2023-04-25 16:49:54
Frough ones are Salman Rushdie’s natural allies. The ayatollah who incited his death by fatwa on Valentine’s Day 1989 – a man. The lunatic with the knife who charged at him and almost killed him (sight was lost on one side, one hand has been paralyzed since then) on August 12, 2022 in Chautauqua, New York, USA – a man. All the assassins in the intervening years who, filled with religious madness, attacked Japanese translators and Norwegian publishers with hatred – men, men, men. Rushdie is known to have been friends with U2 singer Bono, fulfilling his rock star aspirations. Otherwise he would certainly have some ideas for alternative lyrics by Herbert Grönemeyer.
Rushdie has been a self-confessed feminist since The Satanic Verses, which got him into this whole mess in the first place. Because there, too, it was about Koranic suras, which were forbidden under the death penalty, in which Mohammed worshiped three goddesses instead of Allah. Rushdie loves women so much that he married five of them, most recently in September 2021 to writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he met at a PEN convention. At least half jokingly, he blamed his corresponding success on the mullahs: “It’s not up to you, it’s the fatwa that surrounds you like sexy fairy dust!”
This is how Rushdie’s life was imagined before the assassination: late breakfast, PEN congress, writing a little, lavish parties in New York nightclubs. At some point he was fed up with years of playing hide and seek from the bloodthirsty weirdos, which he impressively describes in his autobiography “Joseph Anton”. He remembered that he was a born bon vivant and started doing just that again, enjoying. Not always to the delight of his friends, who sometimes felt queasy when Rushdie danced particularly exuberantly and saw a bomb go off in the middle of the crowd. Eventually everyone stopped believing that one day it would happen. And then it happened.
Salman Rushdie: Victory City. Translated from English by Bernhard Robben. Penguin, 416 pages, 26 euros
Quelle: Penguin Random House
Rushdie is now battered but alive. The Islamists, on the other hand, are duped. Their supposed god has let them down, so to speak. Although the author’s new novel was already finished in July, a few days before the fateful day, it is still called, and downright visionary, as befits a poet, “Victory City”.
Who is winning there? Of course the language, who else! Rushdie owes that to his origins, half the Scheherazades from “One Thousand and One Nights” that his dad read to him back in Mumbai, half the postmodernism into which he was born in 1947, just in time for Indian independence. Both the old fairy tales and the new Anything-Goes have a penchant for wordy playfulness. The ground of facts is always a double one, and, frankly, facts aren’t facts either, but rather doves that flap away at the gentlest attempt to pin down them.
The story told by “Victory City” is about the divinely gifted Pampa Kampana, who begins by seeing her mother go into the fire, voluntarily and for very stupid reasons, which again have to do with men. Little Pampa swears to remain self-determined in the future, which sometimes works better, sometimes worse. Which doesn’t really speak against her, because she lives at least 247 years, from 1318 to 1565, something like that is inevitable.
The data can be reconstructed precisely because Rushdie weaves his mythomaniac miracle carpet, that textile made of text, based on a real model. The city of Bisnaga, which Kampana weaves out of wondrous narrative threads, really existed like this, or rather something like that, until it fell victim to a fateful dispute between various Indian kingdoms, all of which were ruled by men, by the way.
Rushdie treats the historical footage as if he were playing the Sim City computer game. Walls grow up out of nowhere, people who didn’t exist a second ago happily wander around. They develop into devoted followers of different world views, for example erotic liberalism, but also puritanical fanaticism. The following trials and tribulations purr off as cheerfully and entertainingly as a relaxed late work can only be if it knows what it wants. “Some people have a memory. I’ve forgotten,” Rushdie just told the New Yorker. He therefore relies entirely on the elephant memory of literature and – did we already mention that? – on the power of women.
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