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In his first interview since a near-fatal knife attack last August, Salman Rushdie tells David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, that it’s great to be able to talk about literature, books and his new novel Victory City. “I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim,” he says. On February 14, 1989, Iran’s Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses for alleged blasphemy against Islam. Rushdie was in London, and went underground, before coming out of seclusion and moving to the U.S. In New York, he moved around with ease, wrote several books – The Satanic Verses was his fifth book, and Victory City is his 21st – and then the attack happened in 2022. In an essay for The Hindu’s Magazine, Tishani Doshi says it is hard, while reading the new novel, not to think of the brutal attack, especially given that among his many injuries was the loss of an eye. For Rushdie, as he told Remnick, the overwhelming feeling is of gratitude, of being lucky, though these two questions are at the back of his mind. “How to go on living after thinking you had emerged from years of threat, denunciation and mortal danger? And now how to recover from an attack that came within millimetres of killing you, and try to live, somehow, as if it could never recur?” In his memoir, Joseph Anton, Rushdie, writing in the third person, said he wanted to be clear of what he was fighting for: “Freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the beautiful, ancient art of which he was privileged to be a practitioner – he would never again flinch from the defence of these things.” Doshi writes that Victory City is a reminder that fiction remains one of our most potent ways of asking how we must live. “For those of us who see Rushdie as a champion of free speech, Victory City is a restoration of the powers of fiction in these censorious times.”
In reviews, we read Victory City, Anuradha Bhasin’s book on Kashmir after Article 370, Prince Harry’s memoir and more.
Books of the Week
In the days that followed the government’s decision to amend Article 370 and split the State of Jammu & Kashmir into two Union Territories, there was a deafening silence in Kashmir. A total curfew had been imposed, thousands were arrested, many of them held captive in their own homes, internet and mobile telephones were switched off, and those with working phones much too frightened to say anything over them. It is this silence that Anuradha Bhasin’s A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir after Article 370 (HarperCollins) speaks about most eloquently, says Suhasini Haidar in her review. “Like Shirley Toulson’s famous words about grief, Kashmir’s ‘silence silences’. In one poignant paragraph, Bhasin, editor of one of the erstwhile State’s oldest newspapers, Kashmir Times, sums it up like this: she writes about a fellow journalist, a Kashmiri based in Delhi who speaks of the humiliation when ‘your parents call after two weeks, able to do so after trekking three kilometres from home, standing in a queue for a painfully brief call just to say that they are fine, and to add ‘be quiet, don’t say a word’.” Bhasin’s searing pen, says Haidar, has castigated all the players in Kashmir’s tortured history without exception - dwelling on New Delhi’s litany of broken promises since 1947, Pakistan’s perfidy, its training of terrorists and propagation of radicalised Islam, the false lure of freedom and rights that it has not provided to people in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK), politicians in Jammu and Kashmir, as well as the terrorists, who by taking up the gun, took away the legitimacy of a struggle for rights, and gave officials a pretext to enforce tougher controls on the people.
Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (Penguin Random House) spans the rise and fall of the Vijayanagara empire in the Deccan region. Fact is liberally spiked with fable and he goes back and forth in time as characters set apart by centuries inhabit the same plane of existence. The rise and fall of the city is presided over by the “blind poet, miracle worker and prophetess” Pampa Kampana through her long lifespan of 247 years. In his review, Somak Ghoshal says read at the level of allegory, Victory City is a buoyant celebration of the power of words – “Words are the only victors,” reads its last line. “But the novel is also a cerebral interrogation into the meaning of history. How are we to sift truth from falsehood in the records of events left to us? Can history ever be a pristine archive of the past? Or is it a cacophony of voices competing to be heard above one another?”
Book review | ‘Victory City’ is carried forward by Salman Rushdie’s infectious energy
Of the countless wars that the British Royals have been involved in, it is just possible that the latest, the ‘War of the Windsors’, will emerge as the most significant, says Ramya Kannan in her review of Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare (Penguin). It is no surprise, she writes, that Spare has done well. It is eloquent, engaging and entertaining. That J. R. Moehringer, the prize-winning author who assisted with Agassi’s memoir Open, had ghost-written this one too was an indication that the offering would be racy. “The writing itself is well done, with dollops of humour, cliffhangers and subtle digs, but above all, this bildungsroman comes across as Harry opening up to readers, revealing long-kept secrets.” Harry, in his telling, is always the calm and collected sparrer, feinting daintily with his family -- everyone else, his father, brother, sister-in-law, are angry, insensitive, selfish, even violent at times. “With the Royals preferring to keep quiet, the other side of the story is unlikely to be told. Their silence makes things easy for Harry, though his chances of cementing a rapprochement are not. While the book might delight readers, it is unlikely to do the same for his family. With Spare, Harry has redrawn the battle lines in the War of the Windsors, and in this, he has thrown everything he can at it.”
Review of Prince Harry’s Spare: Breaking a royal silence
Spotlight
In the recent film adaptation of Louis Bayard’s novel, The Pale Blue Eye (2003), Harry Melling plays Edgar Allen Poe as a bright West Point cadet assisting the detective in solving a grisly crime. | Photo Credit: AP
When the Mad Hatter asks Alice why is a raven like a writing desk, it caused generations to give pause and wonder. The answers were exquisite brain burners from Lewis Carroll’s “Because it can produce a few notes,” to Aldous Huxley’s “Because there is a ‘b’ in both and an ‘n’ in neither.” Recreational mathematician, (yes there are those who do math for fun) Sam Loyd, came up with “Poe wrote on both” drawing a line between the poet and mathematician, Carroll and the multifaceted Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849), writes Mini Anthikad Chhibber in the column, Bibliography. “There was another line between the two—Carroll wrote the wild and wonderful Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for 10-year-old Alice Pleasance Liddell, while the beautifully bewildering, The Raven, echoes Poe’s themes of loss and longing, inspired by the death of his wife, who he married when she was 13 and he was 26. While depictions of Poe in popular culture have leaned towards a tortured genius, the Bostonian was an astute critic, causing Fireside Poet James Russell Lowell’s famous comment of Poe using ‘prussic acid instead of ink’.” In the recent film adaptation of Louis Bayard’s novel, The Pale Blue Eye (2003), Harry Melling plays Poe as a bright West Point cadet assisting the detective in solving a grisly crime. It seems only right that the father of detective stories be the Watson to Landor’s (Christian Bale) Holmes. Though we all know of the famous residents of 221B Baker’s Street, their creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, paid due respect to Poe with, “Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?”
How Edgar Allan Poe set the template for the whodunit and literature in his stories
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- Un/Common Schooling: Educational Experiments in Twentieth-Century India (Orient BlackSwan), edited by Janaki Nair, is a collection of writings by individuals who founded alternative schools in India, located mostly in remote villages, from the 1970s to the present that highlights the philosophies and rationale behind such schools.
- Journalist Amitava Nag traces the life and times of veteran actor Soumitra Chatterjee, from his initial years of searching for identities to becoming a favourite actor of Satyajit Ray to his final decades of being an artist in Soumitra Chatterjee: His Life in Cinema and Beyond (Speaking Tiger Books).
- The Garden of Tales: The Best of Vijaydan Detha (Harper), translated by Vishes Kothari, is a selection of works by one of Rajasthan’s most important writers, blending folklore and fable with everyday stories.
- Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny (Hachette), translated by Anton Hur, is a collection of short stories which critiques patriarchy and capitalism with genre-bending tales of cursed bunny lamps, heads in toilets and mangled human beings.
