SOURCE: Joshi, Ruchir. “Step Inside Rushdie.” Far Eastern Economic Review 166, no. 16 (24 April 2003): 54-5.

In the following review, Joshi offers a mixed assessment of the essays collected in Step across This Line.

Is it cruel for an author to have to carry on well after he or she has run out of stories to tell?

In his moving essay on Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie writes: “She hadn't finished. Like Italo Calvino, like Bruce Chatwin, like Raymond Carver, she died at the height of her powers. For writers, these are the cruellest deaths: in mid-sentence so to speak.” However, given the unmitigated disasters of Rushdie's last two novels, even hard-core Rushdie fans like myself might be tempted to argue the contrary.

Notwithstanding his last two failures, once you get into Step across This Line, you find that Rushdie is far from running out of stories. There are lots of little...