Author Salman Rushdie, who marks his return to the literary world after a violent attack last year left him permanently injured, says he wants no pity.
“I’ve always tried very hard not to play the part of the victim,” he recently said New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick. The story marked Rushdie’s first interview since he was stabbed.
His return as a public figure also included a recent real-life visit to the New York City office of his agent, Andrew Wylie; promotion for his new book, “Victory City,” completed before the stabbing; and a vow to shun feelings of bitterness in western New York six months after the attack.
In 1989, Rushdie defied advice to keep a low profile after the late Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, put a virtual contract on his life in response to his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which many Muslims considered blasphemous or at least outrageous. found disrespectful.
Rushdie also expressed little desire to embrace the life of a hermit after the midsummer violence at a public, open-air discussion in New York’s Chautauqua.
Still, he acknowledged that the attack has caused him dislocation and pain. Wylie has said Rushdie will not be going on a book tour to promote the publication of “Victory City”.
Violence quickly unfolded on August 12 at the Chautauqua Institution, where Rushdie sat on stage, awaiting the start of a discussion that was part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series.
A person dressed in black rushed onto the stage and Rushdie was stabbed multiple times, authorities said. Wylie said afterwards that Rushdie’s injuries, which included a pierced eye, damaged liver and severed nerves, would be “life-changing”.
He said Rushdie would likely lose the use of one eye, and today Rushdie wears glasses with a dark-tinted right lens instead of an eye patch. While Rushdie’s physiological recovery appears to be nearing completion, he told The New Yorker that his mind still needs time.
“I found it very, very difficult to write,” Rushdie said. “I sit down to write and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of emptiness and clutter, things that I write and delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest, really.”
Rushdie spent six weeks in hospital rooms recovering, The New Yorker reported in his post, published online on Monday and scheduled for print on Feb. 13.
Defendant Hadi Matar, then 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, was arrested and awaits trial on charges of second-degree attempted murder and, charged with assaulting Chautauqua moderator Henry Reese, second-degree assault.
He pleaded not guilty. A lawyer appointed to represent him did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rushdie said he had no doubts about his lack of security that day. “I blame him,” he told The New Yorker, referring to the suspect.
Rushdie, the product of a Muslim family in Bombay who sent him to Cambridge for his education, quickly became recognized as a literary star when his 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children, won critical acclaim and a Booker Prize.
Though he was wary and used safety following instances of dissolute responses from the Muslim world to 1988’s “The Satanic Verses” which depicted a Mohammed character as human and flawed, over time Rushdie rejected the idea of living in exile or fear.
Rushdie’s 16th novel, Victory City, seems to echo his sharp, self-critical view of humanity. It is presented as the secret history of a circa-1500 empire of humanist ideals, including gender equality, that it failed to realize. a New York Times review said it exhibits “haunting, eerie, predictive power”.
After moving to New York in 2000, with the virtual bounty of Khomeini’s fatwa, or religious ruling, still hanging over his head, Rushdie seemed to act as if it never happened, as he was seen enjoying the restaurants and the nightlife of the city. other celebrity.
The display of a good life under the threat of death may have been a mistake, Rushdie told The New Yorker, because people seemed to hate it.
“Not only did I live, but I tried to live well,” he said. “Bad mistake.”
The attack on Chautauqua might have changed the world’s opinion of him, he joked. “Get fifteen stab wounds, much better,” he said.
He said he wants readers to receive him through his books and not think about how such a traumatic event would damage his life timeline, even though he admitted the incident tested his resolve.
“You just sit there saying, ‘Someone put a knife in me! Poor me,’ which is what I sometimes think,” Rushdie said. “It hurts. But what I don’t think is, that’s what I want people who read the book to think. I want them to be gripped by the story, to be carried away.”
He seems determined to keep digging into his soul for his next novel. His characters’ voices, he has said, emerge over time.
“All I can do is this,” he said. “As long as there’s a story that I think is worth spending my time on, then I will.”