{"id":512191,"date":"2026-06-22T07:10:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T07:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/512191\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T07:10:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T07:10:16","slug":"salman-rushdie-in-dublin-what-happens-when-language-does-not-work-any-more-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/512191\/","title":{"rendered":"Salman Rushdie in Dublin: \u2018What happens when language does not work any more?\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Across the world, we are \u201cin danger of becoming a people who cannot communicate with one another\u201d, Booker Prize<\/a> winning author Salman Rushdie<\/a> has warned. <\/p>\n

During a public interview in Dublin<\/a>, the Indian-born British and American novelist said: \u201cEven if people speak the same language, we don\u2019t understand each other and we use the same words to mean different things\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen [US vice president] JD Vance<\/a> uses the word freedom, he doesn\u2019t mean what I mean, but he thinks he knows that word too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Language \u201ccan be so warped\u201d by what is happening within cultures, said Rushdie. \u201cAs the gulfs between us widen and deepen, we literally cannot talk to each other. We are quite close to being there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happens when language does not work any more?\u201d he asked. \u201cHow do we function?\u201d<\/p>\n

This, said Rushdie, is the meaning of his short story. The Old Man in the Piazza, included in his latest collection, The Eleventh Hour, published last year. <\/p>\n

\"SalmanSalman Rushdie: ‘If you get trapped in the rhetoric of anger and revenge, it\u2019s a cage.’ Photograph: Bryan O\u2019Brien <\/p>\n

The story is \u201ca kind of warning\u201d, he said. \u201cWriters have no power, we don\u2019t have armies, most of us do not have any money but what we do is tell the future what the past is like, and so the history of the human race is in our hands.\u201d <\/p>\n

The future \u201cwill be what survives of us in words, in stories, in histories\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n

His message at the end of The Eleventh House collection \u2013 which contains three novellas and two shorter stories, set in India, England, and the US \u2013 is: \u201cThings ain\u2019t getting better folks. And look out.\u201d <\/p>\n

In another story in the collection, Rushdie said he was \u201chaving a go\u201d at the many billionaires in his \u201chometown\u201d of Bombay [renamed Mumbai] who are \u201ceven more garish and grotesque\u201d than US billionaires.<\/p>\n

The city has more billionaires than the rest of India and, he believes, more billionaires than the rest of Asia \u201cso the concentration of wealth is colossal\u201d. The city also has the largest population of people living in slums below poverty line, the contrast between wealth and poverty \u201cis nowhere more acute than in Bombay\u201d.<\/p>\n

Rushdie, who turned 79 on June 19th, was interviewed by Merve Emre, a Turkish writer and academic before a large audience on Sunday evening in Dalkey as part of the Dalkey Book Festival.<\/p>\n

After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988, he became the subject of several assassination attempts and a fatwa calling for his death was issued in 1989 by the then supreme leader of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini. <\/p>\n

In 2022, he survived a stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution in New York but lost his right eye and suffered injuries to his hands and liver.<\/p>\n

Asked about his reaction, he said: \u201cI don\u2019t suffer from revengitis, unlike the president of the United States who can think of nothing else except money.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he had been asked after the New York attack how he felt towards the attacker. \u201cIf you get trapped in the rhetoric of anger and revenge, it\u2019s a cage, it makes it difficult to go past it and go on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"RushdieRushdie (left) and Emre on stage the Dalkey Book Festival. Photograph: Bryan O\u2019Brien <\/p>\n

When writing his memoir Knife in the aftermath of that attack, he had in mind a triangle shape involving himself, his wife and the attacker. It was drawn on his own experience of the event and the observations of others who were there.<\/p>\n

The triangle represented \u201clove and death, hate and love, ugliness and beauty\u201d and the book turned out to be a love story, he said. <\/p>\n

In his own memory of the attack, he was just standing there and the attacker is running at him but that was not how it happened, he was moving and trying to get away. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things about memory is that it makes mistakes, even when we know it is a mistake, we still trust it more than the facts.\u201d His earlier novel, the Booker-prize winning Midnight\u2019s Children, is about memory \u201cas a fallible thing\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n

Towards the end of the interview, Rushdie was asked by an audience member to name his favourite book. Saying he did not know how to answer that, he said James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses would be in his top five.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a time when I would read it fairly regularly every few years in order to depress myself,\u201d he said to laughter. \u201c\u2018What do I do, he has done everything\u2019, and then I had to find little corners of literature Joyce didn\u2019t touch.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Across the world, we are \u201cin danger of becoming a people who cannot communicate with one another\u201d, Booker…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":512192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[122705,615,93,61,60,5461,13522],"class_list":["post-512191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-dalkey-book-festival","tag-dublin","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jd-vance","tag-salman-rushdie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}