Salman Rushdie’s work has staged a number of related battles – between freedom and repression, imaginative play and absolutism, rationalism and what he calls “the unreasoning mind”. But David Remnick’s profile of the novelist in this week’s New Yorker emphasises a more personal kind of struggle: Rushdie’s desire to find autonomy or normality as a citizen and a writer while being a cause and, for extended periods, a target. Rushdie’s story emerges as one not about principles or arguments but defiance and resilience, of forging a path, preserving his energies, protecting his talent.
As Remnick tells it, Rushdie’s life can be divided into a series of more or less discrete periods. First there was childhood in Mumbai (where he was born in 1947) and adolescence at Rugby School and Cambridge. Then he served his apprenticeship, writing various abandoned manuscripts and publishing one novel that appeared to little fanfare (Grimus) while working as a copywriter. For more or less the whole of the 1980s, he was the feted post-colonial writer, author of novels about India (Midnight’s Children), Pakistan (Shame) and South Asians in Britain (The Satanic Verses), mildly controversial for their portrayal of historical events and figures such as Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher. Growing anger towards The Satanic Verses, for its depiction of the Prophet Mohammed, culminated in the fatwa set down by Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme ruler of Iran, in February 1989, which sent Rushdie into hiding. In the late 1990s Rushdie moved to New York where he lived, as Remnick puts it, “freely, insistently unguarded” and wrote a steady stream of books, most recently the novel Victory City, which he finished last July and which appeared a few weeks ago. That appeared to be the status quo until six months ago when Rushdie was stabbed multiple times while attending a speaking engagement.
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