British author Salman Rushdie said in an interview published on Monday ahead of the release of his new novel ‘Victory City’ that he finds writing ‘very difficult’ after being stabbed last year.
Salman Rushdie says that this attack has scared him mentally.
Salman Rushdie’s new novel is the story of a 14th-century woman who defies the patriarchal world and rules a city. His novel will go on sale in the US today (Tuesday).
“There is such a thing as PTSD,” the 75-year-old author told The New Yorker magazine in his first interview since the Aug. 12 stabbing at a conference in a New York suburb.
He further said that ‘I find it very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of emptiness and junk, the things I write I delete the next day. I am not out of this forest yet.’
The award-winning novelist’s agent said in October last year that he had lost sight in one eye and use of one hand. Salman is now an American citizen living in New York for 20 years.
Salman Rushdie told journalist David Remnick that ‘major injuries heal’ but he is unable to type well due to the loss of sensation in some fingers. David Remnick has been an editor at The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He is the author of The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.
Describing himself as ‘lucky’, the Indian-origin writer said, ‘I have improved. But I’m not so bad considering what happened.’
Salman Rashid says, ‘I have always thought that my books are more interesting than my life. The world seems to disagree.’
When Salman Rushdie turned 75 last summer, he had every reason to believe he had overcome the threat of murder. After settling in New York in 2000, he lived independently and said he refused to be terrorized.
However, there were times when this threat was manifesting itself. In 2012, during the annual autumn meeting of world leaders at the United Nations, he attended a small press conference with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and asked him if an Iranian foundation would be willing to pay for Salman Rushdie’s head. Millions of dollars in prize money has been eliminated.
Ahmadinejad smiled and said ‘Salman Rushdie, where is he now? There is no news about it. Is he in America? If he is in America, you should not broadcast this information for his safety.’
In his third memoir, ‘Joseph Anton’, published in 2012, he wrote that ‘there was no such thing as absolute security. There were just different levels of insecurity. They have to learn to live with it. He understood very well that his assassination would not require the joint efforts of Revolutionary Guards or Hezbollah. A scattered single person could easily do this. But I realized that it was a long time ago, and that the world is moving on.’
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered Rushdie’s assassination in 1988 due to the blasphemous nature of the book he wrote, after which he remained in hiding for several years.
The words ‘only winners’
Rushdie was asked if he thought it was a mistake to relax his guard in recent times.
‘I’ve been asking myself that question, and I don’t know the answer.’
He said that three quarters of his life as a writer is after this fatwa. ‘In a way you can’t regret your life.’
Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from New Jersey, was arrested shortly after the attack and has denied the assault charges.
“I blame him,” Salman Rushdie said simply.
‘Victory City’ which means victorious city is a translation of a historical legend written in Sanskrit. It is his 15th novel and was written before the attack.
The novel tells the story of the young orphan Pampa Kampana, who is blessed with magical powers by a goddess and finds the city of Basnaga, which translates as Victory City, in modern India.
While not promoting the book in person, Salman Rushdie has taken to social media and often shares press reviews of his new novel.
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On Monday, she posted a photo of herself on Twitter with one eye covered by dark glasses, with the caption: ‘The photo in @NewYorker is dramatic and powerful, but personally I don’t like it. It seems.’
The publisher’s synopsis adds that ‘the life of Pampa Campana over the next 250 years, from the literal sowing of a bag of magical seeds to its tragic destruction by human means, namely the arrogance of those in power, Basanaga’s Deeply connected with life.’
The novel ends with the statement: ‘Words are conquerors.’
Born in Mumbai in 1947, Salman published his first novel ‘Grimes’ in 1975 and achieved worldwide fame six years later with ‘Midnight’s Children’ which won him the Booker Prize.
‘Victory City’ will be released in the UK on Thursday.
Currently he is thinking about the sequel of ‘Joseph Anton’. At first he was not happy with the idea, ‘because it seemed to be thrust upon me – an attack demanding that I should write about it.’
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2024-08-23 16:53:19
