Salman Rushdie: “Darkness is the word that best defines this present” | Culture | EUROtoday

With the precise lens of his glasses obscured, like a patch, with a broad smile and affable tone, the author Salman Rushdie (Bombay, 78 years previous) appeared this Thursday earlier than almost 100 Spanish-speaking journalists by videoconference. The cause for the busy digital assembly was his new ebook, The penultimate act (Random House), printed within the United States final fall and now reaching bookstores in Spanish.

With this new title Rushdie demonstrates his unstoppable artistic vitality. “I have no plans to retire. I regret that Julian Barnes has announced that this will be his last book. I hope he changes his mind,” he commented. In 2023 he offered the bold novel Victoria City, through which he invented a late medieval metropolis, and a 12 months later he printed Knifethe memoirs of the brutal assault he suffered in 2022 that just about ended his life. Rushdie had lived in hiding for greater than a decade after Iran threatened him in 1989 over his novel The satanic verses, and when that appeared like a factor of the previous, the stabbings arrived. A documentary by Alex Gibney (Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie) about all that has simply been offered at Sundance and the author acknowledged that he’s assured that it’ll quickly discover distribution. “When it was screened, well, it’s a horror movie that becomes a love story,” he stated.

Rushdie, one of many voices that shook British literature within the eighties together with fellow generations equivalent to Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro, returns in The penultimate act the story, after greater than three many years with out publishing tales, with the 5 reunited within the new ebook. “It has grown in an unpremeditated way. I wrote a first text with a ghost and it turned out to be short, so I put it aside. Then other stories that happened in India, the United Kingdom and the United States were added,” he defined. These are the locations the place you’ve spent your life. “Home is plural. India is too big, so my home is a few neighborhoods in Bombay. In London I have family and friends and I have been in the United States for more than 25 years. We live in an era of movement and migration and this has to do with multiple identity,” he stated.

Borges and his Fictions He recalled that that they had an affect on him throughout his scholar years and, in his speak with the press, he defended quick texts: “Stories allow you to write something serious that can be read in depth.” In a type of contained within the new ebook he returns to his legendary and massive novel midnight youngsters. “When I start working, the place in which I place the story is very important and in that story I returned to the neighborhood where I grew up. In the story I wanted to talk about the ridiculous nature of the super-rich and also the miracle of art.” United Kingdom, with a tribute to EM Forster, whom he met throughout his college years at King’s College in Cambridge, and the mathematician Alan Turing (who additionally studied there though within the Nineteen Thirties); The United States and India seem in these tales in which there’s additionally a “Spanish” one, impressed, as he defined, by his go to to the Prado Museum on his final journey to Madrid. Goya’s work and Bosco’s room, with The extraction of the stone of insanity They seem in one of many tales. “I have often thought of Goya as an inspiration. There are resonances in his story with the world today,” he acknowledged.

The theme round which this assortment revolves is the “final act in the production and life of artists, not just writers.” Rushdie feels that seeing demise up shut has impressed him to deal with this concern. “Beethoven faced it furiously and still composed the Ninth Symphony. Dylan Thomas wrote the verse ‘rage, rage, at the fading of the light’ and Picasso’s final works are today more appreciated for their mastery,” he reflected. “When I was young I wrote about young people and now about how artists face the end.”

Literature as a form of resistance

Are books useful to overcome these dark times? Literature, he stated, can be a form of resistance and survival. “It is the best way I have found to respond to the world I live in, because writing changes as the world changes.” The closing phrase of his ebook (“our words fail us”) in essentially the most allegorical story of the gathering is a “warning”, as he famous: “The common does not work, communication does not flow. The deep division in the United States is very alarming, where one side does not understand what those opposite are saying, the language has been broken and it is a very serious problem for societies.”

Rushdie averted commenting on the state of affairs in Iran (“I’m bad with prophecies and I’ve had problems with prophets before”). He did remark, nevertheless, on the banning of books in US colleges, which he described as an issue and a violation of the First Amendment. In the tip, he isn’t positive that literature is “useful,” however what a author hopes to construct are small worlds through which readers get pleasure from, cry and chuckle.