Last week, writers around the world were called upon to collectively read Salman Rushdie’s work as a form of protest against the assassination attempt on him decades after that curse from Iran. I gave up and joined what was called a marathon lecture. It so happened that I was last in the list of readers. I thought that was a good idea, actually, because I also felt that I had been late reading that one novel.
When The Devil’s Verses came out, I was eleven years old. The drama that unfolded around the book and writer largely eluded me at the time. When I got around to reading it, I was nineteen and Rushdie was still in hiding from the terrible fatwa that had been issued on him, but for ordinary people like me, the smoke had mostly cleared around the book. I remember reading the book simply because it had a famous title and at the time I thought I must have read all the canonical works.
The book hit me like a sledgehammer. Rushdie turned out to be a writer who took all the space—and a little more—for his imagination. In the first chapter, he let his main characters tumble out of an airplane, while they started a conversation while falling. I didn’t understand anything I read—in this case, a compliment to the writer. “The plane tore in two,” wrote Rushdie (in the translation by Marijke Emeis), “a pod that gives up its seeds, an egg that gives up its secret. Two actors, bouncy Jibriel and button-up, frowning Saladin Chamcha, fell like tidbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar.”
I read the first chapter three times because I was afraid I was missing some of the riches Rushdie had crammed into his lines. From that point on it was an explosion of ideas and observations, of associations and games that appealed to and challenged the reader’s imagination and where language was not spared either. Rushdie spliced words together, used dots and brackets and dashes in places I’d never seen it before, or just dropped all the punctuation whenever he felt like it. Two men, arguing, fell from a plane, one of them grew horns from his skull after a spotless landing and from that moment the book hurled you in all directions and back again. I had never held such a recklessly ambitious celebration of the literary imagination before. It was just the kind of book you’ve always wanted to know. How could I have missed this, I thought to myself.
The feeling that I late to the party had been reading The Devil’s Verses, was confirmed again when I arrived at the Trippenhuis last week, where the marathon lecture was taking place. I was late. The lecture had already ended, the credits on the livestream were already running. I drifted off, with an indefinable feeling of guilt. I was well aware that such a collective reading of his work did not relieve Rushdie of his fate. But at least it had given me the feeling that literature was central, and that this was really what it should be about.
When I got home I looked up some articles about the attack. In The New Yorker did i read that Khomeiny never read the book that led to a fatwa and elsewhere it said that the boy who stabbed the writer ten this summer was only a few pages out The Devil’s Verses had read. It surprised me, and then again it didn’t. Such an unparalleled book, so much fantasy and writing pleasure. Not reading that, and then finding something deadly about it – it’s unimaginable. And it exposes something horrifying that a marathon reading might not change either. The imagination is ultimately powerless against those without imagination.
Karin Amatmukrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of October 4, 2022