MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

Ayer, la novela Hijos de medianoche Salman Rushdie fue coronado como el Mejor Booker de todos los tiempos (con poco más de 7000 votos mezquinos, anota The Literary Saloon). Salman se encontraba entonces de book tour en EE UU con la novela The Enchantress of Florence (afirma que el motivo principal de los book tours es que el autor odie tanto su libro que se ponga a escribir otro de inmediato). Hasta un suburbio de Miami lo persigue The Guardian para saber cuál es su reacción frente al premio:

"What's especially gratifying is that more than 50% of those who voted for Midnight's Children are under 35. The book has leaped the generations, which is wonderful for me. I feared it might just be a topical book about the birth of India and that it wouldn't endure. The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated (...) I wasn't confident at all when I wrote Midnight's Children. It was all just a trick. My first novel [Grimus, from 1975] had done less than zero and had been trashed. I had four or five other unpublishable novels too, so I felt like a failed writer. At the time, Ian [McEwan], Martin [Amis] and Julian [Barnes] had had great successes. All my contemporaries were like Ferraris, leaving me at the starting grid."

También se refirió a las declaraciones de algunos de sus compañeros generacionales, como McEwan y Amis, sobre el Islam:

"I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on. I don't think there should be discrimination against anyone. Nor do I think Martin was advocating that. The point is this: I don't have to agree with what you or anybody says to defend their right to say it. To have Martin articulating a public fear in this rather knockabout way was justified. If we don't say what we think or articulate what is being generally thought, then we are self-censoring, which is wimpish. I thought the attack on Martin in the Guardian by Ronan Bennett [in an article published last November and condemned by McEwan] was out of order. To say he is racist because of that is wrong. I may not like the things you believe and, by the way, the fact that you believe them makes me think less of you as a person. I may despise you personally for what you believe, but I should be able to say it. Everybody needs to get thicker skins. There is this culture of offence, as though offending someone is the worst thing anyone can do. Again, there is an assumption that our first duty is to be respectful. But what would a respectful cartoon look like? Really boring! You wouldn't publish it. The nature of the form is irreverence and disrespect"

Pero no todos celebran con algarabía el premio. En The Independent el comentarista DJ Taylor ha dicho que no puede celebrar este triunfo pues, pese a ser una muy buena novela, la influencia en la literatura inglesa de Hijos de la medianoche ha sido maligna.

Etiquetas: booker, inglaterra, NOTICIA, rushdie, salman rushdie

This entry was posted on 7.11.2008 at 11:09 a. m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.