but should rational people correct them or listen patiently? “Are mistaken notions harmful to the brain, to the community, to the health of the body politic, or are they simply errors to be tolerated as the product of simple minds?” That question gains currency when applied to climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers.
Religion, art, madness, war and evil, culture and religion, the language of poetry and prose, and the nature of reality are just a few of the topics Rushdie tackles. While the stories are uneven, I give Rushdie credit for trying to do something new in each one. As a writer who marries striking prose to intriguing ideas, Rushdie always gives readers something to enjoy as they try to get at his meaning.
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