With the right lens of his glasses obscured, like a patch, with a broad smile and affable tone, the writer Salman Rushdie (Bombay, 78 years old) appeared this Thursday before nearly a hundred Spanish-speaking journalists by videoconference. The reason for the busy virtual meeting was his new book, The penultimate act (Random House), published in the United States last fall and now reaching bookstores in Spanish.
With this new title Rushdie demonstrates his unstoppable creative energy. “I have no plans to retire. I regret that Julian Barnes has announced that this will be his last book. I hope he changes his mind,” he commented. In 2023 he presented the ambitious novel Victoria City, in which he invented a late medieval city, and a year later he published Knifethe memoirs of the brutal attack he suffered in 2022 that almost ended his life. Rushdie had lived in hiding for more than a decade after Iran threatened him in 1989 over his novel The satanic verses, and when that seemed like a thing of the past, the stabbings arrived. A documentary by Alex Gibney (Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie) about all that has just been presented at Sundance and the writer stated that he is confident that it will soon find distribution. “When it was screened, well, it’s a horror movie that becomes a love story,” he said.
Rushdie, one of the voices that shook British literature in the eighties along with fellow generations such as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro, returns in The penultimate act the story, after more than three decades without publishing stories, with the five reunited in the new book. “It has grown in an unpremeditated way. I wrote a first text with a ghost and it turned out to be short, so I put it aside. Then other stories that happened in India, the United Kingdom and the United States were added,” he explained. These are the places where you have spent your life. “Home is plural. India is too big, so my home is a few neighborhoods in Bombay. In London I have family and friends and I have been in the United States for more than 25 years. We live in an era of movement and migration and this has to do with multiple identity,” he said.
Borges and his Fictions He recalled that they marked him in his student years and defended, in his talk with the press, short texts: “Stories allow you to write something serious and read in depth.” In one of those contained in the new book he returns to his legendary and enormous novel midnight children. “When I start working, the place in which I place the story is very important and in that story I returned to the neighborhood where I grew up. In the story I wanted to talk about the ridiculous nature of the super-rich and also the miracle of art.” United Kingdom, with a tribute to EM Forster, whom he met during his university years at King’s College in Cambridge, and the mathematician Alan Turing (who also studied there although in the 1930s); The United States and India appear in these stories in which there is also a “Spanish” one, inspired, as he explained, by his visit to the Prado Museum on his last trip to Madrid. Goya’s paintings and Bosco’s room, with The extraction of the stone of madness They appear in one of the stories. “I have often thought of Goya as an inspiration. There are resonances in his story with the world today,” he acknowledged.
The theme around which this collection revolves is the “final act in the production and life of artists, not just writers.” Rushdie feels that seeing death up close has inspired him to address this issue. “Beethoven faced it furiously and still composed the Ninth Symphony. Dylan Thomas wrote the verse ‘rage, rage, at the fading of the light’ and Picasso’s final works are today more appreciated for their mastery,” he reflected. “When I was young I wrote about young people and now about how artists face the end.”
Literature as a form of resistance
Are books useful to overcome these dark times? Literature, he stated, can be a form of resistance and survival. “It is the best way I have found to respond to the world I live in, because writing changes as the world changes.” The final phrase of his book (“our words fail us”) in the most allegorical story of the collection is a “warning”, as he noted: “The common does not work, communication does not flow. The deep division in the United States is very alarming, where one side does not understand what those opposite are saying, the language has been broken and it is a very serious problem for societies.”
Rushdie avoided commenting on the situation in Iran (“I’m bad with prophecies and I’ve had problems with prophets before”). He did comment, however, on the banning of books in US schools, which he described as a problem and a violation of the First Amendment. In the end, he is not sure that literature is “useful,” but what a writer hopes to build are small worlds in which readers enjoy, cry and laugh.