Review of Salman Rushdie’s volume of essays “Languages ​​of Truth” – Culture

In the new collection of essays, Salman Rushdies, you immerse yourself in the cosmos from which this truly polyglot British author draws his stories: It is the Asian continent, which is much foreign to Europe, with its traditions based on Hinduism and Buddhism and its wealth of history. From there, Rushdie builds a bridge into Anglo-Saxon, but also makes frequent trips to German-speaking poets and thinkers. The former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky appears as well as Günter Grass. And again and again philosophers, often Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher from Ephesus. Rushdie values ​​being a “migrant writer” and sees himself in opposition to sedentary colleagues like William Faulkner. He resolutely opposes the description that his literature is “magical realism”.

Of course, the very latest must now be reported first. The only new text in the volume in the narrow sense of the word bears the unadorned and sadly current title “Pandemic” and is, as the subtitle promises, “a personal examination of the coronavirus”. So, based on Rusdie’s own 17-day corona infection, one reads less than a big piece of thinking, a laconic experience report and a small experiment about being human. Closer to him than Camus’ plague is a rereading of William Golding’s dystopian story “Lord of the Flies”, “since in Golding’s portrayal of the fragility of civilization and the ease with which this shell can be destroyed to expose the barbarism underneath found terrible and valid truth “.

An article in May 2020 about a real version of the Golding saga, a group of Australian students stranded in 1995 on an abandoned island in the Pacific, south of Tonga, cooperates civilized and is rescued a year and a half later in good shape, but then gives him hope again . A friend’s comment that he was now Superman when he said that antibodies had now been detected in him, he still couldn’t just leave it like this: “I don’t feel particularly great. And I know that it is for every Superman a chunk of green kryptonite. We’ll see. “

There are many literary declarations of love in these texts, very many

One gets closer to the author in these essays than in his official autobiography “Joseph Anton” published in 2012. Probably also because the essayist Rushdie – unlike in “Joseph Anton” told in the third person – does not shy away from the first-person form here. You can learn a lot about Rushdie’s fears after the fatwa after the publication of the “Satanic Verses”, about what it is like to have a false name, to live in secret apartments under constant surveillance – and all of that with people close to him Makes people.

The portrayal of the life of the Prophet Mohammed, described in the nightmares of a protagonist of the “Satanic Verses”, was once the occasion for the then Iranian head of state Ruhollah Khomeini to condemn Rushdie to death by means of a fatwa on February 14, 1989. The reason for this fatwa was that the book was “against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran”. Khomeini called on Muslims around the world to enforce it.

You also learn how important friends like Harold Pinter or Christopher Hitchens were for Rushdie during the time of hiding and fleeing. The obituaries for these friends are among the most touching texts. You could even do an interesting network analysis with the tape. Rushdie reveals which colleagues he values ​​and whom he considers overrated (Dan Brown, for example). There are also some young writers who have yet to be discovered.

Rushdie’s personal literary history from antiquity to the present, which the volume also contains, is a thrilling search for the best possible storytelling for both adults and children. As a college student, he did not finish reading Günter Grass’ “Die Blechtrommel”. Ten years later, he gave the book a second chance, “after which it became my favorite novel: one of the books I would say I love”. There are actually many literary declarations of love in the texts.

It’s about the defense of all those “who risk everything to tell the truth”

Shakespeare appears again and again, Rushdie’s fixed star. Role models are also Hans Christian Andersen, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Philip Roth, from whom, according to Rushdie, he learned a lot about writing sex scenes. He often mentions his novel “Midnight Children” and that there is a lot of Salman in its protagonist Saleem. This is also an invitation to read or reread. “To become a writer, you have to understand yourself first, and it is more difficult to gain that understanding when your self is scattered around the world,” Rushdie writes at one point, also providing literary definitions. A fiction, for example, should be “wildly fantastic”, but an autobiography “decidedly realistic”.

With the speeches he has given at universities over the years, Rushdie wants to pass on some of this passion. He definitely has a strong sense of mission – also or especially when it comes to freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Arguing about arguments, about what can be said, the rejection of censorship – or even self-censorship – is one of his central driving forces for his writing and actions. The title clearly indicates the appropriate brackets: “Languages ​​of Truth”. Rushdie always advocates the polyphonic coexistence of cultures, which should inspire literary writing as much as one’s own life.

Why the book is divided into four parts, however, might have needed an explanation, as well as the reasons for the choice of text. And, unfortunately, there are also no more detailed editorial notes on each of the contributions. However, one is definitely not completely wrong if one assumes that this collection of texts is also about a kind of legacy, about what remains besides the novels, from the thinking of Rushdie, who has just turned 74 should. In the best case, it can be assumed that someday someone will write about his death what Rushdie once promised on the occasion of Harold Pinter’s death: “We will continue the work and will defend the written word and those who risk everything, to tell the truth.”