Salman Rushdie gives his first interview after the stabbing and feels unable to write

The writer Salman Rushdie, stabbed to death by a Muslim fanatic last August, feels incapable of writing at the moment, apart from having a hand that is almost paralyzed, something that prevents him from typing a text.

In the first interview he has given since the attack and published today by

in twenty pages, Rushdie, 75, says that his creativity, which never faltered even after writing

— the novel that earned her a death sentence from the Iranian regime — is now deeply affected.

“I have what is called post-traumatic stress disorder.

I am having many, many difficulties writing.

I sit down to write, and nothing happens.

I write, but it is a combination of emptiness and waste, things that I write and erase the next day.

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The sensation of sitting and waiting for inspiration seems "depressing", although thanks to the therapist with whom he had already been dealing with since before the attack, it is very clear to him that he does not intend to "adopt the role of victim".

Rushdie's latest novel

which was already finished before the attack, goes on sale worldwide tomorrow Tuesday, and there will be no presentation campaign on its part, but it does not rule out going to London soon for the premiere of a play still pending and titled

about Helen of Troy

The photo in @NewYorker is dramatic and powerful but this, more prosaically, is what I actually look like.

😊 pic.twitter.com/ydrV7WvWgE

—Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) February 6, 2023

The writer, as described by the author of the long article-interview, David Remnick, has lost vision in one eye and the full-page photo that illustrates the article shows him wearing glasses with a dark lens to hide the affected eye, making it that does not prevent us from appreciating the long scar that crosses one side of his face.

The dozen stab wounds that the attacker inflicted on him have also left his left hand almost useless, since he has badly damaged the ulnar nerve and has lost sensation in two fingers and part of the palm of his hand.

All this prevents him from typing, and when it comes to doing it by hand, he says that he writes “slower”.

Not only has he lost forty kilos after the attack and lost one of his eyes, and suffers from mobility problems in his left arm, but now he has an involuntary movement in one lip that luckily does not prevent him from "speaking as eloquently as ever". insists the author.

Rushdie has shelved a project he had on an upcoming novel inspired by both Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann.

Although at first he was "irritated" by the idea of ​​writing about the attack itself, he now does not rule it out, and thinks that it should be a story written in the first person.

As for her safety, Rushdie, who all but gave it up after moving to New York nearly two decades ago, now admits he'll have to think about it.

For the moment, and after the first six weeks of hospitalization, he has lived confined to his own home, with the only exception being frequent visits to different doctors.

The trial against her attacker Hadi Matar is expected to begin next year.

He could get 25 years in jail for attempted second-degree murder, plus another seven years for stabbing Henry Reese, another writer who tried to stop his attack on Rushdie (and probably saved his life by doing so).