“Words are the Only Victors”
“Words are the only victors,” writes Pampa Kampana, princess and poet, at the end of Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City. It’s his twenty-first book and it is, among many other things, a celebration of words.
David Remnick‘s most recent interview with Salman Rushdie is the first Rushdie‘s done since the attack on his life last August.
Just before the attack, he'd finished work on a new novel, Victory City, a return to a world where history merges with the supernatural, set in the Vijayanagara empire of South India.
At 75, after having presumably laid to rest old nightmares from a decade of living as a fugitive, following the infamous fatwa of 1989, you’d think Rushdie had paid his dues to ill luck and malevolent intent. Then, in August 2022, he was attacked with a knife and suffered multiple life-threatening injuries, just as he was getting ready to deliver a lecture on the US as an asylum for writers and other artists in exile as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series.
That attack has taken its toll. This man is lucky to be alive. He says, he finds it hard to write.
Excerpt:
“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.”
You can hear a small speech hesitation here and there—has something else happened to how Rushdie talks? Every now and then it seems to me that I'm hearing a widening of vowels, a remake of the “a” in “actually” and “happening.” As if the trauma has picked away at layers of voice for this British writer whose origins lay in quite another world—a world that has itself, since his birth, been fractured and reinvented. Okay, maybe I’m making this up entirely but that’s how I heard it.
About the historical basis for the new book he says: “There were periods of … bigotry and there were other periods of great openness. And I wanted to say, ‘Look, this is the history of India. It's not what the BJP says it is.’” Context: The BJP, the ruling party in India, wants to rewrite textbooks, somewhat in the manner of Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
The main character, he says, just showed up—nine years old and witness to the downfall of a minor kingdom and the mass suicide of queens. Blessed by a goddess, she ends up living for 247 years. The novel is filled with torrents of words that sweep a reader along. It is a joyful mythologization of history. It will no doubt irk the rewriters of textbooks.
