Six months after his violent assault, Salman Rushdie says he struggles to write
Novelist Salman Rushdie, here on November 15, 2017 in New Yok.
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP - Evan Agostini
Text by: RFI Follow
2 mins
For the first time since he was stabbed in the United States in August, the British writer Salman Rushdie confides this Monday, February 6, having a lot of trouble writing and suffering from post-traumatic stress.
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“
I sit down to write and nothing happens.
I write, but it's a mixture of emptiness and nonsense, things that I write and erase the next day.
“On the eve of the release in the United States of his latest novel,
Salman Rushdie confides
in the columns of the newspaper of American cultural elites,
The New Yorker
.
This book,
Victory City
, is presented as the "
epic tale of a woman
" in the fourteenth century who will erect a city, suffer exile and threats in a patriarchal world.
Completed before
the violent attack of several stab wounds
on August 12, 2022 in the northern United States, which left him seriously injured, this novel is presented as the translation of the historical epic of Pampa Kampana, a young orphan endowed with magical powers by a goddess, who will create the city of Bisnaga, literally Victory City.
But, confides the 75-year-old intellectual, “
I found it very, very difficult to write
”.
"
I'm not out of the woods yet
," breathes the novelist of Indian origin, naturalized American, who has lived since 1989 under the threat of death from a fatwa issued by Iran.
“
PTSD exists, you know
,” he adds of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, in French).
No promotions
The writer will not promote this 15th novel, which comes out on Tuesday in the United States and Thursday in the United Kingdom,
his agent Andrew Wylie told
The Guardian newspaper last week, even
if his recovery is progressing
since the attack .
which nearly cost him his life.
A young American of Lebanese origin suspected of being sympathizers with Shiite Iran threw himself on him armed with a knife as the author of The
Satanic Verses
was about to speak at a conference in Chautauqua, a small town cultural and bucolic retirement home in upstate New York near Great Lake Erie.
Rushdie, who had resumed a life in society in recent years in New York, lost the sight of one eye and the use of one hand following the attack, Andrew Wylie announced in the fall.
The author had not spoken since the summer, apart from a few tweets promoting his novel.
"
I've known better, but given what happened, I'm not so bad
," he concludes, adding "
to hold (his attacker) responsible
" for his state of health.
The photo in @NewYorker is dramatic and powerful but this, more prosaically, is what I actually look like.
😊 pic.twitter.com/ydrV7WvWgE
— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) February 6, 2023
(
With
AFP)
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