>> Dwight Garner, The New York Times Published: 25 May 2021 02:59 PM BdST Updated: 25 May 2021 02:59 PM BdST The cover for Salman Rushdie's book of essays 'Languages of Truth'. Photo taken via the author's official Facebook account. Salman Rushdie has nothing to prove. Yet he finds himself, in his early 70s, deeply out of fashion. Too old to seize a moment, too active to be rediscovered, he’s been subject over the past two decades to some of the unkindest reviews ever delivered to a talent of his magnitude. "); } The magazine Cahiers du Cinéma once had a rating system that included a black dot for “abominable.” If critics could be handing Rushdie these dots, they would be. It has to sting.