Literature: After the assassination, Rushdie suffers from serious long-term consequences
literature
After the assassination, Rushdie suffers serious long-term consequences
Salman Rushdie 2017 in London. The author is still suffering from the aftermath of the assassination. photo
© Grant Pollard/Invision/AP/dpa
“I’m not out of this forest yet, really”. Says the author Salman Rushdie about his situation half a year after the attack on him.
Almost half a year after the assassination Salman Rushdie the British-Indian author is still suffering physically and mentally. “I found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of emptiness and junk, stuff I write and then erase the next day . I’m not out of this forest yet, really,” the 75-year-old told The New Yorker magazine in an interview published on Monday.
Rushdie was at an event in the US state in mid-August new York was attacked by a man and badly injured – he has been blind in one eye ever since. Rushdie has been persecuted by religious fanatics for decades. In 1989, the then Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for the writer to be killed because of the novel “The Satanic Verses”.
Sleeping isn’t always easy for him either, Rushdie said. “There were nightmares – not exactly what happened, but just scary.” Otherwise he’s fine, Rushdie said. He could get up and walk around. Typing is difficult for him because he has lost feeling in some of his fingers. It was a “colossal attack”.
