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Six months after stabbing, Salman Rushdie says he struggles to write

2023-02-07T07:26:24.712Z


The British writer explains that he suffers from post-traumatic stress. His literary agent Andrew Wylie revealed in October that he had lost the sight of one eye and the use of one hand.


For the first time since nearly dying in a stabbing in the United States last summer, British writer Salman Rushdie has said he struggles to write and suffers from post-traumatic stress.

The famous novelist of Indian origin, naturalized American and who lives in New York, expresses himself in a long article published Monday February 6 by the newspaper of the cultural elites,

The New Yorker

, on the eve of the release in the United States of his last novel, Victory City, the

"epic tale of a woman"

in the 14th century.

His exclusive confession to The New Yorker

editor

, writer David Remnick is titled

Salman Rushdie's Challenge

and accompanied by an hour-long audio interview and a dark black-and-white photo of the 75-year-old intellectual. years old, scarred face and wearing glasses with a black lens on the right eye.

Faced with this shot, which he judged on Twitter to be

"spectacular and powerful"

, Rushdie published another, in color, showing him with the same black lens, but looking more peaceful.

His literary agent Andrew Wylie revealed in October that he had lost the sight of one eye and the use of one hand.

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.

»

Salman Rushdie

While “Victory City” was completed before his August 12, 2022 assault in the northern United States, Salman Rushdie says he

“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"

, confides the writer who has lived since 1989 under the threat of death from a fatwa issued by Iran, after the publication of his book

The Satanic Verses

.

"I'm not out of the woods yet,"

he breathes, warning his interviewer:

"PTSD exists, you know

," using the acronym in English defining post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Even

“if his recovery progresses”

, his agent told

The Guardian

newspaper last week , Rushdie will not make any public promotion for this 15th novel, which comes out on Tuesday in the United States and Thursday in the United Kingdom.

Adored by the elites in the West, hated by Muslim extremists in Iran or Pakistan - some were delighted with his aggression in August - Rushdie is an icon of freedom of expression and still defends power with erudition and his flamboyant style. words in Victory City.

The book tells the epic of Pampa Kampana, a young orphan girl given magical powers by a goddess, who will create the city of Bisnaga - literally "Victory City".

With the mission of

"giving women an equal place in a patriarchal world"

, according to the publisher Penguin Random House, its heroine and poet, who will live nearly 250 years, will also be the witness of

"the pride of those who are in power”

, will witness the rise and then the destruction of Bisnaga and suffer exile.

Her legacy to the world, however, will remain her epic tale, which she buries as a message for future generations.

The novel concludes:

“Words are the only victors”

.

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.

»

American writer Colum McCann on Rushdie

In The

New York Times

, American writer Colum McCann, a friend of Rushdie, claims that he

"says 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.

Born in Bombay in June 1947, just before the partition of India, into a secular Muslim bourgeois family, Rushdie published his first novel

Grimus

in 1975 and became a world celebrity in the 1980s with

The Midnight Children,

which earned him the Booker prize in the UK.

Despite the Iranian fatwa never lifted, Rushdie felt freer and had resumed a life in society in recent years in New York.

On August 12, he was invited to a literary conference in Chautauqua, a small cultural and bucolic town popular with retirees in upstate New York, near Great Lake Erie.

When speaking, a young American of Lebanese origin, suspected of being sympathizers with Shiite Iran, had thrown himself on him, armed with a knife, and had stabbed him a dozen times.

"I knew better but saw what happened, I'm not so bad

," says Salman Rushdie today, adding, however,

"to hold

(his attacker)

responsible"

for his state of health.

Victory City will be released in September in France under its original title, by Actes Sud.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2023-02-07

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