чужак
14:14 | 18-09-2012 | Literature, Politics, Religion | No Comments
о новой книге Салмана Рушди, “Джозеф Антон”:
On February 14, 1989, a few months after the publication of The Satanic Verses, the spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, called for the execution of Rushdie, calling his novel blasphemous against Islam. Rushdie heard about it from a BBC reporter who called him at his home in London: “How does it feel to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” “It doesn’t feel good,” Rushdie replied. He and his second wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, hadn’t been getting along, and days later she told him she was unhappy in the marriage. “Marianne was a fine writer and a beautiful woman, but he had been discovering things he didn’t like,” he wrote.
He left his house and wouldn’t return for another three years.
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Rushdie had to choose a name “pretty pronto.” “He thought of writers he loved and tried combinations of their names. Vladimir Joyce. Marcel Beckett. Franz Sterne. He made lists of such combinations and all of them sounded ridiculous. Then he found one that did not.” Conrad and Chekhov. “And there it was, his name for the next eleven years.”
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