Author Salman Rushdie, marking his return to the literary world after a violent attack last year that left him permanently injured, says he wants no pity.
“I have always tried very hard not to play the victim role,” he said recently. New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick. The story marked Rushdie’s first interview since he was stabbed.
His comeback as a public figure also included a recent real-life visit to the New York City office of his agent, Andrew Wylie; promoting his new book, “Victory City,” completed before the stabbing; and a vow to avoid bitter feelings six months after the attack in western New York.
In 1989, Rushdie defied advice to lie low after Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put a virtual contract on his life in response to his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which many Muslims considered blasphemy or at least outrageously irreverent.
Rushdie has also expressed little desire to embrace the life of an inmate after the summer’s violence in an outdoor public discussion in Chautauqua, New York.
However, he acknowledged that the attack has caused him upheaval and agony. Wylie has said that Rushdie will not go on a book tour to promote the publication of “Victory City”.
Violence quickly developed on August 12 at the Chautauqua Institution, where Rushdie was sitting on stage, awaiting the start of a discussion that was part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series.
A person dressed in black came on stage and Rushdie was stabbed multiple times, authorities said. Wylie said afterwards that Rushdie’s injuries, including a punctured eye, damaged liver and severed nerves, would “be life-changing for him”.
He said that Rushdie would probably lose the use of one eye, and today Rushdie wears glasses with a dark-colored right lens instead of an eyepatch. Although Rushdie’s physiological recovery appears to be almost complete, he told The New Yorker that his mind still needs time.
“I have found it very, very difficult to write,” Rushdie said. “I sit down to write and nothing happens. I write, but it is a combination of emptiness and garbage, things that I write and delete the next day. I’m not out of that woods yet, really.”
Rushdie spent six weeks in hospital rooms recovering. New Yorker reported in his feature, posted online Monday and scheduled for print release on February 13.
Suspect Hadi Matar, then 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, was arrested and has been awaiting trial on charges of attempted second-degree murder and, accused of attacking Chautauqua moderator Henry Reese, second-degree assault.
He pleaded not guilty. An attorney appointed to represent him did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rushdie said he has not questioned his lack of security that day. “I blame him,” he told The New Yorker in reference to the suspect.
The product of a Muslim family in Bombay that sent him to Cambridge for his education, Rushdie was quickly recognized as a literary star when his 1981 novel, “Midnight’s Children,” won critical acclaim and a Booker Prize.
Although he watched his back and used security after instances of rampant responses from the Muslim world to 1988’s “The Satanic Verses,” which included a character of Muhammad portrayed as human and flawed, Rushdie eventually rejected the idea of living in exile. or afraid.
Rushdie’s sixteenth novel, “Victory City”, seems to repeat his sharp and self-deprecating vision of humanity. It is presented as the secret history of an empire of humanist ideals from around 1500, including gender equality, which he failed to realize. TO New York Times The review said it shows “disturbing, strange predictive power.”
After he moved to New York in 2000, with the virtual largesse of Khomeini’s fatwa still hanging over his head, Rushdie seemed to behave as if it never happened as he was seen enjoying the restaurants and nightlife. from the city like any other. another celebrity.
The demonstration of living well under a threat of death may have been a mistake, Rushdie told The New Yorker, because people seemed to hate it.
“I not only lived but tried to live well,” he said. “Bad mistake.”
Chautauqua’s attack might have changed the world’s opinion of him, he joked. “Get fifteen stabs, much better,” he said.
He said he wants readers to welcome him through his books and not consider how such a traumatic event would mark the timeline of his life, even as he admitted the incident has tested his resolve.
“You’re sitting there saying, ‘Someone stuck a knife in me! Poor me,’ which I sometimes think,” Rushdie said. “It hurts. But what I don’t think is: that’s what I want people who read the book to think. I want the story to capture them, to let themselves go.”
He seems determined to continue digging into his soul for his next novel. The voices of his characters, he has said, emerge in time.
“All I can do is this,” he said. “As long as there’s a story that I think is worth spending my time on, then I’ll do it.”
