For the first time since nearly dying in a knife attack in the United States last summer, British writer Salman Rushdie says he struggles to write and suffers from post-traumatic stress.
The famous novelist of Indian origin, naturalized American and who lives in New York, expresses himself in a long article published Monday by the newspaper of the cultural elites, The New Yorkeron the eve of the release in the United States of his latest novel, Victory Citythe “epic tale of a woman” at the 14e century.
His exclusive secrets to the editor-in-chief of New Yorkerwriter David Remnick, are titled ‘The Salman Rushdie Challenge’ and are accompanied by an hour-long audio interview and a grim black-and-white photo of the 75-year-old intellectual, his face scarred and wearing glasses with a black lens on the right eye.
Faced with this shot, which he judged on Twitter to be “spectacular and powerful”, Rushdie published another, in color, showing him with the same black lens of glasses, but looking more peaceful.
Loss of sight in one eye
His literary agent Andrew Wylie revealed in October that he had lost the sight of one eye and the use of one hand.
While Victory City was completed before his August 12, 2022 attack in the northern United States, Salman Rushdie says he “found it very, very difficult to write”.
“I sit down to write and nothing happens; I write, but it’s a mixture of emptiness and nonsense, things that I write and erase the next day”, confides the writer who has lived since 1989 under the threat of death from a fatwa issued by Iran, after the publication of his book The Satanic Verses.
“I’m not out of the woods yet,” he breathes, warning his interviewer: “PTSD exists, you know,” using the acronym defining post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Even “if his recovery is progressing,” his agent told the newspaper last week. The GuardianRushdie will not be doing any public promotion for this 15e novel, which comes out Tuesday in the US and Thursday in the UK.
Adored by the elites in the West, hated by Muslim extremists in Iran or Pakistan – some were delighted with his attack in August – Rushdie is an icon of freedom of expression and still defends with erudition and his flamboyant style the power of words in Victory City.
The book tells the epic of Pampa Kampana, a young orphan girl endowed with magical powers by a goddess, who will create the city of Bisnaga – literally Victory City. With the mission of “giving women an equal place in a patriarchal world”, according to the publisher Penguin Random House, its heroine and poet, who will live nearly 250 years, will also be the witness of “the pride of those who are in power”, will witness the rise and then the destruction of Bisnaga and suffer exile.
“Winning Words”
Her legacy to the world, however, will remain her epic tale, which she buries as a message for future generations.
The novel concludes: “Words are the only victors”.
In the New York Timesthe American writer Colum McCann, a friend of Rushdie, claims that he “says something very deep in Victory City “. “He says ‘you can never take away from people the basic ability to tell stories. In the face of danger, even in the face of death, he succeeds in saying that all we have is the power to tell stories”.
Born in Bombay in June 1947, just before the partition of India, into a secular Muslim bourgeois family, Rushdie published his first novel Grimus in 1975 and became a worldwide celebrity in the 1980s with The Midnight Children which won him the Booker Prize in the United Kingdom.
Despite the Iranian fatwa never lifted, Rushdie felt freer and had resumed a life in society in recent years in New York.
On August 12, he was invited to a literary conference in Chautauqua, a small cultural and bucolic town popular with retirees in upstate New York, near Lake Erie.
At the time of speaking, a young American of Lebanese origin suspected of being sympathizers with Shiite Iran had thrown himself on him, armed with a knife, and had stabbed him a dozen times.
“I’ve known better, but given what happened, I’m not so bad,” says Salman Rushdie today, adding, however, “to hold (his attacker) responsible” for his state of health.