Salman Rushdie remembered “Oz” and Shakespeare in Porto

Com strong security measures, including magazine and metal detector at the entrance, the session held in the literary festival Babell was preceded by long wait for the public, which only at 22:08, when there were still people in the queue abroad, heard the sound signal of the beginning of the session, with actor António Durães presenting a reading of an excerpt.

While the last ones to enter were looking for a place to sit, after passing both for private security and for the supervision of the Public Security Police (PSP), writer Alberto Manguel called Salman Rushdie, “the reason for waiting so patiently”, to the stage, where he expected a cup of Port wine.

Strongly ovated, Rushdie made the audience laugh several times, in a session that Manguel conducted based on the importance of “Oz”, the film and then Frank Baumann’s books, for the writing of the author, who grew up in India.

“[‘Over The Rainbow’, the first story he wrote] was not my most mature work, he was 10 years old. I grew up in Bombay, I saw the movie, I was very affected by it and I wrote a story about a boy like me, in a town like mine, who was walking around and going to the beginning of the rainbow, not the end. I was born more or less at the time of independence. My family has a joke: ‘I was born and, eight weeks later, the British fled’,” he shot.

In the face of about three thousand people, even though many have only entered after the first 20 minutes of conversation, for the last ‘ring’ of the Colosseum, the 79-year-old author spoke of Bollywood, the parable of the growth that Dorothy’s journey ends, but also of her father and, inevitably, of the stabbing he was targeted in 2022, after the controversy surrounding “The Satanic Verses” (1998), which led to a ‘fatwa’ being called against his person.

In “Knife” (Don Quixote), released in 2024, it reflects on the attack and it was clear “that one of the most important characters in history was the attacker”, who comes to life through a dialogue between the two who invented.

“ I'm a novelist. Why don't I make it up? Then he can belong to me. I imagined myself inside your skin and using the talent I have to do it. Let's see why a 25-year-old boy, who by his admission never read my books and has no priors, goes from zero to murder to kill a person he doesn't know”, he reflected.

He was surprised by the millions of copies that “The Sons of the Midnight” (1981) sold, he also went through “Quichotte” (2019) and “The Sorceress of Florence” (2008), where he crosses the court of Emperor Akbar with the Medici, in that Italian city, proof of how two worlds, and times, can cross by the way fiction allows “to make things happen that never happened”.

About the peers he frequently creates in his novels, he compared them to the impact they have on comical terms, recalling “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Vladimir and Estragon”, works by Miguel de Cervantes and Samuel Beckett, respectively.

“It was not intentional, but I realized after it happened. ... I wasn't conscious, but then I took note of it, and then you have to make a decision. One thing we have to admit is that the writer is not the master of his imagination. We have the brain we have, we're limited to it. Sometimes you repeat yourself, but I hope it happens in different ways, more interesting, as variations”, he said.

For the British, born in India, “writing books is not easy”.

“ We keep making mistakes, we get stuck, the gears stop and we can't see forward. What I learned is that the mistake isn't there, it's something that happened before. One false step, somewhere, that a page later or 50 pages later jams the story. You have to go back and find it. Finding out, everything flows again,” said the man who believes that “almost nothing” is learned by writing a book in terms of experience for others, because everyone is different.

As for the literature of political intentions, it does not want to “write political fiction, but fiction that takes into account everything that makes human beings what they are”.

“ If we look back at Jane Austen, her career is contemporary with Napoleonic wars and there is hardly any mention of that colossal historical fact. The job of soldiers is to wear red uniforms and look good at parties. ... Today, the difference between private and public life almost disappeared, the public colliding with the toilet almost every day. This dimension must be one of the parts of the explanation of the characters, not the most important. Love, work, class, money, religion, everything composes the character and how it is impacted by public events also ", reflected.

At the end of a session with less than an hour, before an audience in which many waited much longer than that to enter, he was asked about whether he was afraid of death and revealed that he had already “looked at it” and “not good”.

“Bartleby, by Herman Melville, says, whenever they ask him to do something: ‘I would rather not’. That's my vision of death. I would rather not”, ironic.

The inaugural edition of the Babell festival, which cost more than 3 million euros to the Livraria Lello Foundation, ends on Monday.