Salman Rushdie publishes his new novel and speaks in the “New Yorker”, six months after his attack

This is without doubt one of the most anticipated novels of the year. Six months after being stabbed in the United States, British writer Salman Rushdie is releasing a new novel, Victory City (Penguin Random House, untranslated), and spoke publicly for the first time on the occasion a long interview and D’a portrait in the New Yorker.

The author will not make any promotion to present his fifteenth novel which comes out on Tuesday in the United States and Thursday in the United Kingdom, warned his agent, Andrew Wylie, in the British daily The Guardianeven “if his recovery progresses” since the attack that nearly cost him his life on August 12. This novel by the author of Indian origin, completed before his stabbing, 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.

A young man lunged at him armed with a knife as he prepared to speak at a conference in Chautauqua in upstate New York, near Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes. Rushdie, naturalized American and who has lived in New York for twenty years, has lost the sight of one eye and the use of one hand, his agent announced in October. On Monday, he tweeted a photo of himself wearing glasses, one of which is black and obscures his right eye.

In his first interview since his attack, published by the magazine The New Yorker MondaySalman Rushdie explains that this event also left him with mental scars, evoking post-traumatic stress disorder. “I found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens”he explains in particular.

The photo in @NewYorker is dramatic and powerful but this, more prosaically, is what I actually look like. ? https://t.co/ydrV7WvWgE

— Salman Rushdie (@Salman Rushdie)

“Giving women an equal place in a patriarchal world”

The attack shocked Western countries, but was hailed by extremists in Muslim countries such as Iran and Pakistan. Since then, the author has remained distant from the media, but he has started to express himself again on the social network Twitter since last December, most often to relay the reviews of his new novel published in the press. However, several events are planned to accompany the release of Victory City, like an internet-streamed lecture with British authors Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman.

Icon of freedom of expression since living under a fatwa for writing the book Satanic Verses in 1988, Rushdie again defends the power of words in Victory City. With the mission of “give women an equal place in a patriarchal world”according to the summary of its publisher Penguin Random House, its heroine and poet Pampa Kampana, who will live nearly two hundred and fifty years, will also be the witness of “the pride of those in power”and will witness the rise and then the destruction of Bisnaga.

Her legacy to the world, however, will remain her epic tale, which she buries as a message for future generations. And the novel ends with this sentence: “Words are the only victors. » In the American newspaper The New York Timesthe Irish writer Colum McCann, friend of Rushdie, claims that the author “says something very deep in Victory City ». ” He says : “You can never take away from people the basic ability to tell stories.” In the face of danger, even in the face of death, he manages to say that all we have is the power to tell stories. »

Born in Bombay in 1947, Rushdie published his first novel Grimus in 1975 and rose to world stardom six years later with midnight children, which won him the Booker Prize in the UK. Victory City will be released next September in France under its original title, said its French publishing house Actes Sud.