Salman Rushdie Gives First Interview Since 2022 Stabbing

NEW YORK – Salman Rushdie is blind in his right eye, struggles to write, and has “frightening” nightmares months after being stabbed repeatedly as he prepared to give a lecture.

However, he expressed gratitude during his first interview since the attack.

“Well, you know, I’ve been better,” he told David Remnick of The New Yorker in an interview published Monday. “However, given what happened, I’m not so bad.”

“The major injuries are essentially healed,” Rushdie continued. “I have sensation in my thumb, index finger, and the bottom half of my palm. I’m getting a lot of hand therapy and am told I’m doing great.”

Remnick, who spoke with Rushdie in person at his agent’s office in Manhattan and via Zoom, wrote that the Booker Prize-winning author had lost more than 40 pounds (18 kilograms) and now reads mostly on an iPad, where he can adjust the lighting and font size.

Rushdie Went Into Hiding In Iran

“On the right side of his face, there is scar tissue,” Remnick wrote. “He speaks as fluently as ever, but one side of his lower lip droops. His left hand’s ulnar nerve was severely damaged.”

Rushdie, 75, went into hiding for years after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for his death because of the novel “The Satanic Verses'” alleged blasphemy. But he’d been moving around freely for a long time, with little security, and had no qualms about appearing at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat center in western New York, last August.

Rushdie was on stage when he was approached by a young man in black carrying a knife. Hadi Matar, who is accused of assaulting and trying to kill the victim, has said he is not guilty. Rushdie called Matar an “idiot” in his New Yorker interview but expressed no resentment.

“Over the years, I’ve worked very hard to avoid recrimination and bitterness,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a good look. One of the ways I’ve dealt with this situation is to look forward rather than back. What happens today is less important than what happens tomorrow.”

The Man Complained The Stabbing Made Book Sales Go Up

The interview was published on the eve of the release of Rushdie’s new novel, “Victory City,” which he finished a month before his assassination. “Victory,” which features a protagonist who lives to be 247, is a typically surreal and exuberant narrative about an imagined ancient poem that has received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with The Washington Post’s Ron Charles writing that “Rushdie’s magical style unfurls wonders.”

Rushdie had been silent on social media for months but now occasionally tweets and even responds to insults. When a Twitter user told him last week that he was living a “disgraceful life,” Rushdie responded, “Oh, another fan! “I’m overjoyed.”

During the interview, he complained that the stabbing had increased his book sales, as if people liked him more when he was in danger.

Rushdie Suffered From 15 Stab Wounds

“Everyone loves me now that I’m almost dead,” he said. “That was my error back then. I not only lived, but I tried to live well. That was a terrible oversight. Better to get 15 stab wounds.”

On Monday, he tweeted a photo of himself staring directly into the camera lens, his face thinner than in photos taken before the stabbing, his right eye hidden behind a dark lens in his glasses frame.

Otherwise, he is still attempting to recover. Rushdie has written that he initially struggled to write fiction after the fatwa and is still struggling, saying that when he sits down to work, “nothing happens,” just a “combination of blankness and junk.”

One project he might consider is a sequel to his 2012 memoir “Joseph Anton,” which he wrote in the third person.

“This does not feel third-person to me,” Rushdie said of a potential sequel. “I believe a first-person story is when someone sticks a knife into you. “That is an “I” story.”

SOURCE – (AP)