The eleventh hour A quintet of stories

Rushdie follows his memoir Knife with a marvelous story collection focused on themes of legacy and death. Three novella-length entries are bookended by two shorter works that previously appeared in the New Yorker: "In the South," which centers on two 81-year-old men in southeastern India as they make their weekly trek to the post office to cash their pension slips, and "The Old Man in the Piazza," about an elderly man whose success at solving disputes earns him a reputation for having "the wisdom of Solomon." The longer works include the superb "Late," which traces the afterlife of a British academic whose ghost can communicate with one of his students. The smart and cryptic "Oklahoma" is framed as an unfinished autofiction by a dead writer, portraying his disappearance and presumed death and containing clues that suggest he might still be alive. The author draws on magic in "The Musician of Kahani," a story of wealth and power, about a pregnant musical prodigy who hones her supernatural skills to enact revenge on her exploitive in-laws. Throughout, Rushdie entertains with discursive references to art and cinema, as when the narrator of "Kahani" apologizes to the reader for failing to provide the "twists, complications, danger" of popular Hindi rom-coms. Grounded in moving ruminations on the afterlife and what a person leaves behind, these stories sing. (Nov.)

The famed writer delivers a brilliant series of intimations of mortality. Several of the stories here are set in Rushdie's native India. The opener, "In the South," recounts two octogenarians, Junior and Senior, who pass their days arguing about this and that: The younger, by 17 days, exults in being a native of southern India, "warm, slow, and sensual," while the older retorts, "Suppose men had imagined the earth the other way up! We would be the northerners then. The universe does not understand up and down; neither does a dog." Senior awaits death, eager to be free of his teeming family. Alas, his wish doesn't come true, death claiming the other, which doesn't stop their arguments from continuing. "Death and life were just adjacent verandas," Rushdie writes, having had plenty of cause to ponder the matter. The following story, "The Musician of Kahani," winds its way through some 80 eventful pages, tracing the fortunes of an academic family grown suddenly superrich and investing heavily in the musical education of their brilliant daughter, a master of both sitar and classical piano and many other instruments, who, oddly, turns her tremendous skills to eldritch purposes. The closing line is delightfully chilling: "And Chandni, who doesn't laugh a lot, whose default expression is sort of grave, is smiling her strange little smile." Eldritch indeed is the next long tale, "Late," a bona fide ghost story, its protagonist a newly deceased one-book writer whose secrets are ferreted out by an enterprising exchange student from India ("Her hometown was far away. Books were her homeland now") who just happens to be able to see and speak with the shade--and, in the bargain, help him take just revenge. The last entry, "The Old Man in the Piazza," enigmatic and arch, closes with something of an epitaph: "Our words fail us." A provocative set of tales that, though with grim moments, celebrate life, language, and love in the face of death. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.