But 9/11, the 2001 terrorist attack by Islamist extremists, collaterally and paradoxically grounded Rushdie. As I recall, he was on tour for his novel “Fury,” about New York City. Mickey is an unmistakable Western icon, and if there’s such a thing as divination by dress, I concluded that those socks made Mickey an expression of Rushdie’s personal insouciance, perhaps even defiance, in even the small things.Ī few years thereafter, in 2001, Rushdie was lined up as a guest on my book interview program. We agreed that was kind of amusing, as were the Mickey Mouse socks he was wearing.
The first time, in the 1990s, the fatwa was still very much in force, so I was led to a safe house in Los Angeles, which turned out to be the home of a mutual acquaintance of Rushdie’s and mine. I have interviewed Rushdie three or four times over something like 25 years. “The news is not good,” his agent said, adding that he had nerve and liver damage. Rushdie was taken by helicopter to a hospital.
World & Nation Author Salman Rushdie on ventilator, could lose eye after stabbing on lecture stage 14 lecture in western New York, leaving him with a damaged liver, severed nerves in an arm and the prospect of losing an eye.Īfter the fatwa, his renown became elevated at a time when literary fame in general was on the wane - such that, for some turns of the news cycle, ordinary people, asked to name a famous writer, might have said ‘’Rushdie” the way they would answer “Einstein” to the same question about a scientist, or “Picasso” about a painter. It was a life transformed, but it was still a life, magnified for his fellow writers and for the reading world by the knowledge that this was a man who might literally die for the words he had written.Īnd he nearly did when he was repeatedly stabbed during an Aug. Rushdie traveled with security protection, often under the name Joseph Anton, which he later used as the title of a book about that part of his life. Another translator was attacked and wounded, as was the novel’s Norwegian publisher. The Japanese translator of his book was knifed to death.
This, though, was a death decree, and Rushdie became a hunted man.
0 kommentar(er)
