The book that Salman Rushdie wrote before the attack: a novel horrified by violence and ignorance

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"Majestic, Parvati sits next to Shiva in Kailasa. All creatures bow before her, unsure of attracting her attention. Sometimes Parvati seems restless...", writes Roberto Calasso in

(Anagram), his dedicated book to Hindu myths Parvati, goddess of intelligence and motherhood, wife of Shiva, the creator of the universe, reincarnation of Sati, Shiva's wife who sacrificed herself, mother of Ganesha, is

(Random House), which is published on February 9.

In one of her forms, called Pampa, Parvati gives her name to the protagonist, a nine-year-old girl: in fourteenth-century southern India, the girl, Pampa Kampana, receives powers beyond imagination from the goddess who gives her name. human imagination: he will use them to create -with his imagination, out of nothing- a fantastic empire, which will last for three centuries, the Vijayanagara empire, "the city of victory",

to be more exact.

The story of Pampa, who will live 247 years - the novel is divided into four parts: Birth, Exile, Glory, Fall - is

, the widows of a battle lost by their men, born with pain to give dignity, rights and power to men and women.

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Literature.

The year the world wanted the Nobel for Salman Rushdie

• Drafting: LUIS ALEMANYMadrid

The year the world wanted the Nobel for Salman Rushdie

Literature.

Salman Rushdie already warned in 2017: "They will never give me the Nobel for fear of Islamists"

• Writing: PABLO PARDO (Correspondent) Washington DC

Salman Rushdie already warned in 2017: "They will never give me the Nobel for fear of Islamists"

Rushdie thus returns to the India of his origins, to the India of

(Random House Literature) and many other books;

If there is a less strong part of his work, it is precisely the American part.

In

there is an oblique and delicious reference to Rushdie's previous novel, published in 2020,

(Seix Barral).

Who is the author of

?

Cervantes, an exile kidnapped by pirates, held prisoner for five years before liberation, an incredible story in itself?

Or is it Cide Hamete Benengeli, the historian of whom Cervantes himself tells us that he is the author of most of the work?

Or the translator from the Toledo market who was paid 25 pounds of sultanas?

In

, Rushdie explains that Pampa's manuscript, hidden in a jar at the time of her death, is found (by whom? how?) and translated from Sanskrit into English by the anonymous "author" of

. ;

once again, Rushdie enjoys disappearing (he even did so in his autobiography, which takes the title from the name of his alter ego, Joseph Anton, like Conrad and Chekhov, a pseudonym used for security reasons during the years of his flight from thugs in the ayatollahs).

Ciudad Victoria

is, then, the translation of

, 24,000 verses found inside an urn and

, in which -from the first pages- the reader is mesmerized by that disappeared kingdom that one day it occupied all of South India, "the warrior women, the mountains of gold, the generosity of her spirit and her moments of evil, her weaknesses and her strengths."

In

, Rushdie revels in his complete mastery of the technical means of writing, taking the reader on a wondrous and bleak journey, 21 chapters loftily titled like a chivalrous novel, imagining a drug-addicted peddler (drug) television, of Indian origin, who leaves in search of his Dulcinea, a television star.

Ciudad Victoria

, on the other hand, is a completely sober novel, magically secular despite telling a story of Hindu gods,

and resigned to the final victory of ignorance and cruelty.

The city of victory, the empire of women, will end up destroyed for futile reasons, all the more depressing the more the reader remembers the majesty of its beauty.

It is, paradoxically, a realistic novel, about 2023, and its reading

that hit Rushdie on August 12 of last year, 33 years after the

, and left him seriously injured, wounds of which will never recover.

Rushdie, who for decades dedicated his fame to helping fellow writers who were victims of dictatorships, insisted at every Pen Club act he attended that there was always an empty chair on stage.

He did it to remind the writers on the run, in prison, that they could not attend.

Now that

makes its entrance into the world, Rushdie will not be there, still recovering from being stabbed by a man who, of course, admitted that he had not read

, and that he had acted on hearsay.

The empty chair is now yours.

Like the protagonist of

, Saleem Sinai, born in Bombay on August 15, 1947 at the stroke of midnight, at the time India was proclaiming its independence, Rushdie, born on June 19, 1947, he was "mysteriously handcuffed to history."

Returning to that novel, Rushdie's second, winner of the Booker in 1981, "a monster without form", as he himself described it using the famous phrase of Henry James, can be seen in the young writer's ambition to narrate chronologically, in full detail. , the major events in India from the 1919 Amritsar massacre to the end of the state of emergency in 1977.

Since then, Rushdie has repeatedly confirmed - contradicting critics, who spoke more simply and trivially of "magical realism", a facile and versatile label - that he wrote the book to investigate the ways in which memory retrieves and recreates the past. .

tries to do the same: here Rushdie has no more political stones to remove from his shoes -Indira Gandhi, the widow of

, took him to court, forcing the publisher to remove a sentence from subsequent editions-, it

.

Thirteen novels (including this one), a collection of short stories, two children's books (one for each of his sons: "Where's my book?" his second son asked dryly, and Dad got down to business), an autobiography, several collections of essays and reviews, and a little-known gem of a mini-essay on

(his Proustian madeleine is seeing the Judy Garland film at Bombay's Metro cinema when he was ten),

, as the title of his collection of essays from the decade 1981-1991 says.

More than the India where he was born, the United Kingdom where he studied and lived for so long, the United States that gave him refuge and a passport, Rushdie is a citizen of the world of books, and ultimately

is a tribute to its power, and its fragility.

It is difficult to try to separate - as far as possible - the assault that Rushdie suffered on August 12 from the pages of the book that is now published.

But it is difficult, and probably unfair, to do so at the last words of the novel, with Pampa finishing her poem, putting it away, and then asking the goddess: «I have finished the story.

Set me free".

At that moment, the narrator-translator, Rushdie, wonders what happened to the girl who lived for two and a half centuries just to tell the story of the kingdom she had created in her imagination.

Did she simply reduce herself to dust?

Or was she led by the goddess "to the Fields of Eternity, where she was no longer blind, and eternity was no longer a curse"?

"Victory belongs to words

," Pampa wrote in her poem.

Because they are stronger than ignorance, violence and greed.

And it is up to the writers to convey those words to us.

"I learned the first lesson of my life: no one can face the world by constantly keeping their eyes open," says the protagonist of

.

Calasso replied in

: «Although the gods were the first to conquer the sky and since then they have fed on amrta, that liquid that is 'non-death', they knew that one day, although immensely distant,

.

They were terrified of blinking, because they knew that everything that blinks dies.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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