Frankfurt, October 2015. The event of the largest book fair in the world is the presence of Salman Rushdie (for some strange reason in Greece we renamed him Rushdie). We expect him to appear as if he were a Hollywood superstar. And it goes without saying that we went through a thorough check before entering the room.

How often does a writer become a celebrity? I’m thinking about Norman Mailer. But Mailer became famous for a variety of reasons unrelated to his prose. On the contrary, Rushdie has nothing to do with politics, television and cinema, but only with dull, demanding literature.

That same year in Frankfurt, where Indonesia was the honorary country, we watched a public interview (in German!) by the leading American historian Timothy Snyder. Lots of people, but that’s all. With Rushdie, you immediately know that you are on a different path, and as I stand in the crowd, I am reminded of a shocking personal story he published in The New Yorker in 2012 (written in the third person, as if it all happened to someone else). ): “Disappeared” (The Disappeared). There he wrote that he woke up on a typical 1989 morning in his London home, thinking about his problems with his wife, getting ready for his day (morning TV interview and then a memorial service for his writer friend Bruce Chatwin). .

Then his world turned upside down. Rushdie’s name entered every home. The name of the author has become a household name.

Has something similar happened before with another author? On March 3, 1812, Lord Byron himself woke up famous, and fell asleep unknown: the first two songs of his poetic work Childe Harold were published, and a bad mess was already going on outside his door. In 1957, less than a day after the release of On the Road, Jack Kerouac saw a soap crowd climb over his fence.

This did not happen with Rushdie. He had already achieved fame as a writer even before The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. In 1981, he won the Booker Prize for his novel Midnight’s Children, and Shame also received critical acclaim. His world wasn’t turned upside down with the release of The Satanic Verses. The novel has been in circulation since September 1988. But on that sunny (for London) morning of Tuesday, February 14, 1989, he did not become famous, he became different: he disappeared. Then he got a call from a BBC journalist who asked him to make a statement, similar to what journalists ask writers when, for example, they receive an award: “How do you feel that …?”. Only now the question was different: “How do you feel that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?”

A few minutes later, a British Secret Service car drove up in a rage and drove him away. He did not see his house again until three years later, when it ceased to be his own.

A quarter of a century later, when he appeared in Frankfurt, the moment he entered the crowded hall, everything shook. Surrounded by bodyguards without being a prime minister, football player, rock star or Hollywood celebrity. None of us could get close to him, and his face kept hiding behind the faces of the bodyguards. Flashes flashed, and the noise was unimaginable. He must have passed only a few meters from where I was standing, and I could discern his calmness: he seemed to be accustomed to the unfamiliar. He seemed to be in control of the situation. He smiled here and there, and when he appeared on the panel, he spoke passionately about all the persecuted writers around the world, not about their ideas. For their words.

Long before the opening of the exhibition, when Rushdie’s name was announced as a guest speaker in Frankfurt, the Iranian Ministry of Culture issued an angry statement about the withdrawal of Iranian participation in the exhibition: Iranian publishers and writers remained at home, disappeared due to the presence of Rushdie, who, despite his obvious passion, seemed cool. Listen, I thought, listening to him, get used to it.

I was wrong. I realized this in idyllic Kitira last August, when we all learned about the assassination attempt in America. A full thirty-two years after Khomeini’s conviction, the occultists managed to find him and beat him so severely (and in front of everyone) that he almost died.

At a book festival he attended in West New York, he didn’t take the slightest bit of security. Let go, relax. “I have to live my life too,” he said some time ago. Nothing to do with Frankfurt 2015: as soon as he finished his speech, he disappeared again under guard. He remained “disappeared” in The New Yorker’s personal narrative.

The Academy has given out so many symbolic and political awards, why does it refuse the most overtly political and symbolic example?

A well-known American newspaper took a concrete stance about a month after the recent bloody attack, when The New Yorker editor David Remnick published an article titled “Rushdie’s time for a Nobel Prize” (September 5, 2022). Remnick took aim at the Swedish Academy’s decision, which was announced about a month later, recalling that the institution in question had put off a full 27 years to publicly denounce Khomeini’s “fatwa”. The Academy was silent, and meanwhile the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was killed, and threats were received by publishing houses around the world. After all, this year the award went to the Frenchwoman Annie Ernault…

So? Can Rushdie win the world’s most important literary prize this year? The Academy has given out so many symbolic and political awards, why does it refuse the most overtly political and symbolic example?

However, the whole discussion misses the point of a literary award: does Rushdie deserve a Nobel Prize as a writer, aside from condemnations, cover-ups, hunts and stabbings? According to Remnick of The New Yorker, yes, absolutely.

An excellent Czech writer lives in France, expelled from his country since the early 70s, persecuted by the communist regime, for whom many believe that he should have received the Nobel Prize for years (among them the writer). Last year it could also have been awarded for political reasons: after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Milan Kundera (which we are talking about) even at 93 years old would have been an ideal political and symbolic award: the persecution that he once suffered and forced him to live away from his country after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Kundera would welcome Rushdie’s Nobel Prize not so much for political and symbolic reasons as for purely literary ones. In her masterpiece The Will Betrayed (in the elegant edition of Hestia, 1995, with a beautiful translation by Yiannis H. Haris, the meticulous cover of Popi Gan in soft ocher, adorning Christos Bokoro’s excellent inkwell), Kundera devotes pages of insincere admiration for The Satanic Verses and Rushdie. His whole approach shows remarkable perseverance over time.

The Satanic Verses, released in English in September 1988, writes Kundera, were received with attention befitting a great writer. However, when Khomeini sentenced Rushdie to death, “the book was preceded by a scandal. (…) A completely natural position, but fatal for the novel. Why; Because in the case of The Satanic Verses, “literary topicality was a death sentence for the author. In such vital situations, it seemed almost frivolous to talk about art. What, really, is art in the face of great principles that are under threat?

It’s true: the novel in question was largely unread after 1989. The death sentence “touched” the novel as well. “The text of the book no longer had any meaning, it no longer existed.” Kundera then puts the problem in a broader context: “Theocracy contacts the New Age and targets their most representative creation: the novel. Because Rushdie didn’t blaspheme. He did not attack Islam. He wrote a novel. But for the theocratic spirit, this is worse than an attack.”

New Year equals the West. Kundera again: “The Russian occupation of my country represented in my eyes an imposed westernization.” That is: removal from ambiguity, from humor, from “euphoric freedom of composition”.

“The art of the novel, above all its (i.e. European) art, was condemned to death for the first time in its history.” For Kundera, compared to the 16th century defense of Rabelais by the lords and cardinals against the Christian “theological police”, the defense of Rushdie by Europe today was rather sluggish. However, in defending the art of the novel, “Europe is defending its own culture.”

This was written by Kundera in 1992, when the impatience and aphoristic toxicity of social networks with their unbearable literalness (0% ambiguity, 0% humor, 100% denunciation) was still science fiction, and finance was a means of control, not an end in itself. Today, with characteristic ease, a Muslim oilman funds an outrageously greedy, jaded European MP. And Rushdie, who wrote the novel, is still suffering from the stabbing of another – probably poor – Muslim.

I still remember him in Frankfurt in 2015. A great modern writer who seemed to be no longer a writer, but something else, indefinite. Disappeared Writer. And yet, when you heard him speak, the writer reappeared in Frankfurt: “Publishers and writers, we are not warriors, we have no tanks,” he said incidentally. “However, it fell to our lot to hold the front line.”

These words of Rushdie still hold true seven years later, despite various retreats and concessions to the deceptive, dizzying speed of technology, despite petrodollars and Russian threats. Or rather, because of all this. The Swedish Academy has a lot to think about this year.