London:

Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie has revealed the decision behind not naming his would-be killer in his new memoir Knife: Meditation After an Attempted Murder was to rob him of the “oxygen of publicity”.

Speaking from New York at a literary event at London’s Southbank Center on Sunday, the 76-year-old Mumbai-born British-American novelist was chatting with author and critic Erica Wagner about her account of the brutal knife attack on stage. In which he lost sight in one eye permanently.

He credited former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with the phrase “oxygen of propaganda”, which she used in reference to violent attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the 1980s, as the inspiration behind mentioning her attacker. A” in the book

“That phrase, the oxygen of publicity, somehow stuck in my head. And I thought, OK, so this guy had his 27 seconds of fame and now he shouldn’t be a nobody. I don’t know his name. Gonna get it, I don’t want his name in my book,” Rushdie said.

“So, I use this initial ‘A’ because I thought he was many things: an assassin, an attacker, an antagonist; he was many things, he was an ass,” he said with a smile. said .

The acclaimed author was on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in August 2022 when he was stabbed 10 times by convict Hadi Matar, who was in prison awaiting trial for attempted murder. But the author revealed that he felt no anger towards his attacker and that the new book was his way of taking control of the narrative.

“What it did, I feel, is it gave me control over the narrative. So, instead of being a man on stage in a pool of blood, I’m a man, writing a book about a person. The stage with a pool of blood and it felt like it gave me back my story, which I’m telling in my own way, and it felt good.

Rushdie is best known as a writer of magical realism, attributed to his early childhood in India and the fantastic stories he grew up with.

“I’m very down to earth in my worldview, I don’t believe in miracles and things like that but somehow my books always have … I think a lot of it has to do with growing up in a world To do. India, where all the stories you hear for the first time are fantastical, fairy-tale-like and magical,” said the author, who won the Booker of Bookers for ‘Midnight’s Children’ – a story about modern India.

“I always thought that was a great way to approach things and that somehow you could get closer to the truth about human nature without realism. Also, I thought the world had abandoned realism. We We don’t live in realism, we live in surrealism,” he noted.

But about his survival from the brutal knife attack, Rushdie has a more pragmatic view: “Many people have told me that my survival was a miracle. I don’t believe that any kind of divine hand reached down and helped me. But I believe in other kinds of miracles, I believe in medical miracles and I believe in the miracles of surgeons.

“Much of human life is determined by chance … the fact is that he tried very hard to kill me, but actually, he missed.” The event, which was streamed globally, was part of the Southbank Centre’s Spring Season of Literature and the Spoken Word, which brings together internationally renowned writers, artists, historians, politicians and journalists.

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