Life has been different for Salman Rushdie for a long time. The stabbing attack of which he was a victim in August 2022 almost took his life. Therefore, the great display of security that accompanied him everywhere yesterday, as if he were a head of state, during his time at Metafuturo in Barcelona could not be surprising. However, up close, he is the great writer who has not lost his good humor and who spoke with this newspaper.
It seems obligatory to start by asking you how you are feeling.
I assure you that I am very well and happy to be in Barcelona.
Has literature been the way to cope with everything you have suffered in recent years?
Honestly, literature is what I love. It is my way of understanding the world I live in. People feel good doing what they love and my work as a writer makes me feel good.
To what extent can literature make a world as complex and tragic as the one we live in better?
It is always difficult for me to claim what literature can or cannot do. I don’t know if it can make our world better. What I do know is that it can generate pleasure in the people who read it, contribute to beauty and help people understand each other better in this world, which is already a lot.
Since we’re talking about understanding, do you feel optimistic or do you think we’re going to the abyss on this planet?
Precisely before becoming a writer I was a History student and one of the things you learn is that nothing is inevitable, there is nothing that is written in stone. Precisely the constant of History is change. We may indeed be living in somewhat dark times, but there is nothing to indicate that it should always be this way. Better times will come. I tell you this and I think that perhaps my words may sound stupidly optimistic, but, even so, that does not mean that we cannot have a better future.
How do you see that the extreme right is rising in Europe within that optimism you speak of?
That’s why I told him that my optimism might sound stupid (laughs). However, last year, while traveling to promote my book “Cuchillo”, in many of those places I was told that young people were radicalizing towards the extreme right, both in Germany, France and the United Kingdom, where a demonstration of 150,000 people against immigration recently took place. Yes, it is worrying, although things will change again. There is nothing to indicate that this will always be the case, although there is undoubtedly a power of influence that young people are experiencing.
The word optimism is appearing a lot in this conversation, something that seems not to have been taken with it by the attack he suffered, nor by the desire to write.
First of all I will tell you that I am alive and well, which in itself is good. Secondly, this is a good profession. It is positive to have the mission of others reading you. Literature is a practice that requires a lot of time, intense intellectual energy, because you have to spend a lot of time working on it every day… So if I had to start from hopelessness it would be impossible to focus. Hopelessness is the greatest enemy of art.
Are you concerned about the role that artificial intelligence may have in literature?
We’ll see what happens. As a writer I’m not too worried because what it doesn’t have is originality. You can feed his memory, his corpus with all the works, but he will not do anything original because what he creates will be a text that will be nothing more than plagiarism. An experiment was done asking the GPT Chat to write some pages in the style of Salman Rushdie. The final result was disastrous.
What is currently on your work table?
I have just finished a book titled “The Eleventh Hour”, not yet translated into Spanish and Catalan. There are three stories and two short stories. It has been 31 years since I wrote a book like this.
Is fiction your refuge after so much reality, after what you have suffered?
I am first and foremost a fiction writer. Yes, I have written two books about myself (referring to “Joseph Anton” and “Chuchillo”), but I think that is enough. I am a fiction author, it is what I have always wanted to do.