An Evening with SALMAN RUSHDIE, Author of Quichotte, in conversation with CASEY CEP (Furious Hours)

now I'd like to introduce our wonderful speakers here for this evening's program first casey step is a staff writer for The New Yorker her first book furious hours murder fraud in the last trial of Harper Lee which is available up at the counter was an instant New York Times bestseller she's a proud graduate of the Talbot County Public Schools she has an AV from Harvard College and an MPhil from the University of Oxford where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar she was born and raised in the Eastern Shore of Maryland and lives there to this day with her family so we're pleased we were very pleased earlier this year to host Casey step to a packed house and it's an honor to welcome her back to Harrisburg and we hope you'll be sure to check her book out it was one of our very favorites here at the air let's please have a warm welcome for a case and our featured author for this evening is Sir Salman Rushdie he is the author as you know of over 13 novels including the Booker prize-winning Midnight's Children Satanic Verses the Moors last side the golden house among others Rushdie is also the author of book of stories and four works of nonfiction a fellow of the British Royal Society of literature Salman Rushdie has received among other honors the Writers Guild Award authored the year prizes in both Britain and Germany the James Joyce award out of University College Dublin the Carl Sandburg prize of the Chicago Public Library and a US National Arts Award I know hey there's so many honorary degrees let's just say in June 2007 he received a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours and his books have been translated into over 40 languages so of course the novel which were here for this evening is titled keyshot and instant New York Times bestseller keyshot was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and was named one of the best books of the Year by Time magazine Rusty's latest shows a fiction master at his brilliant best it's been called hilarious extraordinary and my personal favorite an epic Don Quixote for the modern age we are so very honored to welcome the return of Sir Salman Rushdie to Harrisburg so at this time please join me in giving him a warm Harrisburg welcome [Applause] I feel we could probably spend the next hour just going on down the list of honorifics and honors and everything else that's truly a pleasure to be here with you and I'm so grateful to the the bookstore which is such an institution in Harrisburg and and what a wonderful home for this event and I know a return for you as well you've done yeah it's great to be back I enjoyed it so much a couple of years ago that when they invited me back I immediately said yes and thank you all by the way I saw you all out there in the I would not have done it thank you very much I know they've endured the valley of the rain and the suffering in order to attend the event well let's get started then to say thanks to the folks who did queue up and I'm sure if nothing else everyone knows that the new novel is in conversation with Don Quixote but I'm wondering can you tell us more about its origins and some of the other books it's in conversation with yeah it was I had this even when I was writing the golden house which was the last time I was here for that that while I was writing it I thought that was the second consecutive novel I'd written which was almost entirely set in New York City and I thought you know you have to leave town I thought you know next time you you can't be entirely contained within the to12 area code you have to go somewhere and so I had this idea of a journey book that would that would travel across America and and see what were there was to be seen and then as it happened coincidentally I was asked to write something about Cervantes because it was 2015 I think was the 400th anniversary of both Cervantes and Shakespeare and I was asked to write something about them and so I so I picked up after a very long time I picked up Don Quixote's and have to reread it and it immediately seemed that the book was telling me that this was this was a this was a way of approaching the kind of book I wanted to write and that my my versions of of quixote and sancho panza who are not really exactly like Cervantes's characters but they cropped up in my head almost immediately and so it was just a happy accident really I wasn't planning to write anything about a novel inspired by Don Quixote but I did had you loved the novel before returning to it or was actually loved it more when I returned to it because what had happened what had happened in the very long time in between first and second reading was the arrival in English of much better translations the thing that had been the standard translation the Penguin Classics translation for a very long time was by a man called JM Cohen it wasn't that great it was kind of dull it didn't have you know the effervescent magic that you would expect from you know the most famous novel ever written and and I remember reading at that University and thinking kind of I don't get it mm-hmm you know and then I mean now there's this brilliant translation by Edith Grossman which just brings the book to life and you and you get it you get you see what everybody has everybody reading in Spanish has has always been able to see you know so yeah the return was actually much more exciting than the original encounter mm-hmm it's kind of nice to know you could write such a beautiful book about a book that had not previously been in your personal canon and I'm wondering you know with that sense of a template should we expect you know Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan or you know are you going to give us Vanity Fair of the guy I mean I could see has already written his plays for himself so I don't leave that to him but yeah it was it was it was a surprise you know I mean I it's wrong to say that it wasn't part of my personal Canon because I remember there's a there's a famous essay by Milan Kundera in which he suggests that the novel has two parents one of which is Samuel Richardson's Clarissa out of which comes the realist tradition and the other he says is tristram shandy Lawrence turns tristram shandy but I write she had the nerve to actually say this to Quindaro who I know a little bit that I thought he was wrong about just from sandy because tristram shandy is inspired by Don Quixote right you know the characters of Uncle Tobey and corporal trim interest from Shandy are deliberately and openly based on quixote and sancho panza and so i've always thought that that really the other parents of the novel is is Don Quixote you know it's just that it was a slightly turgid translation that's sure but yeah I mean the other thing that's very interesting where we can stop talking about Cervantes soon but one of the things very interesting was when I was doing this work to write this essay about him and Shakespeare is that there is a lost play of Shakespeare's we only know its title because other people have mentioned it in their what things they wrote this is play called car Dino of which no trace remains and car Dino is one of the most important secondary characters in Don Quixote and the story of Kia of gardenia in Don Quixote is exactly the kind of story that the young Shakespeare loved which is all about star-crossed lovers people people thinking that somebody doesn't love them and therefore going off it's somebody else who really loves the other person and it's a mess it's okay in the end that's exactly what the container story is so it is quite there was a translation into English of Don Quixote in the time of Shakespeare they would have to have known about so it's quite possible that Shakespeare was inspired by Cervantes - there's no evidence that Cervantes knew anything about Shakespeare so it doesn't work both ways anyway no real I actually think everyone here would be fine to have you continue to instruct us in a course on the history of the novel but I feel it would be actually you know kind of limiting our conversation because actually keyShot is full of many contemporary genres - there's there's basically you know a sci-fi plot there's a spy novel there is a roadtrip novel built into it as well and so I'm wondering you know how do you manage so many threads when you're putting together a book like this is just the way my mind works I mean I'm sorry it just is the nonsense in my head what did you write one of the things about a journey book a road book you know the road is a metaphor for life which is so old that it's older than the novel you know that it I mean you could go back to pilgrims progress things like that you know where where the journey the journey the physical journey becomes also a metaphorical journey it becomes a journey from innocence to experience it becomes a journey from birth to death becomes a journey through the stages of life you know and and what it therefore allows you to do is to write a book which changes as it goes along as life does you know our our own lives do that that we the life we have as a child is not the life we have as an adolescent and then our adult lives go through different metamorphoses - and and I wanted to write a book which was like that which which changed as it went along you know so yeah you're right there's a some of it well one of the story lines is quite realistic in a way and and the other one is very surrealist playful and kind of metamorphic so yes it goes through all these forms I just thought you know in the previous two works and I've tried them all these three books two years eight months 28 nights and the golden house and this one hour already attempts to get to grips with the insanity of the present moment it just gets more and more insane and they do it in very different in different forms because two years eight months is really a kind of Arabian Nights fable you know and the golden house is is more realistic and this book I thought I'm just going to try everything at once like every possible way of writing a book it's polite to say try you actually succeed I mean I'll spoil it for everyone to let you know that he pulls it off quite beautifully by the end things you think might might never come together come together quite seen well it was very scary is all I'm saying it's very because I realized what I was doing and that I showed it to my friend Karen Desai who was a you know Booker prize-winning novelist I thought I told her about it and she was very serious she's then she said oh I see she said it's a high-risk book I suppose so and she said no because if you could do what you say you want to do it'll be amazing but otherwise it'll be a mess she said there's nowhere in between so it was scary yeah there was a lot of the time that I thought that I wasn't sure that I wouldn't make it work but you know one of the things that's surprising is the degree to which I mean we've we've talked about some of the literary influences that creep into the book and the books in which the book is in conversation with but I was equally impressed by the way you handle contemporary events and and this sort of ripped from the headlines experience so without giving too much away you know on the one hand someone arrives in behringer New Jersey and we feel like we're in an Ionesco play people are turning into mastodons yeah on the other hand there's a chapter where there's a shooting in beautiful Kansas and it will call to mind for people yeah well that was a very that passage that moment of the book is very much is based on on that real shooting right which took town a place in a town called a lava in Kansas which I discovered is a Native American word meaning beautiful me and so because I didn't want to be entirely limited by the news story you know I wanted to be able to fictionalize it mm-hmm I thought I wanted to not use the real name of the town and not use the real name of the people you know because then it's just a reportage mm-hmm but I also didn't want to completely fictionalize it so I just changed it a little bit you know but yes I mean I was very struck as I saw an interview with the what happened was the crazy guy walks into a bar and shoots two Indian American men one of them died one of them survived and they were like software engineers living there working for the Garmin you know stuff that makes your GPS stuff for your cars and and I saw an interview with the widow of the murdered man in which she I mean she was very articulate and she talked about how they had lived there for you know 25 years and they had raised their children there and they thought of themselves as local and American and then this happens and she says and she said now it makes me think do we have a place here mm you know Bernard that sentence really stuck in my head you know I have javi used the sentence in the book because it was very moving you know as a question about about new immigrants in America you know and the book is about immigrants you know I mean all all the main characters are Indian American in one sense it's an immigrant novel so yeah so some of it is very real and mastodons not so much except I don't know New Jersey's a strange place well you take you take a small news story like that and you build it into the novel but you also tackle what are sort of the largest stories of our time and be namely the opioid crisis and know that the pharmaceutical industry played in perpetuating it and I'm wondering there too you know was that a collection of newspaper stories that sort of built into a plot or how did you arrive at that what part of the storyline well it's two things really well it one is that I stumbled across the true story of an Indian American crook pharmaceutical and entrepreneur made a very powerful version of fentanyl that was a crook and therefore managed to start getting doctors bribing doctors essentially to prescribe these these dangerous things to people who didn't have a medical need for them mm-hmm and therefore contributed to the the addiction you know so so that was a real strong I think he actually went to jail this year he's a man called John Kapur and anyway so one one thing was just discovering that story and but there's a sort of sad I mean family thing which is that my my youngest sister died of an opioid overdose 12 years ago she was she's 14 years younger than me but she was so she was only 49 at the time but and she wasn't living in America she was living in Pakistan but I didn't know you know and I had no idea of the extent of her dependence the her addiction to these drugs not so much offense and it was more like you know oxy oxycontin Percocet vicodin those things and so of course it was a huge shock in the family and it made it kind of personal to me you know and I started digging around then you know finding out about the Sackler family you know and Johnson and Johnson and all these different people but it's taken me a long time to find the story that I thought I could use to tell the story and so yeah this is 12 years that I've been sort of thinking about it so some part of this book is very very very immediate as you say torn out of the headlines and some of the stuff that's been gestating you know for a decade well mm I'm so curious you know when you when you share that part of your family story and then for folks who've read it you can think about how it actually finds its way into the novel in this fictionalized way I'm so curious to know which of the characters you see yourself most in because some of them are overtly autobiographical and then of course there's one very in a sort of pseudonym like name yes there's a female character of a talk show hostess with whom my crazy old coot falls in love not that he's ever met her he's just seen her on TV and she's called she's called miss Selma are missing one I see the resemblance now it's really it's quite clear to me now that we're this close it's just it's just an extraordinary coincidence there was also a writer you know I think if you'd asked me I would have thought Sam Duchamp was you know I think I there's a bit of me there's very much a bit of me in the key shot character which is that he is ludicrously optimistic you know when he has no reason to be hopeful he's hopeful so there he is deciding he's going to cross America to win the hand of this this lady on TV who is who he doesn't know and who is extremely famous and powerful and successful and beautiful and young none of which he is but that doesn't deter him in the slightest and he just he says repeatedly that he knows that love will find a way and and that kind of ludicrous optimism he's also ludicrously optimistic about America you know everybody he meets he meets in a spirit of friendliness and openness and expects that that will be the way in which people deal with him and it isn't always which surprises him but doesn't change his mind you know so and people have people who people who are allegedly friends of mine have said to me that I am sometimes stupidly optimistic especially given the condition of things right now so I thought I would take that quality and and just exaggerate yeah exaggerated colossal II and but I see that I see myself in him in that way you know and it's like when I if we can talk about my most important work when I when I had my my moment on Curb Your Enthusiasm there is a car I can't believe that wasn't in the introduction honestly I mean I had a conversation with Larry David about his character in which he said yeah of course it's like me but its enormous ly magnified you know it's like me exaggerated colossal II so I think he probably does have a bit of OCD or you know but but not not to anything like the degree that the character but so I thought but I did something like that you know it took something that I recognized as being me but so is there a secret pseudonymous cannon of Salman Rushdie novels that are spy novels that we thought you know the thing is I wanted to write a spy novel I did because there was a point of my life which we don't have to go into a lot where I met a lot of spies I mean I did I met American spies I had British spies and a few French spies the French spies wrong drunk sorry French spies we've talked about when when when the life goes into the fiction but the question is what about when the fiction goes into the life because I understand your son still want to go on this trip with you Tocqueville type book in the works maybe one of the starting points before I had the idea for how to write the novel I had thought a couple of times I've thought that I wanted to do a road trip across America and just see what I could see the first time was like when I turned 66 I thought I would go drive down route 66 and I thought that I thought that might be you know but then I never did it and I was always slightly disappointed that I never did it and then in in these in these times I thought middle America might be a place to explore and it might be better to do it like on the road rather than in a plane to actually physically be in the place and yeah and I asked I actually asked my younger my younger son who's now 22 this is a few years ago he must be 18 or something I asked him if he would go with me because I thought it might be interesting to have a younger generations eyes as well as as well as mine and he said yeah he'd be up for it and then he had like a comic pause and he said but dad are you gonna drive so I've been driving since before you were born what are you talking about and he said no I don't think you should drive and then he said that he would be willing to drive and so essentially I fired him but they still it's like both my sons him and his older brother they based the I mean who have actually read the book I have to say which my kids don't always read my books but they have read this one and enjoyed it and they said they say to me we should we should do a road trip I assume everyone here is an agreement with me that they should do the road trip we would all be interested well another possibility and I know you you've done a little bit of writing for the stage and the screen you know so much of this book we talked about sama arm but she's actually entered the world as a reality television star and so it's possible it's it's not a manuscript you all would produce but rather a reality TV show no Larry David would be in the backseat with the cameras and you would take us around America that's not good one of the things I had to do because you know in in Don Quixote in Cervantes is novel he tells you on the first page more or less that don't you know he's mad and that he has been driven mad by reading all this junk fiction mm-hmm you know and so it did make me think that if he were around today Cervantes what would his target be you know and and and the answer I came up with was reality television which is and and so here you have this this lonely old man he's a traveling salesman he's never been married he has no children and spends his life going from motel room tomato motel room and watching holy whoops a bad television and I don't I thought this is not really the kind of TV I usually watch but if I'm going to write this character and and and I'm saying that his head is full of this stuff mm-hmm then I have to know what that stuff is so that I can fill his head with it I did go to Wikipedia and verify that all of these shows really exists and that quite a lot of them have audiences larger than any novel do diligence in the way that Cervantes says Don Quixote's brain has been rotted by reading this this romantic fiction I could feel my brain Roger while watching you bachelorettes and Kardashians and all that stuff and now I don't have to well it's interesting so so here we are you know right the romances of servantes day with a brain rotting tools then and today it's reality television and what was most interesting to me you know we've talked so much about the exuberance of this novel but in its restraint you know obviously most people would characterize the President as the first reality of television president and he goes unnamed and so much of the indictment of American racism and Xena is pitched as a kind of global phenomenon not a particular affliction of the most recent cycle and I'm wondering you know did you know all along you were you were just writing about you know what kind of I didn't want him in my book hmm I thought he's here now heads too much already mm-hmm you know you wake up in the morning thinking what's he done now yeah and if you switch off the TV for two hours you think something happened you know because he's probably done something else I just thought we have too much of him in our heads and I did think well I do think about mr. Trump that there's a sense in which he's in effect and not a cause that the the social phenomena that existed not only in America the divisions in society the rise of xenophobia it's not only an American phenomenon you know it's it's also very much behind the whole brexit thing and there's a rise of racism and anti-semitism all across Europe and even in India where I come from there is now the rebirth of real communal hostility you know which has me which is getting so I'm saying is it is a worldwide phenomenon and I mean Trump is one of the leaders who has been very skillful at exploiting it and and has no doubt made it worse you know but didn't cause it right you know if he were to disappear tomorrow these things would still be there you know and so I wanted to write about America not about Trump because America is more interesting than John sure you know Trump is essentially not interesting huh you know I mean he's we are obsessed with him but as a writer I mean he's not really a character you know he's a series of performances in search of a character I feel obliged to take you away from Trump and we've talked about political influences and literary influences and actually wonder you know so often writers are asked about you know the things they read and the people they talk to but I'm wondering I know that you recently lost your editor Susan camo and it's not often that writers get to share their experience of being edited or talk about that side of how books come into the world and I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about you know when a book like keyShot is finished and it gets handed over what happens to it and the people who influence it there yeah well we just I mean a few days ago there was the memorial event for Susan in New York in which an enormous range of writers came to talk about her you know and I think it's was a testament to her brilliance as a medicine that she could edit with she could instill complete trust in writers as different as you know gary Stein guard Sophie Kinsella Elizabeth's trout me Ruth Rachael you know etc etc and was able to kind of get into the skins of each in each of our books as if they were her book you know that kind of gift of like sympathetic magic you know being able to become the writers alter-ego you know and and confident know is I mean very few people can do it I mean we shop yeah I mean Susan she read the book like six times so she had ended up knowing it better than me and then she came over and she sat in my house for seven hours going through the book like in great detail and remember that she's not just my personal editor she's the publisher of Random House she has kind of a big job and yet during that seven hours she never looked at her phone you know she never saw if she had an urgent text she never looked at an email she never made a call she was entirely just there for the book and for me and every writer who was edited by her has the same experience you know she was like a hundred percent and so you learned to trust her you know and then she said to you she we go through it then she sent me a copy of her marked up manuscript but there marks on every page [Laughter] and she starts off saying you don't have to do any of this you don't have to do anything which is very comforting and not true she wrote her notes in very faint pencil and in basically illegible handwriting so I I had to quite often use a magnifying glass to make the letters bigger so I could work out what the words were which meant you had to really concentrate anyway listen she was she was a brilliant reader and even when you didn't agree with her you had to really think about it you know and just to have somebody who would read your work so carefully that everything they said was worth thinking about you know and is is is a great gift to a writer and there were two chapters in particular in the book where she was worried about the timeline in one of them and she thought it was too scrambled and in another case she was worried about one of the characters who she thought would not think like that or wouldn't have that kind of knowledge you know she just said I think you you're giving the character more than the character should have in the way of information mm-hmm and in both cases she was completely right and I unscramble the timeline and I revised the character and it looks much better for it you know and so yeah I mean it would not be the book that it is if it weren't sir if it weren't for her is your Italian speaking cricket was mine she was my tout yeah yeah I mean you'll know if you haven't read the novel soon enough who that is the thing is that the the character my Sancho is not like Sancho Panza he's actually a teenage boy who has been in a way like in the way that in Pinocchio in the way that the wood carver Geppetto makes a child out of wood and then the child wants to be a real child something similar happens in this book where where Mikey shot brings Sancho into being by an act of will and magic and then he is desperate to be a real human being and he has helped in this by a talking cricket speaks Italian she's got the motors and that's because if you could imagine the impossibly ancient time before Walt Disney there was an Italian novel called finocchio by Carlo Collodi in which there is a talking cricket who is called Grillo parlante which means talking cricket and I thought I would have him instead of jiminy with his stupid hat you're good in a sense though this is a tremendously beautiful and rich and just erudite and playful novel that I'm sure so it's not just Don Quixote it's also Pinocchio I think that now we were going to take some questions from the audience so hopefully you've been thinking of things you'd like to ask all right first off can we give a round of applause for saman okay sir [Applause] so at this time this is one of our favorite parts of author events we're going to do an audience Q&A so if you have a question feel free to raise your hand we'll try to do a few here in the main floor then David has a mic up on the balcony so if you have a question on the balcony we will get to the balcony at some point here so who's gonna start us off right over here thank you so much for being here I wonder if you would share with us the theme the role of forgiveness in your works and if you will in your life Oh in my life I needed a lot know one of the things that the book it's it's a it's a great question actually because one of the things we haven't spoken about is it the book has a lot to do with with what with what goes wrong inside families you know and and with loving relationships which are not which are not romantic love which a father father-son mother-daughter brother-sister relationships and and and how those can become estranged either because of physical distance or because of something said or imagined to be said or done or imagined to be done you know which which creates ribs inside these very profound and intimate relationships and and one of the things the book tries to look at is whether those things can be healed what is the role of forgiveness and or are there things which are unforgivable so in the in the book there's he shot the key shot character has an estranged relationship with his sister and and a complicated relationship with the child he is brought into the world by magic and then there's a second storyline which we haven't mentioned which is there's a second storyline which is to put it simply of the author who has written the key shot storyline but isn't me and he in his life if we begin to see is that the issues of his life are things he's transforming into fiction and working out in fictional form because he also has a problematic relationship with a sibling and the problematic relationship with a child and so these things work themselves out in parallel and they don't all go the same way some of them work out better than others so but it allows me to get into the subject of families and and how we are inside families and how they how it could go wrong and how sometimes it can go right again and I think I mean I think everybody's families are like this you know I mean I remember when I was in when I was at university at King's College Cambridge that the president of the college was a famous anthropologist called Edmund leach and and he gave a series of lectures of the BBC which became very scandalous because they were on the subject of the family that was their theme and his opening sentence from the first lecture he said the family with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets is the source of all our discontents didn't go down completely well this is from like 1967 or something and I'm interested in exploring the subject of love when it isn't romantic love you know so these other kinds of love that we have with friends with family etc which are in many ways as important as any romantic love that might come our way you know so romantic love in the novel is is this crazy story of keyShot and miss Salma are you know which is an absurd romantic love which is treated as it shouldn't be treated comically you know but but these other relationships are not treated comedy they are treated more seriously other questions in the main-floor yes hi thank you so much for being here I sorry I did think about this um speaking of the xenophobia in the world today I was wondering if you could share a little bit of your ludicrously optimistic vision of the future I know I would appreciate it right now and also perhaps the role of literature both of the past and the future in that you know endeavor well the point about my optimism acidity is ludicrous so I wouldn't want you to draw any conclusions from it because there's another bit of me which is quite pessimistic which is a more natural thing to be maybe right now but the thing about literature I think is an interesting question and again one can't speak for I mean literature is such a broad Church that you know one can't speak for all of it you know I can only think say some things about what I think and what I think is that we are at a moment in which there's an extraordinary assault of the idea of truth and and not and again not just from the occupant of the White House but you know if you go on the internet you find side-by-side websites which are valuable and websites which are absolute garbage and it's sometimes hard to tell them apart because they both exist with equal weight you know out there and I think people are I mean the people's dislike of what of what they saw as being the mistakes of the mainstream media preceded Trump that was long before you know and and and yet the places where people were getting their information were often much more suspect than the mainstream media which they were which in which they in lost faith you know so so when when you have a situation where a culture we have grown confused about the nature of the truth or even if such a thing exists that's something which people can exploit and and is being exploited but I deeply believed that the function of literature all good literature is to move towards the truth it doesn't matter what techniques are used it doesn't matter if this is social realism or surrealism or whatever it might be the purpose of literature is to say this is what human beings are like we are like this we this is how we are with each other these are the worlds we make this is this is this is reality you know it's and I think what this wonderful act of reading and writing does is that the writer and the reader make a kind of contract in the act of reading in which if you like the book you essentially accept that yes this is I this is what it is this is how things are you know if you don't like the book then you don't like the book it doesn't have that effect on you but the magic of the act of reading not just of the act of writing is that you can through the act of reading gain some kind of traction on the idea of the truth you know and and it may be a thing that the reading of books can offer at the time as confused as the present you know then it's just a question of doesn't the right to do it well or badly and if you don't like them then read another book you know but on the whole just read mine beautiful I mean is that that's the Covenant for you that's that's when you think about your audience when you think about putting those books in the world and I think it's become more difficult because you know in the great age of the realist novel in the let's say 80 late 18th 19th centuries I think there was more of a kind of agreement between in society about what how the what the world was like you know and so the the the writer could assume like stone how Balzac could assume that their readers would see the world in much the same way as as as they did you know and and on that agreement about reality his bit is built the foundation that's the foundation of the realist novel you know and and now we live in a moment in which that agreement no longer really exists you know in which reality has become something that we argue about you know that is you know one man's ceiling is another man's floor we have great disagreements about the nature of the real and so that foundation doesn't exist in the same way you know and what do you do about that and I mean one of the things you do about that is write a novel which comes at the truth from 17 different directions you know to try and get there but I think what you can't do at least what I feel that I can't do is to write that kind of old-fashioned realist novel because that was based on assumptions which no longer obtain you know and in this more fragmented world you know you need to come at it differently that doesn't mean that you don't do it and as I say if you do it right then that then the reader will still or some readers anyway will still feel that yes this is telling me the truth about about how things are and I do think that that's the purpose of all writing otherwise why bother you know I'm not interested in I mean even the great fairy tales I was gonna say I'm not insured in fairy tales but I am interested in fairy tales because the great fairy tales contain profound truths you know and so it's not a matter of technique you can come at this through many you know it's a matter of intention well I think the intention of literature is to say something truthful about human nature and about human society built out of human nature and I think that's why no that's why we can read the literature of other parts of the world we can look at a 16th century Japanese novel and we can recognize the characters because human nature is the great constant you know where human beings are human beings wherever we are no and so that's it end of lecture we in a question on the stairs and then we'll go up to the balcony for a couple questions hi thank you I noticed that you mentioned two distinct traumas and your family trauma in your sister's death and the trauma of the shooting that took place in in Kansas and it occurs to me that even in the sort of obscuring of the truth there is an element of sort of that gaslighting mentality of like what is reality and I'm wondering what you feel the relationship of your work and literature has to say about how we process trauma and how we release obscured truth well it's sort of what I've been saying you know I mean I think I don't think literature acts as therapy you know I think it's asking it to do something which it's not designed to do you know to ask it to work in that way I certainly don't myself use it in that way you know I don't write novels in order to work out my problems you know sometimes the problems get worse as a result of writing it works that that that's happened at least once and it happens to Sam Duchamp within the novel he goes yes the thing that's the thing that I hadn't expected about this novel was that I would write about a writer writing a novel because I've always kind of disapproved of you know what is now called meta fiction you know books in which a writer writes a book about a writer writing a book about a writer you know I just think don't do that and then I kind of found myself doing it and I was very uncertain about it I thought I might not keep it in the book I gave myself the permission to explore it but then if I didn't like it just to take the whole thing out you know because it wasn't part of the plan of the book I thought the book was going to be about this crazy old fool and his his his sort of mutinous teenage kid and their journey across America on this impossible quest for love and I thought that's enough for the novel to me that's plenty you know and then this other thing of this about this writer writing this book and and working out his own problems you know showed up and in the end I liked it because first of all because it shows it shows I think something about how the act of creation works how a personal situation can be transformed and become another thing in the work that is being made and also I liked it that the two storylines are written in very opposed manners the author storyline is written very naturalistically and and the keyShot storyline which he's theoretically writing is written very playfully and surrealistic it's in its manner and I and yet they they're confronting the same kinds of theme you know which we've been talking about and I thought to tell a story in which you can show that you can write about the same kind of themes in two very different ways and what is that what does that show us if we put them side by side that's what I thought I ended up that's why I ended up liking it sorry I haven't answered your question because because I the question of trauma as I say I don't think I don't think literature is for that you know I think there's there other kinds of work that help people deal with trauma and I wouldn't think that anybody feeling traumatized by the world we live in will find much reassurance in my work because the because the horror is there you know the way in which I Delta that I suppose you could say is to write is to write comedy you know let's just say instead of writing a kind of bleak novel about how awful everything is and then it gets worse it's it's instead of that it's funny and it's funny about things that aren't particularly funny and that's what we call black comedy and then the point about black comedies it's still comedy so it makes you laugh no I mean one of the things you mentioned the master dog who's you know the master Don's as you rightly said find that point of origin in UNESCO is great play rhinoceros in which in this small town in France people for no reason apparently are turning into rhinoceroses and and I when I was 19 years old at Cambridge I was cast in the production of rhinoceros well I mean not in the lead or anything I was a Behringer its Farsi so people are running on a lost stage all the time and and I was on these one of the townspeople and every time we ran offstage somebody in the wings would stick a bit more rhinoceros on you you know and then you come back on and you'd leave all rhinoceros then you were before and I remember age 19 not really understanding the play and and saying to the producer you know what's this about and he kindly said to me he said someone it's about fascism and I said how and he said it's about what can happen in a community or in a country when suddenly your neighbors seem monstrous to you the people living next door to you seem to you to have become monsters and and they they speak a language that you can't speak to them in and and they're scary to you and and yet these are the people whose children were playing with your children the day before yesterday you know your neighbors have become so alien from you that they seem frightening and I've never thinking a that it was a wonderful explanation but be that what was brilliant about the play is it although it was about actually something very dark it never stopped being funny you know the entire plays conceived as far as it is played as farce and yet what it's telling you is something very serious and then I thought you know maybe in some way we're we're there again maybe we're again in this world where we are so divided from each other that people some people see monstrous to us our neighbors see monstrous to us you know and and then I thought why can't I Brian oestrus is because he has rhinoceroses so so I'll have mastodons because they're all so funny and as far as I know not at present in New Jersey but but you never know we're up here hello there we have a question here hi there I'm but a humble reader but I have found literature to be therapy question for you though you seem to reference your own trauma of perhaps 30 years ago with the Satanic Verses watched you walk in today seemed pretty safe as you came in by yourself where do you stand in Brevard dangerous to me I was laying low where do you stand today with reference to this in twenty nine nine so it's that that's all I mean it's really been a long time since there was a serious issue it's been like 20 years or so you know so I mean as far as you know security and all that there hasn't been any of that for more than 20 years I think you're under estimating Alex who works at the bookstore at security who provides to any author really wouldn't cross him it's it's been such a long time that it feels like he feels like an earlier chapter of my life you know I mean to put it simply the Satanic Verses was the fourth novel that I published it was the fifth book good one non-fiction book this is the 14th novel and the 19th book so you know most of my life as a writer has come after that you know and and so it feels like a book that I wrote 31 years ago you know and I have I mean I'm I'm proud of it you know I think it's I think it's as good a book as I could write but I wrote it 31 years ago and I've done a little work since then which I'm more interested in oddly because you know writers are always only interested in their most recent book because they want you to buy it we we have time for maybe one more question we have one more up here to your left yes sure thank you I'd like to go back to the question of the different genres in your novel if we could I'm curious if you were seeing a kind of parallel between the movement through America in the novel and the necessity then of different genres and voices and styles to match a kind of movement across spaces especially given the kinds of conditions and dynamics yeah that's right it's not everything I would say that it's not so much a geographical thing you know it's not that I felt I right about Kansas in one way and and New Jersey in another it's not that it's that it's that on the stages of their journey there are mood shifts and there are shifts of what is important and so on and that it seemed to me could be represented by by these kind of formal differences because the thing about key shots journey in the novel is it as he explains to his son that yes it's a physical journey they have to travel across the country but it's also in some way a spiritual journey because for him he knows that if he is going to have a shot at the impossible love he feels he has to make him prove himself to be worthy of her and that means he has to he's very interested in the idea of being better and so he sets himself you know the classic mystical journey of Seven Valleys but these are not literal valleys these are these are tests or challenges that he feels he has to pass or overcome and so during the course of the novel he goes through these seven phases you know and they're written about differently because they're different kinds of experience no because I do think the thing that I said before I really think that one of the ideas of the of the novel as a journey is that it corresponds to life and and one of the things the book is very interested in is his mortality you know is life as being finite and having an ending you know and and and our lives change our lives are metamorphic they're not always the same thing you know and and I wanted the book to represent that so we give another round of applause for Casey and Sam you you

Channel: Midtown Scholar Bookstore

Views: 438

Rating: 4.6363635 out of 5

Keywords: books, bookstore, Salman Rushdie, Quichotte, Don Quixote, Sir Salman Rushdie, Midtown Scholar, author, book, author talk

Id: ke-yMD3sXyU

Length: 60min 1sec (3601 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020