London:
Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie has revealed in his new memoir 'Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder' that the decision behind not naming his would-be killer was intended to deprive him of “the oxygen of publicity”.
The 76-year-old Mumbai-born British-American novelist addressed a literary event at the Southbank Center in London on Sunday, virtually from New York, and was in conversation with author and critic Erica Wagner about his account of the brutal knife attack on the stage. in which he permanently lost vision in one eye.
He credited former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with the phrase “oxygen of publicity”, which she used in the context of the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) violent attacks in the 1980s, as the motivation behind referring to his attacker only as “A” in the book.
“That sentence, the oxygen of publicity, somehow stuck in my head. And I thought: this man had his 27 seconds of fame and now he has to be a nobody again. I'm not going to name him, I want his name is not in my book,” said Rushdie.
“So I use this initial 'A' because I thought he was many things: a would-be murderer, an attacker, an opponent; he was many things, he was an ass,” he said with a wry smile. .
The acclaimed author was on stage at New York's Chautauqua Institution in August 2022 when he was stabbed up to 10 times by accused Hadi Matar, who is in jail awaiting trial for attempted murder. But the author revealed that he felt no anger towards his attacker and that the new book was his way of taking control of the story.
“What it did do, in my opinion, is it gave me back control of the story. So instead of being a man lying in a pool of blood on stage, I'm a man writing a book about a man lying on the ground. stage with a pool of blood. And that felt like it gave me the power back; my story, which I tell in my way, and that felt good,” he said.
Rushdie is known as a writer of magical realism, something he attributes to his early childhood in India and growing up with fantastic stories.
“I'm quite down-to-earth in my worldview, I don't believe in miracles and things like that, but somehow my books have always done that… I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I grew up in a world where India, where all the stories you hear for the first time are kind of fantastic stories, fabulous and magical,” said the author, who won the Booker of Bookers for “Midnight's Children” – a fabulous story about modern India.
“I always thought that this was a good way to approach things and that somehow you could even get closer to the truth about human nature by abandoning realism. I also thought that the world had realism abandoned. We don't live in realism, we live in surrealism,” he noted.
But on his own survival after the brutal knife attack, Rushdie has a more pragmatic view: 'So many people have said to me that my survival was a miracle. I don't believe any kind of divine hand has helped me. But I do believe in other kinds of miracles, I believe in medical miracles, I believe in the miracle of surgeons and just plain luck.
“A large part of human life is determined by chance. The fact is that he tried very hard to kill me, but in reality he missed.” The event, which was streamed globally, was part of the Southbank Centre's Spring Season of Literature and Spoken Word, which brings together internationally renowned authors, artists, historians, politicians and journalists.
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