Salman Rushdie's Impossible Island

The best way to check the stature of Salman Rushdie as a writer is to immerse yourself in his extraordinary memoir,

(2012), not because it is his best work, which it probably is anyway, but because of the depth and quality of the literary language, for the mastery of prose, and because in it he goes beyond his most characteristic register, fantasy in its purest form, to give a lesson in sobriety as a master of non-fiction.

There are more keys in that fundamental book: the profile of him as a public intellectual, the profile of him as a citizen committed to directly political and social issues.

But there is also, hidden, the empire of fiction.

's title

responds to secret coordinates.

These are the first names of two of his fundamental writers, models whose example he followed since he began to take his first literary steps: Joseph Conrad, who narrated the same world that he would narrate in a postcolonial key, and Anton Chekhov, master of the transience of short prose.

He entrusted himself to tell the story of his life, of which the central section is the relationship of the difficult circumstances in which he had to live in secret as a result of the death sentence that was imposed on him for having written a supposedly blasphemous book. ,

(1988).

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Writer Salman Rushdie stabbed in the neck while giving a lecture in New York

If you only have time to read one Salman Rushdie title, I highly recommend

.

There is much more, of course.

As a novel, although many despise it saying that its notoriety is of a non-literary nature,

is a work of great interest, stylistically and conceptually, both for the audacity of the prose and for the literary vision on which it is based, and for be a characteristic display of the features that shape his writing: unbridled fantasy and a sober handling of the keys of the most restrained realism.

Literally, Rushdie has always moved on an unstable balance.

His greatest achievement as a storyteller is

(1981), a novel with which he won the Booker Prize, which he revalidated twice, as the best Booker on the 25th and 40th anniversary of the history of the prestigious prize.

The novel begins with an indelible image, when the hands of the clock mark the arrival of midnight, on August 15, 1947, when the independence of India and Pakistan from the British Empire was proclaimed, giving rise to the birth of two nations, presided over by in an extremely contradictory way, due to the sign of two religions that he always wanted not to be antagonistic, Hinduism and Islam.

From there, Rushdie displays a formidable historical frieze that investigates the keys to coexistence between the two new nations.

Rushdie, who was born in Bombay into a Muslim family, was not a religious man,

Salman Rushdie, with a copy of 'The Satanic Verses' in 1995.aSSOCIATED pRESS

Salman Rushdie is a writer of volcanic power, an unleashed force of nature, which crystallized into a formidable output of both fiction and essay.

After the publication of a collection of essays, entitled

last fall, and after having recreated Cervantes'

in a delirious key in a novel with the same title, originally published in 2019, in which he carries out a Inquiry about the relationship between fantasy and reality in the technological age, a new novel entitled

is announced for next February

.

In the arc

to

Rushdie left behind several memorable works, including

(2001),

(2005) and

(2008) in the field of the novel.

The formula with which he came up had its roots in various branches of the fantastic literature tradition, on the one hand the legacy of Latin American magical realism, particularly as cultivated by García Márquez, for whom he professed boundless admiration;

on the other, the unfiltered lesson learned from

, where you have to look for the true root of his work, and which crystallized in such notable narratives as

(1995) or

a children's book he wrote for his son in 1990.

Salman Rushdie's narrative world is based on a solid conception of literature, on which he reflected acutely in collections such as

(1994), a key book in which the writer intelligently unites the legacy of the two literary traditions to which referred to in the title of the work.

His intellectual curiosity led him to establish relationships with personalities as remarkable and different as Edward Said, whose theses on the end of colonialism in literature he fully absorbed and put into practice in his work, or Thomas Pynchon, whom he met personally at a dinner at which he reported in a hilarious chronicle.

In New York, his adoptive city, Salman Rushdie is a well-known, loved and respected character, who even in the most dangerous moments of his sentence made public appearances.

Courageous, agile, vital, overflowing with energy, always active and politically committed, the fatwa he suffered led him to embrace the cause of freedom of expression in literature, turning to the creation of the Voices of the World festival, organized annually by the organization of PEN writers, a festival imbued with the same spirit as their work.

At the time of writing these lines, the city that the writer wanted to make his own is holding its breath, awaiting news about his state of health.

Born in India, educated in England, well versed in British and Anglo-Indian literary traditions,

(2017), through whose pages the sinister shadow of Donald Trump is projected.

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