New Delhi, Nov. 14 -- Salman Rushdie's new book of stories, The Eleventh Hour, ends with a definitive statement: "Our words fail us." It comes as a coda to a fantastical, albeit clumsily executed, allegory titled The Old Man in the Piazza, where language is imagined as a lone woman in a crowded piazza. She is pursued, exploited and mistreated by the crowd, until one day, unable to bear the torment, she lets out a mighty scream and disappears. The eponymous old man, like the character in Ernest Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea, is a stand-in for the elderly writer, exhausted and spent after a lifetime's struggle to nail his prize catch-in this case, the ever-elusive texture of the world itself, made out of words.

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