Completed before his knife attack, this novel – undoubtedly one of the most anticipated of the year – by the author of Indian origin, is presented as the translation of the historical epic of Pampa Kampana, a young orphan with of magical powers by a goddess, who will create the city of Bisnaga, literally Victory City.
The novel will be released next September in France under its original title, said its French publishing house Actes Sud.
No promotion
The writer will not make any promotion to present his 15th novel which will be released on Tuesday in the United States and Thursday in the United Kingdom, warned his agent Andrew Wylie in the British daily The Guardian, even if “his recovery is progressing” since the attack which almost cost him his life on August 12th.
A young man lunged at him armed with a knife as he prepared to speak at a conference in Chautauqua in upstate New York near Great Lake Erie . Salman Rushdie, a naturalized American who has lived in New York for 20 years, has lost the sight of one eye and the use of one hand, his agent announced in October.
Since then, the author has stayed away from the media but has started to express himself again on the social network Twitter since last December, most often to relay the reviews of his new novel published in the press.
In an interview with New Yorker, Salman Rushdie confided that he was far from being out of the woods psychologically: “I 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.”
Defend the place of women
An icon of freedom of expression since living under a fatwa for writing the book Satanic Verses in 1988, Rushdie still defends the power of words in “Victory City”.
With the mission of “giving women an equal place in a patriarchal world”, according to the summary of its publisher Penguin Random House, its heroine and poet Pampa Kampana, who will live nearly 250 years, will also be the witness of “the pride of those in power”, and will witness the rise and then the destruction of Bisnaga.
Her legacy to the world, however, will remain her epic tale, which she buries as a message for future generations. And the novel ends with this sentence: “words are the only winners”.
In the New York Times, American writer Colum McCann, a friend of Rushdie, claimed that the author “said something very profound 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 manages to say that all we have is the power to tell stories” .
afp/juma