“Plet’s talk about literature! The only remedy, with love, to the horrors of the times in which we have to live”, confided Salman Rushdie to us in August 2016. Six years later, cowardly and savagely attacked with a knife on August 12 when he was was about to give a lecture on literature, it has just been put aside again under the blows of an Islamist who had certainly not read Rushdie’s books. Nor even, no doubt, The Satanic Verses “People who attacked it didn’t read it or deliberately misused the content to serve their own ends. “, he said, indignant that one “reduces a novel to an insult”. This is why the publication of his new book next November is good news.
Because one cannot, indeed, understand Rushdie if one does not understand his love of literature and in particular of fiction, “the most interesting way I have found to understand the world around me”, confided to the Point the one we see in a photo from the 1950s – he must be ten years old – read Peter Pan to his two sisters. Truth languages, that’s the title. A strong title for a strong book since it brings together, written over seventeen years, his essays and articles on literature, on his favorite authors, his texts for the PEN Club, his “notes on laziness” or on Heraclitus , in the manner of a “sublime cave of Ali Baba”, as presented by its faithful publisher Actes Sud.
READ ALSOSalman Rushdie: “I’m like Edith Piaf: I regret nothing”
We will thus find texts on Andersen, Cervantas, Shakespeare, Beckett, but also on Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut or Christopher Hitchens. And chapters entitled “The half-woman god”, “The instinct for freedom” and… “Courage”. Pure Rushdie therefore, funny, erudite, luminous and always committed, as confirmed by the excerpt from this new book that exclusively Point offers you and which, in the light of the terrible event which has just taken place, and from which he fortunately returns alive, still alive, resounds in us even more powerfully than usual.
Extract
“We live in a time when we are called upon to define ourselves more and more narrowly, to compress our multidimensional personality into the corset of a single identity, whether national, ethnic, tribal or religious. I came to think to myself that this may be the evil from which all the evils of our time stem. Because when we succumb to this narrowing, when we let ourselves be simplified to become simply Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Hindus, then it becomes easier for us to see in the other an enemy, the Other of each of us. and all the cardinal points then come into conflict, East and West collide, as well as North and South.
Literature has never lost sight of what our contentious world tries to force us to forget. Literature rejoices in contradictions and in our novels and poems we sing of our human complexity, our capacity to be simultaneously, at the same time yes and Nopeat a time this and that, without feeling the slightest discomfort. The Arabic equivalent of the phrase “once upon a time” is kan ma kan, which can be translated as “It was so, it was not so”. This great paradox lies at the heart of all fiction. Fiction is precisely that place where things can be both so and not so, where there are words in which one can deeply believe while knowing that they do not exist, never have existed and will not exist. never. In this age of simplifying everything, this magnificent complexity has never been more important. Salman Rushdie.
Extract of Truth languages. Trials 2003-2020. Translated from English by Gérard Meudal (Actes Sud). Release in November 2022.