Rushdie highlights his preference for Elena Poniatowska, Fuentes and Gabo

Yesterday, the British-American writer Salman Rushdie released the Spanish version of his most recent book, The penultimate hour (Random House), in which he reflects on the way in which artists face their final years, although he said he has “no plan to retire.”

In a virtual meeting with the Ibero-American press, he highlighted that in Spanish he especially likes Latin American authors, such as Elena Poniatowska, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.

The volume of five stories will be in Mexican bookstores in mid-February, according to the publisher.

“There are those who do not like to grow old, to lose their hearing, but we have Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which despite being one of his last works is inspired by joy,” said Rushdie (Bombay, India, 1947).

“Dylan Thomas has the phrase: ‘anger, anger, against the end of time’. It’s one way to take it, and serenity is another. I don’t think it has to be one or the other. On Tuesday you can be angry and on Thursday you can feel peace. The complexity of how human beings approach this final act of life is fascinating. I look forward to exploring both.”

When he is about to turn 79, Rushdie approaches the topic of death: “when I was younger I wrote about young people. Now that I’m older I write about older people, which is quite common.”

The two-time Booker Prize winner asserted that we live in “the age of movement and migration”; He himself has the “sense of home in three different places. This is very much related to identity. If you are rooted in many places you have a multiple identity and I like that.”

He said that when he goes to India “after a couple of days the language in which I dream changes. I no longer dream in English, and I dream in Hindi and Urdu. I feel that it is like my home entering my subconscious, which has moved from the new world to the old. Having a plural self is something very beautiful.”

The world changes and so does writing.

The author of The Midnight Children He sees literature as “the best way I can respond to the world I live in. As it changes, so does writing. It can’t ignore or overthrow regimes, not often, but in the difficult times we live in now I hope it is a way to increase readers’ understanding of what is happening.”

He stressed that we live in a “moment in which communication within a society is collapsing. I speak especially of the United States, the depth of the division in this country is alarming. It seems that you are shouting into the void.”

Regarding the presidency of Donald Trump, he noted: “it is a very dark moment in American public life, as we see with this discussion of Greenland, Canada and so on.”

The penultimate hour It came about without planning, Rushdie recalled: “The first one I wrote was the English story, ‘Deceased’. When I finished it I didn’t know what to do with it, because it wasn’t long enough to make a novel, so I put it aside. A couple of months later I started thinking about the rest. I looked at the spectrum of work and it was kind of the book I had been doing all my life.”

He noted that his story “The Old Man of the Piazza” is the most allegorical in the collection, because “it suggests that we live in a time in which communication in our society is collapsing. It is very difficult for people to talk to each other, even if it is in the same language. We really don’t understand each other.”

The text “Oklahoma” has the painter Francisco de Goya as inspiration and character. He says that in the Prado Museum he saw that artist’s black paintings, and he wondered how he lived when he made them. “He had left the court due to a change in atmosphere towards something more totalitarian. Those last moments of Goya have a certain contemporary resonance.”

Goya and Hieronymus Bosch in his work

During the same visit to the Spanish campus, he visited the Hieronymus Bosch and looked The garden of delights y Extraction of the stone of madness. “That had a very profound effect on me because I didn’t think of madness as something physical. Goya and Hieronymus Bosch They are a very particular inspiration, we could say that this is my Spanish story”, and that being a kind of unfinished narrative is “the perfect metaphor for human life: we are all unfinished until we finish; So, we don’t know anymore.”

Regarding “The Kahani Interpreter,” Rushdie “wanted to write about a number of things: the power of art represented through music, which can inspire and change the world; also, a satire of India’s super-rich. It’s still fun.

“I thought maybe I can set it in the place I know best: the neighborhood I grew up in. It’s a little bit like going back to the world of The midnight children, but in another time. It’s the same, but different. This combination of the familiar, but also the new, made me feel drawn to this location. It is a story that I had left to tell.”

Meanwhile, “Finado” incorporates the real EM Forster and Alan Turing, alumni of King’s College at Cambridge University, as the author. “The story began as a tribute to these two incredible men. I didn’t expect it to be a ghost story. Initially it was about the unlikely friendship between the two, but when I started writing I found myself dying in the first sentence. That sentence surprised me as I was writing it.”

Salman Rushdie admitted that if he hadn’t been a writer, he might have been “a wonderful actor. That’s what I would have loved to be,” but that he made the right decision not to do it.

About the documentary Knife, by Alex Gibney, which was recently premiered at the Sundance Festival, the writer said that it was made at the same time as his book Knife. “Both works fed each other. There are ideas that came into discussion with Alex, that found their way into the book and things from it that found their way into the documentary. Both projects were closely related, as if they were brothers.”