My Great Books

this program is brought to you by the Satanic Verses a deeply controversial book at the time and subsequently and its depiction of Muhammad led to a series of death threats including secretly under a pseudonym and recently wrote a biography called Joseph Anton about his experiences living underground under constant threat of assassination so he's the living embodiment of the the high cost of freedom of speech and freedom of expression very privileged for us today well I just going to talk about group of books that it's very difficult to say what your favorite books are because it's well at least it's difficult to say it's easier to say what a hundred of your favorite books are then then ten because you know your mood changes and your favorite book one day might not be the next day but so at the moment at which I wrote this list these were my favorite works and one of the things I noticed looking down the list that they have in common is that none of them really fall within the boundaries of what gets called realest realest fiction and they in many ways they all break the rules in different ways and this reminds me that there's a famous essay by the Czech novelist and essayist Milan Kundera about the history of literature in which he suggests that the novel has two parents two progenitors as one of them is it's clarissa the heroine of Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa and the other is tristram shandy the hero of Lawrence Stern's novel tristram shandy and and and he argues that the realist tradition in literature descends very largely from Samuel Richardson's novel and so that and has expanded is by far the larger tradition and as he says the children of Clarissa have populated the world just from chandi anybody who's read tristram shandy knows that he has a bit of difficulty in the in the childbearing department um but that's about smaller lists these weird books that descend from Laurence Sterne but what Kundera argued was that that because the realist tradition had been so much more extensively explored by writers in the last few hundred years that there wasn't really very much left to discover in that area and that and that this other there the more antique kind of ludecke fabulist surrealist area was the one in which he said there was most interesting new work still to be done and so yeah as i see on this list tristram shandy well tristram shandy is was was a a book that was derided when it was published by eminent figures like dr. johnson dr. johnson said of it when it came out said nothing nothing odd will do for long tristram shandy will not last that was his review this tristram shandy and we now find ourselves at a moment when tristram shandy still around and i don't think many people are reading dr. johnson so so much for critics it's a it's a one of these novels what are the early examples in which novelists very overtly played games with the form of the novel so that there are there are famous trick pages in tristram shandy there are pages which are completely black there are other pages which are marbled with no words on them there are pages in which the words kind of tail off down the page mimicking something happening in the story so he he plays graphic games typographical games with with the form of the book but he also uses a strategy a narrative strategy of almost infinite delay that's to say just from Shandy it's supposed to be the life and adventures of Tristram Shandy gentlemen that's that that's the title of the book but actually just from takes a very very long time to show up even though he's telling the story and there's a wonderful moment about a quarter of the way through the book where he twists from the narrator says that he is now he says I've now been writing and paraphrasing he says I've now been writing this book for a year and in that year I've managed to reach only the second day of my life and as a result I now have more of my life to tell you about that I had when I started so this this endlessly proliferating book in which nothing happens with great comic effect and isn't really about Tristram at all it's about all kinds of people around him it's one of the great comic novels in the English language and one of the great innovative novels and as I say a novel from which those of us who like fooling around with the forum have taken great great heart there's one book on my list which is much older than that which is which is a sort of Indian equivalent of a kind of or text which is the text that has become known as the thousand nights and one night 1001 nights otherwise I mean more colloquially known as the Arabian Nights what's interesting about these stories well a lot of things they interesting about the story first of all they're really good stories secondly they've made very a very interesting journey across the world that's to say even though the book is is is colloquially known as the Arabian Nights most of these stories didn't originate in the Arab world in fact many of them originated in India and in fact a lot of the form of the book is a very Indian form there's a lot of Indian classical texts which like to which like to have like frame stories like the famous frame story of Shahrazad Shahrazad telling the stories of the Arabian Nights to this murderous King to stay alive basically save her life that idea of the frame narration cut is something that very much comes out of the Indian classical tradition the Indian classical Edition also really liked nesting stories you know Russian doll stories Chinese mock stories stories in which somebody says that reminds me and then tells you a story and in the story within the story somebody says there's a story about that and tells you is another story it so you have these the stories disappearing down down endlessly diminishing series of nests and then they all come back up with kind of spectacular effects sometimes so it seems that what happened was that the stories of the Arabian Nights stories had ended up in the Arabian Nights at some point maybe around the 10th century were translated into Farsi which was the court language in India at the time and they were collected as as a text which was called Hazara of Sanaa which means a thousand stories it didn't take place over a thousand nights and one night but allegedly contained a thousand stories I say allegedly because this book has been lost and there's not a single copy of it has survived the book seems to have traveled west from India into the Persian speaking world and and the only reason we know about its existence at all is that it's referred to in other books that have survived but it does seem that it's in this book that the Shahrazad story first appears and and several of the stories which one now associates with the Arabian Nights at some point it moved through the Persian speaking world into the arabic-speaking world and was translated into Arabic and then became this this text a thousand nights of flare like one and a thousand nights at one night eventually found its way into Europe initially into France where it was translated into into French by a man called Antoine Galan and the thing about gallo is that he was to put it mildly a translator who took liberties with the text so he ditched some of the stories and he added some stories of his own and interestingly some of the stories with which you'll be most familiar the Aladdin story Alibaba story were added only in the French Edition and did not exist at all in the original Arabic text so at the heart of the Arabian Nights as we now know it there's this kind of fraud and we don't even know about those stories where the gallon found them in other folktale collections and included them in this one or whether he made them up you know it's it's both possibilities exist and and from French they came into English and from English they call it to the Disney Studios and and then it's all you know Robin Williams and genies one thing you know is worth pointing out about the real Arabian Nights is that there are no flying carpets in the Arabian Nights there are flying carpets and other fables coming out of the Arabic speaking in Persian well but in the Arabian Nights itself all the carpets stay on the ground anyway the point about these stories which is very remarkable other than their great narrative qualities is that even though they come from the Islamic world there's almost no religion in these stories they you know priests mullahs hardly appear and the subject of religion is scarcely discussed in in in these stories there's a great deal of everything else there's a great deal of sex and violence there's a great deal of deviousness cunning spitefulness' you know lots of lots of excellent novelistic qualities but but no religion which is a great liberating quality about these stories and as a result quite often they have been moments when people for whom religion is an imperative have tried to in the Arab world have tried to ban the Arabian Nights in fact quite recently him in Egypt there was an attempt to - there's a legal attempt to ban them which fortunately it went up a number of courts but fortunately there was a sensible judge who who threw it out so they are that the effect of that is to make them very often read in a very modern way they don't read like archaic stories they read like stories that might have happened just around the corner and it's a wonderful demonstration of the fact that stories from a very distant time stories which have made this very unusual journey across the world really traveling across half the world can cannot be can see cannot become just folkloristic and inert but can still remain kind of active and vivid on the page and feel like they're stories that in which we recognize human nature and we recognize truth and etc so it's a very long book I recommend you there's a not not the best translation with the most enjoyable translation of the Arabian Nights is one which was made by the British orientalist Richard Burton not to be confused with the husband of Elizabeth Taylor and the point about Richard Burton is that he was obsessed with sex he was obsessed with all kinds of very bizarre sex actually more than fifty Shades of it and and and what he did was in his addition he annotated the stories very very heavily sometimes on a given page the footnotes are longer than the text so so and the footnotes are all about very weird sex so it's this extraordinary book in which the top half of the page has this classical narrative and the bottom half of the page is got a pornography Victorian pornography so I recommend it strongly the translation has a lot leaves a lot to be desired there are much better translations of the stories but there's nothing quite like the Richard Burton version as a thing to look at just look at it for a bit don't read all of it it'll corrupt your tender Minds I think most of these other books are much more recent Oh back in the last 100 years in the book that the book that I sort of fell in love with when I was at college was was James Joyce's Ulysses and I will argue with anybody who says that it's a difficult book to read because because its first of all it's very funny and I think things people forget to say about Joyce is that he had a real comic gift and it also contains maybe three of the great characters of literature one of which is is Leopold Bloom the advertising salesman wandering around Dublin who's in the in the role of Odysseus in in in the novel and and Steven Daedelus who is the young man who is whose life is sort of modeled after Joyce's own life but who during the course of the novel becomes a kind of surrogate son figure to to bloom and therefore occupies the role of of Telemachus from The Odyssey and then the the magnificent character of Molly bloom the wife of the wife of Leopold Bloom who was busy having sex with everyone in sight every time he leaves the house and and and whose soliloquy sort of 50-page soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is one of the great texts of English literature and very steamy but the book is the book is one of the books that reinvented English literature it did it's it's a book that that plays with both the form and the contents of English teacher of literature and in the way that but in a way gave birth to the whole modernist movement in English literature and Joyce himself although Joyce Joyce like many great writers contradicted himself you know as as Whitman said do I contradict myself very well then I contradict myself one part of Joyce's argument was that literature should not have political contents that he argued that literature should be what he called static not dynamic it should simply be it should not seek to push the world in this or that direction and but you know like many great writers he didn't practice what he preached and one of his other dictor which I think was closer to who he was as a person was because he was very very passionate about the Irish nationalist movement and figures from that movement crop up through all his books but he said he wanted to make an English that was no longer the property of the English and that that is the it's like the linguistic project of Ulysses which is very brilliantly executed and you know speaking as somebody who came from to whom English was given as a part of the history of as a consequence of the history of Empire I was also interested in making an English that belonged to me and not to the English and and so I've always been interested in those writers who have embarked on some kind of project like that and of course it's one of the great beauties of the English language that it is so malleable it is it is it's a language that you can twist and Bend and shape and reshape and it and it goes on making sense you know in French for example is it's much harder to do that French is much more syntactically rigid language that if you try and perform the Joycean experiments let's say on French it's it's a it's a lot tougher to do but English has become many things and of course here in America there there there's not one but many american english is the language of southern literature is not the language of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and the language of the West Coast is different from the East Coast and the language of African American literature is different again so you have all these English's which people have molded and shaped to their own needs here in America and that's been happening elsewhere that the Irish were one of the first people to do that to make their own variation of English and Joyce is preeminent amongst those writers but in the in the Caribbean you know writers poets like Derek Walcott been making West Indian English which is which is partly highly classical as many allusions to homer and so on but is also very heavily influenced by my creole patois by watch the seventies Marxists in the West Indies used to call nation language that didn't catch on um Australia has got Australian English and Africa about different parts of Africa have English's which which you know the way in which Gordimer and could say use English in South Africa also has a lot of you know local variations and in India too there has become an Indian English has become a I mean it's unfair to it to call it a dialect it's become a variant of English which is which is very rich and very unlike idiomatically very unlike English so I was very drawn to Joyce's attempt to do that and the I mean I'll just tell you one the funny story about this is it Molly bloom them given that Molly bloom the heroine of the novel is based pretty much everyone would agree on Joyce's wife Nora Barnacle one of the things we can see about Molly bloom when we read Ulysses is that she's not the kind of woman who reads a lot of books and she has other skills and there's a there's a story which is in Richard Elements biography of Joyce that when the book was first published was first published by an American in Paris called Sylvia beech who had a small bookstore slash publishing business called Shakespeare Company and it was published in a limited edition of 200 numbered copies and Sylvia beech kept copy number two for herself and copy number one was wrapped up and messengered over to Joyce's apartment in Paris and Joyce was there with his wife and a friend of theirs and when the book arrived he unwrapped it and took out his fountain pen and on the first page wrote to my darling Nora with love from Jim and handed it over to her and she looked at it and she said she said sure I'll never read all that and then she held it out to their friend who were sitting there and she said why don't you give me for it so slightly I'm generous especially as especially as the book is set on the day that they met what Joyce did was he was he was obsessed with this date June the 16th 1904 which was the day they met and he kept all kinds of memorabilia of that day he kept the irish times of that day and and then performed this extraordinary romantic act of writing his great novel about the day he met the woman he loved and she didn't read it the June the 16th has now become you know in in the book world is become known as blooms day because it's the day on which Paul bloom made his Odyssey around Dublin and so obsessed was Joyce with the my new she I of what happened that day in Dublin but if you look at the you could get out of I guess a little library to get out if you get out the Irish Times for June the 16th 1904 you can see that almost every single article in the newspaper has found its way into the book including the advertising and the racing tips and so on there's a moment in the book when Leopold Bloom wants to back a horse in the 230 a horse called throw away and if you look at the newspaper there was a horse called throw away running in the 230 race in Dublin that day the ads getting there's a famous moment in in the book where and you know because Leopold Bloom is an advertising sales when he's trying to get people to buy ads place ads in the paper and there's a there's an ad for potted meat what his life without plum trees potted meat incomplete so on so literally every tiny detail of this day in Dublin finds its way into this great novel and yeah it's fun read it what else have I got down here well one of the things that happened in the 18th century was the rise in English literature of a kind of literature which which like tristram shandy departed from naturalism even though it had some roots in in real life and I mean one example of that is Robinson Crusoe I mean Daniel Defoe was you know he was a journalist more than he was a fiction writer and there was a true story of a man who was marooned on a desert island for a number of years and then eventually rescued which which he knew about and out of that he made the fictional character of Robinson Crusoe the book that is often bracketed with with Crusoe which also is about a man who went on a journey and got you know shipwrecked is it but it's more fantastic book is Gulliver's Travels and one of the things that's interesting about the 18th century is it was possible for a book to be extremely famous while the author remained largely anonymous if you look at the front page of Gulliver's Travels it purports to be written by Gulliver and and you have to look in the bottom left-hand corner to see in very small type the words Jay Swift it presents itself as an autobiography by the character in the book Robinson Crusoe does the same thing the name of Daniel Defoe is very sort of over there in the corner it purports to be a book written by Robinson Crusoe about his own life anyway Gulliver's Travels everybody knows about Lilliput because big Gulliver little little people but that's only the first of the journeys there are a number of in here's the second journey is the opposite little Gulliver big people and then there are there are other journeys including the final allegorical journey to a land of of kind of intelligent horses who have contempt for the human race and with some justification and anyway so there's this book which uses fantasy and parable and etc in a way that was something very new in English literature and became the forerunner of much of the fantastic fiction that has that has followed coming back on moving all of it from the 18th century I guess it's it's very difficult for anybody who is a novelist by trade not to say something about Charles Dickens if only because that the body of work is so gigantic and omnipresent that you'd be a very stupid writer not to pay some attention to it and the the thing I want to say the reason I've chosen great expectations rather than you know Oliver Twist so whatever is is that what happened to Dickens as he got older it wasn't so much that he got better well I think he did get better what happened he he got less sentimental and so if you look at the early if you look at Copperfield and Oliver Twist those books there are these often nauseating children who you want to give a good smack even though that's completely incorrect now but as you get into the later part of Dickens he he stops doing that no and the the boy pip in great expectations is hit the main thing that distinguishes him from people like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist is that he's a very flawed character you know he's by no means a goody-goody boy he's got a very kind of dark side and it makes him much more interesting and it makes the book feel much more modern and contemporary and so if you're going to read I mean it's late it's late in his career but if you're going to read Dickens I mean I would actually suggest that you start at the end ridiculous that you read great expectations and our mutual friend and which are the last couple of novels and work your way backwards to the terrible children when you get to the 20th century I've chosen here three or four books from different languages different parts of the world - from Latin America that the great Argentinian writer Boris Jorge Luis Borgess was probably responsible for showing more writers the possibilities of fiction than than anyone else in the 20th century in Spanish anyway actually thought of himself primarily as a poet and thought of these little weird short stories he would write as as kind of light entertainment and you know people can be wrong about their work I don't know I don't think many people would see him as one of the great Latin American poets oh and you wouldn't put the poetry of Boris in the same place as Neruda or Octavio Paz but but the stories of Boris have been revolutionary in their games with the form in their revelation of what's possible in in in literature I mean just to give you one example it is this is a that the most influential collection is a collection just called fictions ethion is in which there's a store the Garden of forking paths which is in part a spy story but the spy story is you know Alfred Hitchcock had this term he said that stories could have things in the machine which he called MacGuffins the MacGuffin was the thing that the story seemed to be about but it wasn't actually about that it was just a decoy to get you off the track of what the story was really about anyway when you get past all the spy story which is all nonsense and doesn't matter at all you discovered that this the thing that everybody is searching forward to this thing called the Garden of forking paths is actually a book and a book written by a Chinese writer who was driven mad by it because what he wanted to do was to write a book in which every possibility of every action was explored so you know boy meets girl boy gets girl boy doesn't get no what happens then what happens then so the book kind of explodes like nuclear fission into alternative possibilities and drove him mad he just couldn't do it and after you read thousands of pages of all these different variations it's or killed him people have said I have seen more than one article which which says that in this story Bohr has anticipated the hyperlink you know Vargas anticipated the idea of telling stories sideways that instead instead of having to have a narrative line going beginning to end that simply you were able to present many many many many many alternative possibilities and so take that for what you want Bohr has the father of computer the computer age he certainly was a father of what became the great moment of Latin American literature starting in about the middle 1950s until the late 1970s the period which was known colloquially as el boom and of whom the most famous figures were Gabriel Garcia Marquez and and Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes and Julio cortázar and Elijah Carpentier and several others of those books the book that has sort of risen to become one of the great novels of the 20th century is Garcia Marquez his novel cien anos de Soledad 100 Years of Solitude and I remember as a young writer I just published my first novel and I didn't I did I knew nothing about the Latin American boom I didn't have never heard about this this literature at all the friend of mine read my novel and said Oh use it seems that you quite clearly been very influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I said who is that and he said to me you got to go to the book store you got to buy this book it's gone 100 years solitude you got to buy today and read it and I said really 100 Years of Solitude that's that's a good book and he said I don't be an idiot just go get the book and so I did and of course the one of the qualities of that book is the moment you arrive at the first sentence it just sucks you in and and 100 although I have to say Boris who was sometimes uncharitable towards his fellow writers especially younger writers who made more money than him said said that he said the book is too long it should be called 50 years of Solitude but leaving that aside it's it's it's probably the great canonical work art of what has come to be known as rallies no magical magical realism it takes place in a what begins as a tiny settlement in the middle of nowhere in the jungle in Colombia and goes through several generations until it becomes a more established township but it's about this world of the village in the jungle I guess the village circumscribed by the jungle and that that's the point about the solitude the thing that's very interesting that what he does in this book is that he privileges the world of the village over the world of the city so that the the social the cultural attitudes of the village superstition religion belief in miracles etc that's all treated as completely everyday that obviously that's true and the stuff that is really frightening and awful is technology so there's a there's an extra there's a moment for instance when one of the characters in the book a young girl called Remedios the beauty who is extremely virtuous and open saintly as a character there's a moment when the ladies of the village of hanging out washing and and in the middle amid the washing amidst the sheets flapping in the breeze Remedios the beauty begins to rise up to heaven and that she right continues she rises up to heaven and he's lost and the other that the women all say yeah well we always knew something like that was gonna happen to her you know she was always too good for this world and that's the end of Romania stability you know so so that's completely matter-of-fact and accepted but there's another moment in in later in the novel when the rent the railway has been has reached has reached Macondo which was the name of the village and the first railway train comes to town and this old lady seeing it approaching kind of goes mad she runs through the village streets screaming and they say to her what's what's the matter what's happened and she says she says something's coming something terrible and they say well what is it and she says I don't know what it is it's like it's like a kitchen dragging a village behind it and that's the railway train so this reversal is the magic of the book that the the world of the village is true and the world of this city outside the village is bizarre and scary and out of that simple device and what other device which is exaggeration that's to say what happens in in Garcia Marquez is that everyday phenomena are exaggerated to the point of surrealism I mean for instance at one point there's a train owned by the banana company that's carrying goods away from Macondo and one of the characters sits there and watches it go by and it goes by for a week there's a there's a moat there's a famous moment in it where one of the characters up front one of the members of the main family the buendia family has got himself into a lot of trouble in any way he commits suicide he shoots himself in the head and the blood trickles down on his body and heads out of the door turns right goes down the street turns left arrives at the house where his mother is cooking lunch goes into the house up the steps yeah into the house goes round the edge of the room so that it doesn't stay in the carpet arrives at the kitchen where she's cooking and makes a pool at her feet and then she screams because she realizes her son is dead so that there's a you know surreal exaggeration but in order to say something truthful just to tell you about to tell you how a parent discovers gets the news of their child's death so that's what is interesting I think about what's called magic rivers because most people when they say magic realism hear the word magic and they don't hear the word realism and the point about this kind of writing is that it's still rooted in deep emotional truth and that's that's why it works that's why it works just about that book having Carlos Fuentes who's great Mexican novelist and a great friend of Garcia Marquez and and actually of mine said he's doubt deceased but he's before he passed away he said that he said you know in Latin America now everybody stopped doing magic realism because because Garcia Marquez his magic realism and he said actually it's very difficult for us in Latin America to use even the word solitude because because it seems to be a reference to Garcia Marquez that he said I'm really getting worried that if things go on like this we won't be able to use the term 100 years which is an indication of there's a giant presence of that of that book in that writer know sort of the book in Europe that had something like the same scale of impact as as one hundred years of solitude was the German novelist winter grass his first novel the tin drum the book written in the immediate aftermath of the war and it's a book about a boy in in the town of Danzig meg where grass was born and raised is one of those strange places which has been a town which constantly changes country that at the time that he was a child it was it was it was German but it's at certain points in its life moved it and actually now it's in Poland and at some point between being in Germany and Poland it was actually a free state it was this a free state of a free city so it's this curious town which doesn't know which country it's in and where they speak a very unusual dialect of German called kashubian and anyway grasses novel is about a boy called Oskar in the lead up to the at the time of the rise of the Nazis who decides at the age of three that he's going to cease to grow because the adult world is too horrible and he wants to remain child-sized and so he does by an act of will he ceases to grow I mean he arranges to fall downstairs so that the grown-ups have a reason for why he stopped growing but but actually he just does it by choosing to do so and as a result because he's a little keys that make he can he could watch the entire history of the Nazi period from as it were under the table with nobody paying any attention to him because he's a little kid except that he isn't much of the novel anyway this and he has a tin drum on which he could have beat search history the way annoying everybody and this novel became in a way certainly was considered to be the I think he is considered to be the greatest novel that came out of World War two and it's and and it's interesting that it came from that side I mean you can compare it with maybe catch-22 a novel which has a rather similar similar comic sensibility to grass and catch-22 and tin drum you could see as being a conversation across that line maybe slaughterhouse-five as well and if you have no sense of humor the naked in the dead again a novel which used surrealistic techniques in order to talk about history and has became the first of a trilogy of books that he wrote which are now called the dancing trilogy which explores that moment that the moment of Nazism and what he says about his own life is that he was brought up in a house in which you know the lies of Nazism were accepted as being obviously true and so he was raised in that kind of a world and at the end of the war when when the Americans arrived in Berlin you know he he discovered not only that his entire picture of the world was a false picture with it was actually an evil picture and he had to do something which is very hard to do which is to destroy your picture of the world and try and build another one and that project is really what has inspired his his life's work to find another way of looking at German history other than the way he was given by his parents which he had to so wholeheartedly reject so yeah one of the great novels of World War two and I think well the subject of this this the use of the fable as a as a force through which to tell modern stories you find variations of this around the world and one of the other ones that I've selected here is is Italo Calvino the Italian writer who in the I guess in his youth I mean it would have been in the in the 60s or so wrote these three extraordinary fairy tale like fables one of which is called the Baron in the trees another is called the cloven Viscount and the third is called the non-existent Knight they're they're three sort of very very modern but fairy tales which he then collected actually in America they were never collected in America they've only always ever been published as individual volumes but in in in in Italy and in many translations including in England they were published in a single volume called our ancestors which he wrote an introduction for and so as if these three crazy figures were in some way the ancestors of the modern world the Baron in the trees is about a young man from a very minor Italian noble family whose father is very authoritarian and at one day his mother puts in front of him a particularly unappetizing plate of snail soup and he refuses to eat it and his father says orders him to eat it and he rebels and so he he leaves the dining room and he climbs a tree in the family's grounds and he never comes down from the trees for the rest of his life he spends the rest of his life living in the trees as an act of rebellion this this has become one of the great most most celebrated Italian novels because of its its metaphor of resistance and and denial you know etc so the other two novels are equally bizarre the cloven vie count universe contained I met Sato is about they're all set sort of in the Middle Ages it's about there's a the the the the Viking question is involved in a in a battle and unfortunately the swordsman he's fighting against is better than him and manages to cut him in half vertically vertically bisect him falls apart fortunately there's really quite good doctor available who manages to stitch up the two halves so that they individually survive as half a person each and and one of them becomes hideously evil and the other becomes equally hideously saintly and they both do equal amounts of damage until they begin to dislike each other and at the climax of the novel they fight each other one legged one-armed you know and and because they are after all two halves of the same person they are exactly equal in skill and so at a certain at the climax of the fight they each launch a blow against the other which opens the stitches so now they fall apart fortunately the same doctor is on hand and he's able to stitch the two halves together again so that's a happy ending and the third story is a story called the non-existent night you Cavalera Norris East and a which begins with the Emperor Charlemagne taking the taking the salute of his army and so there's a and the there are the knights in their shining armor on their horses and behind each of the knights there are the the infantry the soldiers that the Knights have brought to fight for the for the Emperor and and the Emperor's taking the on his horse riding down the line and as he goes past each night the night lifts the visor of his helmet says who he is and says how many men he's brought and it's a big army it's taking hours and it's a hot day and the Emperor's getting a little bored and at the end of the line they come and he comes to this night with the shiniest best greatest suit of armor of all and the knight introduces himself but will not lift the visor of his helmet and chalamaiah says sir Knight why will you not show me your face it'sit's discourteous of you not to show your face to your Emperor and so the knight rather reluctantly lifts the visor of the helmet and there's nobody there it's as empty helmet and and Charlemagne says sir Knight how could it be that you're not in there and and the knight replied sire it is because I do not exist and sharla is very struck by this and he says well how do you keep going then and and the knight says so by willpower and strict adherence to the rules of chivalry and so this is a story about an Onix at night that doesn't exist who serves the Emperor anyway these these are our ancestors you know I recommend them to you and just briefly at last one is a book that was very helpful to me Russian novel Mikhail Bulgakov's great novel The Master and Margarita it's a novel about it partly it's a satirical novel about intellectual life in Russia it's very rude about kind of like official writers and so on but the real thing that happens in this novel is that the devil comes to Moscow the devil comes to Moscow with with very use with very very impressive sidekicks one of his sidekicks is a giant cat with a revolver at each paw who can shoot the pips out of the ace of spades there's there's another there's another sort of I don't know Harlequin like figure and kind of lozenge outfit who is so thin that when he turns sideways he disappears so when he wants to disappear he just turn sideways then he's not there anyway the devil comes to Moscow and makes mayhem and one of the things that he does is that he encounters this which called margarita who leads him to her lover who is a writer known only in the book as the master and the master has been writing a variation a version of the life of Christ as told from the point of view of Pontius Pilate Pontius Pilate narrating the life of Christ and and the master has become very depressed by his bed and during the course of the novel that we're reading there are chapters from the Masters novel about the life of Jesus Christ seen through the eyes of Pontius Pilate that are dropped into the novel anyway the master has become very depressed about his book and has actually destroyed it actually he says he's burned it the devil is very puzzled by this he says he says what do you mean you've destroyed it and he says yeah well I sighs hated the book I set it on fire and there's one of the most famous lines of the book is that the devil says but but that's impossible he says manuscripts don't burn and this has become a great metaphor of of how you can't destroy but anyway manuscripts don't burn he says and then he says what's that over in the corner and margarita goes there and there's just heap of paper over there and she picks it up and begins to cry and she says it's your novel it's your novel so the devil brings the novel back from ashes and gives it to the gives it to the master and so well what I'm saying is that when I was writing a novel in which I guess there was a part of the novel which is a variation of the of the origin story of Islam it was quite useful to have to read a novel which contained a variation of the origin story of Christianity so so it so I think of all the books I read when I was writing The Satanic Verses the Master and Margarita was probably the most helpful I'll be practically helpful you know showing you how showing you to do something even though what he's doing his rather unlike what I was doing but still it was inspiring enough it was a book which oddly had a not dissimilar fate to something that happened to me but it was it was very heavily persecuted by the Soviet leadership and and was forbidden and banned for a very long time and actually it really only gained wide publication in in Russia after the fall of communism so it was it was unavailable there for a long time anyway so that's you know the problem is I said those are those are ten of the books that I like you know I mean I could throw away this piece of paper and talk about another 80 or 90 but let's stop there maybe I mean I think the general point I want to make is this question of the great books you know that there are such things as books that are better than other books and and and one of the things that I think is that any book that lasts 50 years 100 years or more it it never does it by accident that there is only one reason why books last which is people think they're still worth reading and as a result it's it's people's fondness for books that makes them survive and nothing else nothing else so the so the classics are the classics for a reason they're not accidentally the classics what I do think is true is that any culture English language culture but but other languages too tend to privilege their own classics above those from elsewhere and and and so but as I said to one or two classes this week we we have the great good fortune to live in an age of great translators I mean the people who in literature who nobody ever talks about the invisible people you know and yet it is because we live in that age that we have accessible to us literature's from from around the world which we can read as vividly as if they had been originated in our own language no so so I try very hard and I've tried in this in even in this little list just to suggest that literature breaks national boundaries it doesn't exist inside language boundaries and writers are very often influenced by writing which comes very very far away from their own experience in the way that a Russian book helped me to write my book which is very much not a Russian book I remember when I was first published in America when Midnight's Children was published by Knopf I went into the office of the then head of Alfred Knopf Robert Gottlieb he took down from hit the bookshelf and gave me as a gift a Japanese novel and he said I see it as my job in publishing to keep this book in print and he said you should go and read it because it's better than Anna Karenina and this is a novel called called the MA kyoka sisters by Junichiro tanizaki and I'd never heard of it litter I'd never heard of it that's really better than Anna Karenina oh yes and I went away and read it and you know what it's better than Anna Karenina and so I think you know all of us who do this job are as likely to be moved or affected or inspired or influenced by books which come from the other side of the world as as from our own backyard I think that's right so recommend it as a better way to read it's just a better way to read you know read outside your own world you know read from other places that other not just other times but other places other languages it's the thing at which Americans aren't very good and it's partly the fault of the publishing industry that so little translated literature is published in America so it's not available to American readers if you compare I mean in in this country it's less than 2% of all the books published in a given year originated in the language other than English if you go even across the water to England that figure is still low but it's probably somewhere around 10% if you go into Europe if you go to countries like France and Germany then you know 30 or 40 percent of the books that are being published in a given year started out not in French or German but in other languages so readers in those countries have the ability to really know what's happening in world literature in a way that we have we have a problem because many of the books are just not available but all these books are available so you can read them and so I'll just stop there and maybe if you want to talk about something we can I cannot try and answer your questions the preceding program is copyrighted by Emory University

Channel: Emory University

Views: 14,807

Rating: 4.847909 out of 5

Keywords: Emory University, Emory Williams Lectures, Salman Rushdie and books

Id: hgT1A5KqCik

Length: 57min 44sec (3464 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 23 2015