NEW YORK – The literary earth paid tribute this Friday to the author Salman Rushdie, significantly injured exactly a 7 days in the past, in the coronary heart of New York, summoned by PEN The usa, the most prestigious writers’ club, and by the Huge Apple Public Library.
The occasion, which according to the organizers was followed live by Rushdie himself from the clinic where by he is hospitalized, took put on the techniques of the well-known library headquarters, a historic creating positioned a couple hundred meters from Times Square.
Paul Auster, Gay Talese, Jeff Eugenides and a dozen other lesser-known authors took the floor and in quite a few cases skipped the script: while they experienced been requested to read passages from Rushdie’s operate, numerous most well-liked to notify their encounters and reminiscences that backlink them to the author of “The Satanic Verses”, the work that attained him a fatwa and a death sentence in 1989 by the Iranian routine.
The values underlying Rushdie’s prolific function have been evoked by writers as beacons that illuminate a planet in conflict: variety of ideas, cross-breeding, suitable to free speech, independence of the press, adore of guides, and in the long run, “the celebration of life”, maybe the most felt expression during the hour that this tribute lasted.
A dozen PEN activists have equipped on their own with posters with emblematic phrases written by Rushdie, these as the a person that proclaimed that “art is not amusement at greatest, it is revolution”, or “If we are not positive of our freedom, we are not free of charge. “
YOU Had been Finished TO BE OUR HERO
“You didn’t check with for the job of hero: you just required to be authorized to compose in peace, but you ended up turning out to be our hero,” said British Tina Brown, turning to Rushdie, to go through underneath the paragraphs in which the writer claims the relevance of the push, the “vital skepticism of journalists and their consistent questioning about electric power”.
The most anticipated of the celebration was Paul Auster, who, dressed in black and with a straight deal with – he experienced just missing a niece and her son to an overdose – recalled that Rushdie’s operate is like the finest literature, which “opens the Universe pushes the boundaries of languages, enlarges the environment and helps us to detect with those who are not like us “.
Author Siri Husvedt – an American of Norwegian dad and mom – praised the range in which Rushdie grew up: born in India, educated in England and resident in the United States, and claimed that his price is “in not struggling from the absence of roots. , but on the opposite, take pleasure in its lots of roots ».
Irishman Colum McCaan, still one more immigrant to New York, claimed the globe need to stand in solidarity with Rushdie as it did when the attack on Charlie Hebdo journal in Paris, and as the earth then reported “Je suis Charlie” , now it truly is time to say “Nous sommes Salman” (We are Salman).
Rushdie’s braveness in not succumbing to self-censorship or silence following his dying sentence in 1989 was also highlighted by quite a few of his colleagues, these as American Amy Properties, who recalled that artists like to chat about their work and not censorship, but an individual has to do it, like Rushdie himself, mainly because the liberty to compose “is like air: only when you pass up it do you come to feel the have to have”.
But not almost everything was dominated by gravity or solemnity: maybe to emulate Rushdie’s jovial character, Iranian poet Roya Hakakian (an additional “exile” in New York) browse excerpts from a kid’s reserve by Rushdie, “Harun and the sea of stories “.
In a earth dominated by the “factories of disappointment”, a narrator named Rashid nevertheless keeps the flame of the imagination alive, but a single day his stories run out and it will be his son Harún, as a result of a thousand adventures, to assistance him get better his reward traveling to the Sea of Stories.
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