NEW YORK – Salman Rushdie's new book, his 23rd, is also a career reset.
“The Eleventh Hour,” which includes two short stories and three novellas, is his first fiction since he was brutally stabbed on a New York lecture stage in 2022. His recovery has been physical, psychological and creative. Just finding the words for what happened was a painful struggle that culminated in his memoir “Knife,” published in 2024. Fiction – the ability to imagine – was the final and crucial step, like the awakening of nerves once feared damaged beyond repair.
“While I was writing ‘Knife,’ I couldn’t even think about fiction. I had no space in my head for that,” Rushdie told The Associated Press last week. “But almost immediately after I finished the book, before it came out, it’s like this door swung open in my head and I was allowed to enter the room of fiction again.”
Two of the pieces in his book being released Tuesday – “In the South” and “The Old Man in the Piazza” – were completed before the attack. But all five share a preoccupation with age, mortality and memory, understandable for an author who will turn 79 next year and survived his attack so narrowly that doctors initially couldn’t find a pulse.
“The Eleventh Hour” draws from Rushdie’s past, such as his years at Cambridge, and from sources both surprising and mysterious. The title character of “The Old Man in the Piazza,” an elderly man treated as a sage, originates from a scene in the original “Pink Panther” movie, when a pedestrian looks on calmly as a wild car chase encircles him. The novella “Oklahoma” was inspired by an exhibit of Franz Kafka’s papers that included the manuscript of “Amerika,” an unfinished novel about a European immigrant’s journeys in the U.S., which Kafka never visited.
For “Late,” Rushdie had expected a straightforward narrative about a student’s bond with a Cambridge don, inspired by author E.M. Forster and code-breaker Alan Turing. But a morbid sentence, which Rushdie cannot remember writing, steered “Late” toward the supernatural.
“I had initially thought that I would have this friendship, this improbable friendship between the young student and this grand old man,” Rushdie explained. “And then I sat down to write it, and the sentence I found on my laptop was, ‘When he woke up that morning, he was dead.’ And I thought, ‘What’s that?’ And I literally didn’t know where it came from. I just left it sitting on my laptop for 24 hours. I went back and looked at it, and then I thought, ‘You know, OK, as it happens, I’ve never written a ghost story.’”
Rushdie will always carry scars from the attack, notably the blinding of his right eye, but he has reemerged in public life, with appearances from Manhattan to San Francisco. A native of Mumbai, he moved to England in his teens and is now a longtime New Yorker living with his wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
His most celebrated novel is “Midnight’s Children,” a magical narrative of the birth of modern India that won the Booker Prize in 1981. His most infamous work is “The Satanic Verses,” in which a dream sequence about the Prophet Muhammad led to allegations of blasphemy, rioting and a 1989 fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie’s death. Although Iran said in the late 1990s it would no longer enforce the decree, Rushdie’s notoriety continued. His assailant, Hadi Matar, was not born when “The Satanic Verses” was published. Matar, found guilty of attempted murder and assault, was sentenced in May to 25 years in prison. A federal trial is pending.
Rushdie also spoke with the AP about his legacy, his love of cities and how his near-death experience did not make him more spiritual. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: Age is obviously a theme throughout this book, and something you had been thinking about before the attack – the idea of “Will I be valued at the end?” “Does it matter that whatever knowledge I have accumulated?” These are things that you think about?
RUSHDIE: I think about what maybe all of us think about. What do we amount to in the end? What did our life add up to? Was it worth it or was it trivial and forgettable? And if you’re an artist, you have the added question of will your work survive? Not just will you survive, but will the things you make endure? Because certainly, if you’re my kind of writer, that’s what you hope for. And, it would be very disappointing to feel that they would just vanish.
But I really love the fact that “Midnight’s Children,” which came out in 1981, is still finding young readers, and that is very pleasing to me. That feels like a prize in itself.
AP: Something else that struck me about the book was how much it was a book of stories about stories. The conscious art of storytelling.
RUSHDIE: Yes, and much more than in the others. I think particularly the story called “Oklahoma” is very much a story about storytelling and about truth and lies.
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