This is a maze of letters and ideas. The books pile up on the tables in the office of editor Andrew Wylie, considered the most powerful in the world.
These volumes are still unexplored territory for readers, like Knife, which came out in the US on April 16 and on the 18th in Spanish, literally translated: Cuchillo (Random House).
In the background there is an office with views of Manhattan. A discreet-looking man sits on the sofa. He wears a dark suit and white shirt, without a tie. On his right cheekbone there are some marks, small scars. On the eye on that side, his glasses have tinted glass. Salman Rushdie, 76, greets with a kindness that breaks the tension of being in front of a peak of literature and a survivor of a fundamentalist knife attack, on August 12, 2022, in Chautauqua (New York). He has lost vision in his right eye. “It hung on my cheek like a hard-boiled egg,” he illustrates.
Before the attack he left the novel Ciudad Victoria (2023) ready, but Cuchillo is a personal account of the aggression suffered shortly after going on stage to participate in an event about the importance of writers being safe from risks.
The Iranian regime issued the fatwa or death penalty for The Satanic Verses in 1989…
I thought those days were gone. It was terrible to discover that at least one person was still sufficiently disturbed. But he wasn't even born when that happened, he didn't know anything about me, nor had I read what he had written.
The trace of intolerance.
I came to live in New York in 2000 and have led an ordinary writer's life. That's why I feel that this attack was an anachronism, something out of time. That attacker was a visitor from the past, a time traveler who escaped from the past and planted himself in the present.
Write that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
I'm not sure. Often what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. If someone tries to kill you, it is because they are trying to silence your voice. By writing this book I have made my voice stronger than before.
Did you feel an obligation to write what happened to you?
I couldn't have written anything else. I would have looked at my next project and it would have been trivial and stupid compared to this great event that took place in my life. If you had written any of those other ideas, people would have asked: why are you avoiding your case? It would have seemed like cowardice.
It's a way to take control of the narrative.
It was a shift in the balance of power in my favor. My response to violence is art. I told myself I was telling the story of something that happened to me, but many could connect because they have suffered tragedies like this. Talking about my experience was a way to connect with them.
Isn't writing therapy?
I want to tell you that I already have my therapist, who is a great help in facing the trauma and also in being able to write this book. This book is not exactly therapy, it is a change in the nature of that event. I can say that, until I wrote it, I had been attacked. Now, what has happened is that I have written a book and talked about it. This makes me feel much more comfortable.
It has entered the bloody statistics.
America is good at killing people. The attacker was born in New Jersey and grew up as an American boy. I think part of the problem is that this is a country that seems to value human life very little. It is not difficult to decide to kill children in schools or kill people in the synagogue. The attacker had no criminal record, had had no problems with the police, and was not on the terrorist list. He went from zero to killer. It's a big jump, unless you come from a place where there are murders every day.
It talks about the intimacy that an attack with a knife entails.
It's not a bullet that comes from a distance. The knife is proximity, of a horrible intimacy. I learned that the attack lasted 27 seconds, 27 seconds of extraordinary intimacy between life and death. It's horrible what happened to me, but as a writer it's interesting.
It was close to the end point.
I am very lucky to be alive. Not only live, but be able to think, speak, walk, write. Should I have fought? I am a peaceful person and everything happened very quickly. It took me by surprise.
Now you have another concept of the knife.
In the book I say that language is also a knife. It's my knife. The book itself is my defense weapon for my personal struggle.
Reflect on the angel of death and the angel of life.
There was a lot of blood on the floor of that stage. I was in that pool of blood, which was growing, and I thought 'I'm dying.' The saddest thing is that he was going to die far from the people I love, surrounded by strangers.
But he survived.
There were several strokes of luck. First, onlookers ran and restrained the attacker until he was arrested. The public saved my life, the readers. And there were at least a couple of doctors in the audience who took emergency measures. Plus it was a sunny day, a nice summer day, with blue skies. If there had been bad weather, the helicopter would not have been able to fly and take me to the operating room.
He assures that on the way to his end he did not see any light, nor a tunnel...
There were no supernatural things, no divine light, no hellfire, nothing to make me reconsider my beliefs.
His book is about hate and love.
When I thought about it, I thought that describing the attack would only take a few pages. So the book, on the one hand, is about what I don't like, death, violence, fanaticism, hatred. And, on the other, things that matter deeply to me, love, art, freedom. It is a meeting between everything I hate and what I love. Luckily, since I survived, the army of love was victorious. Something I have learned is the incredible resilience of the human body. We have a colossal survival mechanism that works overtime.
He alludes to “Gunter and Grass”, to “Borges and I”, to “Salman and Rushdie”.
I don't like all the other Rushdies. Those other versions of me were created to criticize me.
Have you made peace?
When you go through a survival experience like this, when you almost die and are given another chance to live, one of the clarifying things is that you become less interested in other people's opinions. I no longer care what people think. I try to be an artist and live my life, this is what matters to me. I value more every day. You think: one more day. Like a gift, every day is a blessing.
Well this is an era of censorship.
I'm very glad I'm not a young writer starting out. I have written 22 books, if I have any more I will be lucky. I have done my job.
Without caring about the fashionable cancel culture?
It doesn't scare me. But I see young writers working on their first book or second and thinking about what words they are allowed to use, what characters they can include in their stories. How are you going to write well without freedom? Good literature has always meant that the writer creates characters that are not like him. No matter how much Flaubert says 'I am Madame Bovary', he is not, nor is Dostoyevsky Raskolnikov. The idea that you can only write from your small, narrow personal experience is the death of literature.
And the skin, increasingly thinner.
There's this idea that you can't say anything that might offend someone. The problem is that there is always someone who is offended by something. If you can never offend, nothing can be said. If you get offended, read another book. The satanic verses are 550 pages. If you have to read all that to be offended, you have to do a lot of work. You can always close the book and say I don't like it. When she was young she had this puritanical view that he couldn't leave a book half read. Not anymore. If it bothers me, I won't finish it. If you don't like something, don't read it.
Three quarters of his production has come after that novel and he emphasizes that he did not want to change his style because of the threat.
I tried to move on. I knew the path I had as an artist and I stuck with it. I didn't betray my own art. I continued with my vision and people may like it or not. This is another question, but I did what I wanted to do. I could have been scared and written scary books. I could have gotten angry and written revenge books. All this would have meant my destruction as an artist. I didn't and continued on my way.
Do you regret anything?
No writer is ever satisfied with his books. If I take any of mine, I can tell you the parts I don't like... but I won't tell you. A famous literary critic said that a novel is a long piece of writing that has something wrong. The idea of perfection in a novel is a dream, for anyone, even Cervantes. Don Quixote is sometimes very repetitive... Whatever you do, it will never be perfect. You have to know how to handle imperfection. I learned this lesson a long time ago.
