«It will be the girls’ and boys’ show». Word of Annalena Benininew director of the Turin book festival, which yesterday opened its thirty-sixth edition at the Lingotto Fiere with the main theme of «Imaginary life», suggested by a phrase by Natalia Ginzburg. The largest ever, say the press releases, with its 137,000 square meters between Lingotto, Oval and Congress Centre. The youngest, or at least that’s what it would like to be, given that it is dedicating an entire pavilion to children for the first time. But then, after the ribbon cutting, and the inaugural lesson of Elizabeth Stroutone of the most important voices in contemporary American literature, the day is dictated by the presence, charisma and escort of a great old man, or rather the great old man.
Let’s talk about Salman Rushdie, seventy-six year old Indian writer naturalized English, author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children. A great old man with a thick skin, especially if you think about the attack suffered in the United States on August 12, 2022, from which his book Knife was born. Meditations after an attempted assassination (published by Mondadori), which marked the return, after almost two years, to writing. Rushdie doesn’t argue, he doesn’t complain. He doesn’t even want to go back to those intellectuals who didn’t defend him after the fatwa for the Satanic Verses: «For me it was painful to suffer attacks even from non-Muslims. Many writers I considered my friends, yet they attacked me. Luckily I’m not one to ruminate, even if I remember everything, I remember their names perfectly.”
Despite the fatwa and the 2022 attack, they were unable to silence him. And in fact Salman Rushdie is not silent: «I would have preferred not to be stabbed fifteen times», he says to the journalists who interview him in the London hall of the Lingotto Fiere, «but now my voice, which the attack was intended to silence, is stronger . And this book is a knife to react against my attacker”, someone “who knew almost nothing about me, and who in my book I don’t mention by his name because he has already had his moment of notoriety. Now he can go back to being a nobody.” It is the first public meeting after the attack and someone asks him if he is afraid. «I have been subjected to threats for 35 years, I know how to deal with a situation like this, we need to be more cautious, careful that it doesn’t happen again, but paying attention doesn’t mean being afraid. I don’t want something like this to happen again, but I want to move on and live my life normally. I had to find the strength to go back to working as before. A good amount of time passed, about six months, a very hard and negative period, then I went back to writing. He was like a switch suddenly flipped.”
We don’t need to ask him, to paraphrase Eugenio Montale, for the word that examines our shapeless soul from every side. In other words: you don’t bring him into the field of politics, he has no recipes to propose for what is happening in the world, from Ukraine to Gaza. He obviously doesn’t love Hamas, that is, he hates it. And he doesn’t even love Netanyahu, he hates him too. So he says: «I have no solutions to give. I believe a good writer should ask good questions, not answers.”
But he knows well that religions can be vehicles of death, of oppression. However, he adds, “radical Islam cannot be blamed alone, even if it harms millions of people around the world.” And he recalls the American evangelical churches, their anti-abortion positions, their support for Donald Trump’s right.
He then focuses on the war made or continued with words, i.e. the “world war of stories”, as he calls it: “The time has come”, claims Rushdie, “to change the way in which conflicts are told. For the war in Ukraine, there is a Russian leader who says that Ukrainians are Nazis; Ukrainians say the opposite. In the Middle East there are two opposing forces that are fighting for a piece of land. The only possibility to get out of the war is to reconcile in the narrative, otherwise we will go on with the war forever.”
Writers, he continues, «can’t do anything but continue writing. I only know how to write, I’m not a dancer, nor a football star.” Finally Italy: «For me this return means a further victory. I had been here a month before the attack, we had returned to the USA shortly before. We had been to Sardinia, Umbria, Capri, a bit in Milan and Rome. The time of the pandemic had just ended and it was pleasant to be able to return to such a beautiful country. Today’s return to Italy is the closing of the circle”, he concludes.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Read the full article at
The morning
