The British writer Salman Rushdie narrates the attack he suffered in August of last year during a conference he was giving in the United States in a memoir that will appear next April, Cuchillo. Meditations after an attempted murder, as reported today by his publisher, Penguin Random House. The launch will be international and in several languages, including Spanish.
As a result of the attack, the author lost his right eye and suffers from mobility problems in his left hand. "It was necessary for me to write this book: a way to take charge of what happened and to respond to violence with art," says Rushdie, threatened with death by a fatwa dictated by Ayatollah Ruholah Khomeini after the publication of his The Satanic Verses in 1988. The work continues to be prohibited in various countries with an Islamic majority.
After years of isolation in which his public appearances were few and always under rigorous security measures, Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly last summer in Chautauqua, a town in the state of New York by a man who ran up to the stage where the author was standing. about to begin his intervention.
Cuchillo, 256 pages long, will be published in the United States by Random House, the Penguin Random House imprint that earlier this year published his novel Ciudad Victoria, completed before the attack.
"Knife is an overwhelming book and a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable," says Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya in the same note. We are honored to publish it and amazed by Salman's determination. to tell his story and get back to the work he loves.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Rushdie explains the ordeal of the assault, explaining that in this memoir he had worked hard to avoid resentment and was determined to "look forward."
These are not the first memoirs of the author, who published Joseph Anton in 2012, recounting his life in the third person after Khomeini's fatwa. "When someone sticks a knife in you, it's already a first-person story. It's a personal story," he says about his new work.
