Rushdie's calamity

Kevin Power writes in the Guardian, about Salman Rushdie's lates short story collection, 

Towards the end of Knife, his 2024 book about the assault at a public event in upstate New York that blinded him in his right eye, Salman Rushdie offers a thought experiment:


Imagine that you knew nothing about me, that you had arrived from another planet, perhaps, and had been given my books to read, and you had never heard my name or been told anything about my life or about the attack on The Satanic Verses in 1989. Then, if you read my books in chronological order, I don’t believe you would find yourself thinking, Something calamitous happened to this writer’s life in 1989. The books are their own journey.

If you read 'Midnight', you understood that Rushdie didn't like his dad and 'had issues with authority'. In 'Satanic', there is a degree of reconciliation before the father dies. The hope is held out that Rushdie might be growing up- or 'reintegrating' a fractious anima as the Jungians might have it. But, it is one thing to attack the Prime Minister of a Democratic country. It is another to attack the Supreme Leader of a Theocracy which uses terrorism as a foreign policy tool. Would the British police- whom Rushdie had depicted as racist buffoons- be able to protect Rushdie from assassins sent by a country which has a good reason to hate the United Kingdom? 

The answer turned out to be yes. Still, the American Jewish wife had to go. But that was scarcely a calamity. Getting knifed by some rando was a calamity.  Rushdie should have hired a close protection agent with a concealed carry permit and adjusted his speaking fees accordingly.

Literature is a service industry. Failure to adopt a proper absorption cost model can have catastrophic consequences. Books are less important than Book Keeping.