Joseph Anton

Here is an interview with Salman Rushdir about living under Iranian fatwa: http://m.spiegel.de/international/world/a-857034.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=https://www.google.com/ . Much more than a simple death threat, he has had to create an alias, get bodyguards, open fake bank accounts, the whole nine-yards. Of the innumerable amount of aliases he could have picked, he picked Joseph Anton, which he said was created from the names of his two favorite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov. I find it interesting that Rushdie enjoys Conrad, considering writers such as Chinua Achebe decried Conrad's racism toward the West Africans. For a writer that wrote as influential an opus about Indian culture and heritage, placing so much importance on a writer that vastly simplified another culture's values intrigues me.