Controversial Author Returns After Brutal Stabbing Attack
If you’re at all aware of controversial writer, philosopher, and fatwa carrier Salman Rushdie, you may be surprised to learn of his upcoming return to fiction. The author, who suffered a near-death experience back in 2022, which resulted in the loss of his eye, is projected to deliver a new trilogy of short novellas.
Though each of these projects will be quite brief, clocking in at only 70-ish pages per unit, fans of the writer will surely be overjoyed to read new material from the unapologetic truth-seeker, as he claims he is nearing the end of his professional career.
His body of work spans decades, though his most notorious claim to worldwide fame is the 1988 novel The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie’s initial return to writing came with the personal memoir Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, which was published earlier this year. While the harrowing tale is quite shocking in nature, the writing strays significantly from the flowery prose that readers have come to expect from Rushdie.
While he has not yet provided a title for his forthcoming trilogy of novellas, he claims that each installment will offer a meditation on his life and relationship to India, England, and the United States, and will pack more of his characteristic outward-gazing wit.
These new novellas will serve as Salman Rushdie’s first return to fiction since the stabbing incident. His last novel, Victory City, was published after the incident had already occurred, though he had concluded writing on the project long beforehand and was already promoting its release when he was attacked. In multiple interviews over the course of the past year, Rushdie has confirmed that he spent six months completely unable to write following the incident, as he slowly recovered and meditated on his own mortality.
For those that don’t know, Salman Rushdie is an Indian born novelist who spent most of his life and professional career living in England and the United States. His body of work spans decades, though his most notorious claim to worldwide fame is the 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which is lightly critical of Islam and depicts the prophet Muhammad in ways that some find to be unflattering. As a result, Salman Rushdie has been banned from dozens of Islamic nations across the world, never to return again, and has even been sentenced to death by then-Ayatollah of Iran, Ruholla Musavi Khomeini.
Salman Rushdie’s initial return to writing came with the personal memoir Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, which was published earlier this year.
While the fatwa ruling has not deterred Rushdie, nor kept him from returning to speak truth to power in many facets of the world, it has resulted in a number of attacks on the author, including a 2022 stabbing that nearly left him dead.
The fatwa was even referenced humorously in a 2017 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, wherein Larry David seeks Salman’s advice after receiving a fatwa of his own. In the show, Salman Rushdie offers a cameo appearance, where he simply suggests leaning into the danger as a means to achieving “fatwa sex,” though it’s unclear if the loss of an eye helps or hurts that goal.
While the fatwa ruling has not deterred Rushdie, nor kept him from returning to speak truth to power in many facets of the world, it has resulted in a number of attacks on the author, including a 2022 stabbing that nearly left him dead.
Clearly, Salman Rushdie’s return has been long-awaited, though he urges his readers to temper their expectations for any future output. While speaking to the Lviv BookForum via video conference, the author explained “When you get to this age you obviously think about how long is left. There obviously aren’t 22 more [books] that are going to be written. If I’m lucky, there will be one or two.”
Source: The Guardian
