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Salman RushdieHis new book, his 23rd, is also a re-establishment of his career.
“The Eleventh Hour”, consisting of two short stories and three novellas, is his first fictional work since he was brutally stabbed on a New York lecture stage in 2022. His recovery has been physical, psychological – and creative. Finding words for what happened was a painful struggle that culminated with his memoir “Knife”, published in 2024. ImaginationThe ability to imagine was the last and crucial step, like the awakening of nerves once damaged beyond repair.
“When I was writing ‘Knife,’ I couldn’t even think about fantasy. There was no room for it in my mind,” Rushdie told The Associated Press last week. “But almost immediately after I finished the book, before it came out, it was like this door opened in my mind and I was allowed to enter the room of the imagination again.”
On Tuesday, two pieces from his book, “In the South” and “old man In the piazza,” had been completed before the attack. But all five have concerns over age, mortality and memory, understandable for a writer who will turn 79 next year and survived his attack so narrowly that the doctors who rushed to help him initially could not find a pulse.
“The Eleventh Hour” draws from Rushdie’s past, such as his years as a student at Cambridge, and from surprising and mysterious sources. The title character of “The Old Man in the Plaza”, an elderly man regarded as a sage, originates from a scene in the original “Pink Panther” film, when an old pedestrian watches calmly as a wild car chase overtakes him. The novel “Oklahoma” was inspired by an exhibition of Franz Kafka’s papers that included the manuscript of “America”, an unfinished novel about a European immigrant’s journey to America, which Kafka had never seen.
For “Late”, Rushdie hoped for a straightforward story about a student’s relationship with a Cambridge don, inspired by writer EM Forster and World War II code-breaker Alan Turing. But a morbid sentence, which Rushdie does not remember writing, propels “Late” toward the supernatural.
“I initially thought I would have this friendship, this impossible friendship between this young student and this grand old man,” Rushdie said. “And then I sat down to write it, and the sentence I found on my laptop was, ‘When he woke up in the morning, he was dead.’ And I thought, ‘What is that?’ And I literally didn’t know where it came from. I left it on my laptop for 24 hours. I went back and looked at it, and then I thought, ‘You know, well, as it happens, I’ve never written a ghost story.'”
Rushdie will forever bear the scars of the attack, notably the blindness of his right eye, but he has reemerged into public life, with planned appearances everywhere from Manhattan to San Francisco. A native of Mumbai, he moved to England in his teens and has been there for a long time now New Yorker Joe lives there with his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
His most famous novel is “Midnight’s Children”, his magical story of the birth of modern India which won the Booker Prize in 1981. His most famous and infamous work is “The Satanic Verses”, in which a dream sequence about the Prophet Muhammad led to charges of blasphemy, rioting, and a 1989 fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie’s death and he was forced into hiding. Although Iran announced in the late 1990s that it would no longer enforce the decree, Rushdie’s vilification continued: the author’s attacker, Hadi Matar, was not even born when “The Satanic Verses” was published. Peas was found guilty of murder and attempted murder in a state trial and sentenced to 25 years in prison in May. A federal lawsuit is still pending.
Rushdie also spoke with the AP about his heritage, his love of cities and how his near-death experience didn’t make him more spiritual. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: Age is obviously a theme throughout this book, and before the attack you were thinking about it as something like, “Will I be valued in the end?” The idea of. “Does it matter what knowledge I have accumulated?” These are things you think about?
Rushdie: I think about what we probably all think about. What becomes of us in the end? What has our life become connected with? Was it worth it or was it trivial and forgettable? And if you’re an artist, you have an additional question in your mind: will your work last? Not only will you survive, but will the things you build last? Because of course, if you’re a writer like me, that’s what you hope. And, it would be very disappointing to realize that they will disappear.
But I love the fact that “Midnight’s Children”, which was published in 1981, still finds young readers, and that’s very pleasing to me. This feels like a reward in itself.
AP: Another thing that struck me about the book was the extent to which it was a book of stories about stories. The conscious art of storytelling.
Rushdie: Yes, and much more so than others. I think in particular the story called “Oklahoma” is really a story about storytelling and truth and lies.
According to Max Brod (Kafka’s friend and literary executor), Kafka had the idea that his character would appear when oklaholaHe will get some kind of happiness. He will find some kind of solution, some kind of fulfillment there. And I’ve often thought that it’s hard to imagine a Kafka book with a happy ending, so maybe it’s just as well that he didn’t write the last chapter. The Oklahoma in the story is entirely fictional. I mean, he never went anywhere. He never came to America, Kafka. But it becomes like a metaphor for hope and perfection.
AP: Is this what America was like for you?
Rushdie: That’s why I came here to live, because I was so excited about America. New York City was a place that excited me when I first moved here in my 20s, when I was still working in advertising. But I just thought, “I just want to come and put myself out here and see what happens.” I just had a feeling it would be good for me. And then, you know, life intervened and I didn’t do it for a long time. And then around the turn of the century, I said to myself, “Well, if you’re ever going to do it, you better do it, because otherwise, when are you going to do it?”
AP: I remember that after the fatwa, people would call you a recluse. But this is clearly not true.
Rushdie: I like being in the world. You know, one of the things I often say to students when they’re following the “write what you know” mantra, I said, “Yes, write what you know, but only if what you know is really interesting. And otherwise find something, write about it.” I always take the example of Charles Dickens, because one thing that impresses me about Dickens is how wide the range of his characters is, that he can write about all walks of life. He could write about pickpockets and archbishops with equal credibility, and that would mean he went out to find things out.
AP: Is there a part of you that likes the idea of being the old man in the piazza where people come?
Rushdie: I don’t want to be any kind of guru or oracle. I don’t have answers. I hope I have interesting questions.
AP: Does writing a novel feel different to you than it did three years ago?
Rushdie: No, I feel like I’m very happy to have it back. I hope that people reading the book will find a special kind of joy in it as I certainly felt in writing it.
AP: Did any of this make you more spiritual?
Rushdie: I’m afraid it hasn’t. It has not performed that service.
AP: Do you still agree with your friend Christopher Hitchens (the late author of “God Is Not Great”)?
Rushdie: Hitch and I are still united in that area of distrust, aggressive distrust.