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Salman Rushdie: "What happens tomorrow is more important than what happened yesterday."
Photo: Teutopress / IMAGO
Almost six months after the assassination attempt on him, Salman Rushdie is still suffering physically and mentally.
“I found it very, very difficult to write.
I sit down to write and nothing happens.
I write, but it's a combination of emptiness and junk, stuff I write and erase the next day.
I'm not out of this forest yet," the British-Indian author told The New Yorker magazine in an interview published on Monday.
Rushdie, 75, was attacked and seriously injured by a man at a literary event in upstate New York in mid-August - he has been blind in one eye since then.
Rushdie has been persecuted by religious fanatics for decades.
In 1989, the then Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for the writer to be killed because of the novel »The Satanic Verses«.
Rushdie does not blame those responsible for the public event where he was attacked with the knife.
After the assassination, criticism was raised because there were no metal detectors at the event through which one could have drawn attention to the attacker's weapon.
Instead, controls were limited to searching the audience for drinks they had brought with them.
"I've tried to avoid accusation and bitterness over the past few years," says Rushdie.
“I try to look forward and not backward.
What happens tomorrow is more important than what happened yesterday.«
Nevertheless, sleeping is not always easy for him: "There were nightmares - not exactly what happened, but just scary." But otherwise he's fine, says Rushdie.
He could get up and walk around.
Typing is difficult for him because he has lost feeling in some of his fingers.
It was a "colossal attack".
Rushdie's new book, Victory City, is due out in English on Tuesday.
The publication of the German translation is planned for April.
cbu/dpa
