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Foto social empires6/27/2023 ![]() One of the sparks for the novel was a trip decades ago to the town of Hampi, in South India, the site of the ruins of the medieval Vijayanagara empire. ![]() By last July, Rushdie had made his final corrections on a new novel, titled “ Victory City.” They spent the pandemic together productively. It was his fifth marriage, and a happy one. In September, 2021, Rushdie married the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he’d met six years earlier, at a PEN event. “But I had come to feel that it was a very long time ago, and that the world moves on,” he told me. He would have to learn to live with that.” He well understood that his demise would not require the coördinated efforts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or Hezbollah a cracked loner could easily do the job. ![]() “There were only varying degrees of insecurity. “There was no such thing as absolute security,” he wrote in his third-person memoir, “ Joseph Anton,” published in 2012. With every public gesture, it appeared, Rushdie was determined to show that he would not merely survive but flourish, at his desk and on the town. Would Solzhenitsyn have gone onstage with Bono or danced the night away at Moomba? Some people thought he should have adopted a more austere posture toward his predicament. “You can do what you like.”įischl hadn’t meant to offend, but sometimes there was a tone of derision in press accounts of Rushdie’s “indefatigable presence on the New York night-life scene,” as Laura M. “Well, I’m having dinner,” Rushdie replied. The painter Eric Fischl stopped by their table and said, “Shouldn’t we all be afraid and leave the restaurant?” I have to show them there’s nothing to be scared about.” One night, he went out to dinner with Andrew Wylie, his agent and friend, at Nick & Toni’s, an extravagantly conspicuous restaurant in East Hampton. I thought, The only way I can stop that is to behave as if I’m not scared. Recalling his first few months in New York, Rushdie told me, “People were scared to be around me. If he ever felt the need for some vestige of anonymity, he wore a baseball cap. He wrote book after book, taught, lectured, travelled, met with readers, married, divorced, and became a fixture in the city that was his adopted home. Within a year, Ahmadinejad was out of office and out of favor with the mullahs. Is he in the United States? If he is in the U.S., you shouldn’t broadcast that, for his own safety.” “Salman Rushdie, where is he now?” he said. Ahmadinejad smiled with a glint of malice. In 2012, during the annual autumn gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, I joined a small meeting of reporters with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, and I asked him if the multimillion-dollar bounty that an Iranian foundation had placed on Rushdie’s head had been rescinded. There were times, though, when the lingering threat made itself apparent, and not merely on the lunatic reaches of the Internet. But after settling in New York, in 2000, he lived freely, insistently unguarded. ![]() A long time ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” blasphemous and issued a fatwa ordering the execution of its author and “all those involved in its publication.” Rushdie, a resident of London, spent the next decade in a fugitive existence, under constant police protection. When Salman Rushdie turned seventy-five, last summer, he had every reason to believe that he had outlasted the threat of assassination.
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