Stay a novelist, at all costs: Salman Rushdie, portrait of a resistant writer

Three days before being stabbed on Friday in New York State, the novelist announced the release of “Victory City”, his fifteenth book, in February 2023.

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Keep your course. Dedicate to literature, whose ability to “increase the sum of what human beings are able to perceive, understand, and therefore, ultimately,” (Joseph Anton, A autobiography, 2012, 2012 ). Not giving up writing is one of the forms of resistance chosen by Salman Rushdie after the fatwa enacted against him in February 1989. She is inseparable from his defense, never denied, of freedom of expression, one of the testimonies was his firm support for Charlie Hebdo after the 2015 attacks, when an important part of the American intellectual scene bargued. So many procrastination which had to revive in the writer of painful memories.

Stay novelist, at all costs. A novelist busy telling the chaos of the world, armed with his imagination, his erudition and his humor. After all, if it is “accidentally” that his life was “made interesting” (from a narrative point of view), as he happened to ironize the turning point taken by his life there is thirty- Three years, however, it is quite voluntarily that he became a writer.

He was born on June 19, 1947 in a Muslim and bourgeois family – Father businessman, teacher mother – in Bombay, in a district where European and American Indians cohabit and expatriates. In an interview with the journal the rule of the game, in 1993, he will note: “For anyone who has grown in any big city, particularly in a city like mine, where the east and the west Join, one of the facts that impose on you is that culture is hybrid, that it is a mixture, in short, that it is an impure form. And the novel must be a celebration of impurity. “

In 1961, the adolescent was sent to study in England; After high school, he entered Cambridge to follow a story of history. Once graduated, this great reader, naturalized British, earns his life by working in advertising, a sector that teaches him, he will say, the art of “conciseness”, even if it is not the first term which comes to mind when you think of his lush work – but he indeed has the taste of formulas that encapsulate several ideas or sensations in a minimum of words.

“I discovered my voice”

In 1968, he left his post to embark on writing. Beginning years of learning and trial and error for the one whose influences are to be found as much on the side of Charles Dickens as from the new wave, Luis Buñuel as of Mikhail Boulgakov or traditional fables of the pañchantrara to which he was bottled. In 1975, he published his first novel, Grimus (JC Lattès, 1977), which organized the meeting of science fiction, mythology and tale, without convincing too much. Including its author, which, when it simply does not forget to mention it, sweeps it from a: “It was not very good.”

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/Media reports.