Almost two years after the knife attack that almost killed him, Salman Rushdie seems changed but also practically the same. Interviewed this week in the Manhattan offices of his longtime publisher, Random House, he is thinner, paler, scarred and blind in his right eye. He talks about the “iron” in his soul and the struggle to write his next full-length work of fiction while concentrating on promoting Knife, a memoir about his stabbing that he agreed to if only because he had no other choice. option.
But he remains the engaging, articulate, uncensored defender of artistic freedom and the ingenious creator of Midnight’s Children and other lauded works of fiction. He has been, and remains, a hopeless optimist, he admits. He also has that strange sense of confidence that can only be achieved by surviving your worst nightmare. “In Midnight’s Children I wrote about optimism as a disease. People get infected and I think I got a lifelong infection,” he says.
Chronologically, he is almost 77 years old, the age his father was when he died, an age he considers something of a milestone in his own quest to exceed expectations. She internally feels like she is 25 years old, he claims.
A self-described nice kid who wasn’t destined to get into trouble, Rushdie has had a life far beyond his own limitless dreams. The 1981 Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children established him as a dynamic voice in postcolonial literature. Nearly a decade later, he would achieve a terrifying level of fame with The Satanic Verses and the call for his death issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran.
Rushdie had to hide. But by August 2022, he had deemed himself safe enough to head to a conference in Western New York with minimal security: No one was on hand to stop a young assailant, Hadi Matar, from taking the stage and stabbing him repeatedly. Matar, then 24, has been charged with attempted murder and assault.
In this interview, Rushdie talked about why he wrote the explicit account of his attack, what he has learned about himself, and what he might do next.
—When you started working at Knife, did you have any fears?
—I was worried about being traumatized again, that was the worry. And the first chapter, which describes the actual attack in great detail, was very difficult to write.
—You went straight to the point.
-Yeah. You know, don’t beat around the bush. Because
—Writers talk a lot about not knowing how they really felt about something…
—…Until you write it.
—And that’s how it was for you?
-Yeah. Also, I have a very good therapist and, in fact, this is a book written with the help of a therapist as well. She talked to him every week and told him what she was doing. And, in fact, it was useful. Very clear thinking and helped me clarify my thinking. So that was something I hadn’t done before.
—You have discovered that it is harder than you thought.
—If you had told me this was going to happen and how I would deal with it, I wouldn’t have been very optimistic about my chances.
—Was there that fear in the back of your mind? Is it possible that she can’t handle this?
—I’m not good with fear. I’m not good with pain. You know, I’m just a regular guy hoping those things don’t happen, that you don’t have to deal with the fear and the pain.
—I remember you wrote about how, after the fatwa, there was a period when fiction was a struggle. Where is he in that place now?
—I don’t have the next novel. I hope to, but the only fiction I’ve written since finishing this book is some sort of history. It’s something I don’t really know what to do with. It’s a story about 60 pages, 65 pages long. And I’m not sure whether to think of it as a novella or whether I want to add to it and make it more, or I want to cut it in half and make it into a story.
—Much of Knife is about getting your life back. Is a measure of having regressed “I have the next novel”?
—That will feel good. I’m always happiest when I have a book to write.
—I imagine there are hundreds of different ways to consider attack and damage. But one way is: has it intruded on your imagination?
—Well, that’s how it was. For six months after the attack, she couldn’t even think about writing. He wasn’t physically strong enough. And when I sat down to write, initially I didn’t want to write this book. In fact, I wanted to go back to fiction, I tried and it seemed stupid to me. I just thought, “Look, something big happened to you.” And pretending it wasn’t like that and continuing to tell fairy tales would seem like… I would have felt like I was avoiding the topic.
—Something that catches my attention in this book is that when the moment comes, there is a voice inside you that says: “Well, here it is.” Even when he had returned to a practically normal life.
—I thought about it in the early years, obviously, when the danger level was very high. I thought about how someone could get out of a crowd and I had had dreams about that before.
—Was there ever that fear that maybe this was just your destiny?
—No, I don’t believe in destiny.
—What do you believe in?
—Well, anti-destiny.
-Coincidence?
—I believe in taking charge of my life.
—One of the things I remember thinking when I first heard the news about the attacker was how young he was. He was not born when you wrote Satanic Verses.
—No, not for 10 years or something like that.
—It’s as if you and that book were somehow fixed in the subconscious.
—And it’s not even the book, because no one bothers to read it. It’s just the name of that book associated with me, demonized as a bad guy. But I don’t know this man, you know? I mean, I know how little we’ve been told: that his mother said after he returned from visiting his father in Lebanon that he was very different, much more religiously oriented, critical of her for not teaching him properly. about religion. And then, for four years, in a basement.
—It’s as if it were a kind of abstraction.
—I don’t know why it became me that after all this long time in the basement, playing computer games and watching videos. Why he became me, she became obsessed.
—When you were growing up, did you imagine yourself as the type of person who would get into trouble?
-Absolutely. He was a very calm child. He behaved very well to me. My sister, a year younger than me, was the naughty one. She hit people for me and I got her out of trouble.
—Talk about your happy childhood. But in Midnight’s Children, as in many of his works, he tries to provoke some kind of reaction.
—You’re trying to write a great book, you know?
—And a book that he probably knew could make someone unhappy.
—Yes, but who cares, you know?
-Where does it come from?
—I had it as a child. I had confidence that my parents loved and supported me. And I have always been academically excellent. So you grow that way. You give yourself permission to do things. Because they have treated you that way. And also, of course, remember, I was 21 in 1968. I’m a child of the ’60s.
—To what extent do you think it has changed, if at all, compared to two years ago?
—I’m still myself, you know, and I don’t feel other than myself. But there is a little iron in the soul, I think. And I also think that what happens when you see death up close – the closest you can get without dancing the dance of death and going nowhere – stays with you.
-What does that mean?
—It means there is a shadow. It means the presence of the end.
—How old do you feel? Internally.
—(laughing) About 25.
-Really?
—I think one of the great things about writing is that you need a kind of youth to do it, because it requires energy, imagination, dreams. It’s a young man’s game. I’ve said somewhere that when you’re young and you write, you have to feign wisdom. When you’re older and you write, you have to fake energy.
—Can you fake energy?
-Ok I try.
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