In the Victory Citypublished on Wednesday 6 September by Actes Sud, Salman Rushdie asked Zerelda Li, one of the characters in his new novel, to say: “I learned that the world is not limited in beauty, but also relentless, cruel, greedy, cowardly and ruthless. » This cowardly and cruel world, the writer knows it better than anyone. About a year ago, on August 12, 2022, as he was preparing to give a lecture in Chautauqua, near Lake Erie, New York, a Muslim fundamentalist named Hadi Matar lunged at him and stabbed him twelve times. Twelve punches in less than thirty seconds, including three to the neck, four to the stomach, and one to the right eye, but he lost, as did the use of his left hand.

For thirty-four years Salman Rushdie suffered from the fatwa issued against him in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini after the issuance of that fatwa. satanic verse (Christian Bourgois, 1989). After more than three decades in hiding, the writer chooses to live, no longer as an escorted hermit, but as a free man. Unfortunately, just as he had feared Truth language (Actes Sud, 2022), a fatwa is a death sentence that never dies. Just to say the least, he noted: “When you hear it for the first time, you understand that it will stick to your feet, like a ball and chain, for the rest of your life. »

Miraculously surviving this attack, this naturalized American writer of British origin – he lives in New York, where he has been a “Honored Author in Residence” at New York University since 2015 – has never lost his sense of humor or his legendary self-mocking. . But he admits that he experienced a period of severe post-traumatic stress which, for a long time, hindered any attempt to write. This summer, he confided in New Yorkers : “I find it very, very difficult to write” after the attack. He said he sat down and no one came, on the contrary “a mix of emptiness and bullshit”. With the help of time, Rushdie, who had recovered, found a desire to put on paper, not a fiction, but a brief work about the attack itself and the reflections it inspired in him.

cathartic book

In a lengthy interview he gave to the weekly Point (August 31), the author talks about the nightmare he had after and also before the attack, namely about a “Who’s the gladiator? [l]‘attacked with a sharp object’. Then he explained: “I understand that until I finish another story, which happened to me, I will not be able to write anything else. (…) One reason to write about what really happened is so you can write about something else later. I just need to forget what happened. It only lasts twenty-seven seconds, but you can hurt a lot of people in twenty-seven seconds. I never wanted to think of books as therapy. But we must admit it is still useful. One way to support the event. »

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