Rushdie hints at new memoir in first interview since attack

Salman Rushdie has hinted at a potential sequel to his memoir Joseph Anton, published by Vintage in 2012, in the first interview given by the author since he was attacked in August.

The 75-year-old Satanic Verses author was stabbed in the torso and neck during a talk he was giving at the Chautauqua Institution in New York on 12th August 2022 about the importance of asylum being given in the US to exiled writers. He was in hospital for six weeks and subsequently lost the use of one hand and vision in one eye.

The man suspected of stabbing Rushdie, Hadi Matar, has been charged with attempted murder. He has pleaded not guilty. It is thought the attacker was trying to carry out the fatwa decreed by late leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on Rushdie’s life after the publication of The Satanic Verses (Vintage, 1998), which was deemed to be blasphemous.

Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s first memoir, details how following the fatwa he was forced underground, how he and his family lived under the threat of murder and tells the story of his ongoing fight for freedom of speech. 

Speaking to the New Yorker in his first interview given since the attack, Rushdie told David Remnick he had set aside a novel inspired by Franza Kafka and Thomas Mann to focus on a potential sequel to Joseph Anton.

He told Remnick the idea irritated him at first “because it felt almost like it was being forced on me — the attack demanded that I should write about the attack”, but the idea had taken hold and that rather than something epic in scale he is looking towards the “microscopic” and written in the first person. 

Rushdie said: “This doesn’t feel third-person-ish to me,” Rushdie said. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.” 

His latest book, Victory City — the 16th since the fatwa was issued — is scheduled to be published by Vintage on 9th February, however agent Andrew Wylie told the Guardian Rushdie would “not be making any public appearances to promote his forthcoming novel” as he continues to recover. 

Rushdie said overall he felt "lucky... my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude". He added: "I’ve been better. But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad.

"The big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm. I’m doing a lot of hand therapy, and I’m told that I’m doing very well."

However he said it was difficult to type and write due to the lack of feeling in some of his fingertips. He also said he has mental scars from the attack and that he is having to rethink his approach to security, having lived without it for more than two decades.

"There is such a thing as PTSD, you know," he said. "I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really."

He added: "I’ve simply never allowed myself to use the phrase ’writer’s block’. Everybody has a moment when there’s nothing in your head. And you think: ’Oh, well, there’s never going to be anything’.

"One of the things about being 75 and having written 21 books is that you know that, if you keep at it, something will come."