PEN Out Loud: Salman Rushdie and Marlon James

[Music] words are the lifeblood of our freedom words are truth they bring us together they help us ask questions and understand each other words are connection and ideas and research and songs and inspiration and laughter and fun and love and for nearly a hundred years Penn America has been fighting for words we fight for them in Saudi Arabia in China in Russia Myanmar turkey Mexico in New York Los Angeles Washington DC and in Denver Atlanta Dallas Cincinnati New Orleans and anywhere else across America and around the world where words need protection we need to be strong for words because they are truly in danger and to be strong we must come together we are louder together [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] that takes place year-round and showcases a wide range of contemporary writers in one-on-one conversations huge thanks to our serious partner in the Strand bookstore and the series curator Lily Philpott who is our literary programs producer at Penn America and many thanks of 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we do everything in our power to champion and protect the power of the written word gear across America and abroad before we get started a program like a couple of program remotes logistics a book signing will follow right after the Q&A take place right on stage so come on out please buy books questions were collected on index cards and handed our backstage to our speakers so they already have them and we will start with a reading by Salman Rushdie followed by a conversation with our two speakers and finally please it kinda makes noise so now forever we are here tonight to celebrate the publication of Salman Rushdie's newest novelty show which came out yesterday and which also we learned yesterday has been shortlisted for the [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] but I thought I wouldn't treat I thought Milan and I too much to talk about so we just got to talk yeah unless you howl would be but with insistence in which case you may do that let's see I know rody Crouch New York speaking of what did you do to your book or money or did it give money back man they gave me money yeah but much less really yeah I mean when you got it's like fifty thousand pounds yeah yeah when I got it was ten but just for inflation but yeah but I think it's true ten thousand pounds in 1981 it's probably just you know sorry [Laughter] the this sort of occasion of the tainted history of the book appraised and I remember somebody in Chicago's me how do you how does it feel taking tainted money and I was like you damn right it's tainted it ain't enough yeah if you think have any problem taking Booker's money no I I was totally shameless because also broke that helped me accept that very large check yeah the first letter of no actually we used to have these things called telegrams the first telegram of congratulations I received this from my bank manager and also by the way it's it's not the Man Booker Prize anymore no it's just the Booker Prize the man leather no man left the chairman of man group whose name is also man you know Manny Manny from man that he's not it man and I think his exit from the man group was closely followed by their decision to stop sponsoring it yeah but it's still it's still a great thing to be on this show it's you may be the most nominated author I don't know who is I mean there's a few you know I don't know I mean Margaret Atwood's be nominating like home lost and could see us being nominated a whole lot he I can't remember who else I mean yeah Hilary mantel gets nominated every time she sneezes is such a brilliant sneeze though so I don't know I actually don't know who has these records yeah I mean this is it's the seventh nomination congratulations oh yeah it's nice the last shortlist was 24 years ago so yeah you know I think maybe I'm do I've come to realize that you can tell if you've won yeah you just have to walk just watch how the photography watch the photography yeah no because you see the the kind of what are the dark secrets of the Booker Prize is that they tell the media before they tell the writers yeah so in this way you're in this enormous hole having eating rubber chicken and the media the journalists of photographers know yeah the journalists from the independent was on my table and she knew yeah and after why she couldn't take it anymore she's they're into being have you written your acceptance speech she's like I read I think you should write your acceptance speech she's like I really think you should and then she turned to my poverty got he won you know he won that my dear and she was so frustrated she's just trying to tell us a fun yeah it was actually in that moment though you don't believe anybody know you know somebody comes up to do whispers in your ear it says I know for a fact you know it's you and you think you know okay I'll just wait for the woods anyway yeah so it's been a while yeah put the money up this year what do you think maybe they'll put the money up so I would get more than you you know the thing the first time I read your work I was stunned by it and I was actually a little appalled by it mostly because you know I grew up in a very very sort of Victorian day of literature a lot of which I still like but the idea that you could actually sort of have fun with words or twist words around or do this sort of smack it flip it rub it down I had to bring in Bell Biv DeVoe nice with the words really really stunned me and I it made me wonder and I was and my progress is already what's your relationship to the English language intimate yeah convicted it's a bit but you know not my mother tongue that's to say I mean I grew up in a kind of environment in in India where where everybody's kind of multilingual yeah you know because you have to be mm-hmm and but basically the language we spoke at home was mostly not English and but I went to what they call English medium school so when I went to school I was big taught in English and so I grew up more or less bilingual but but you know when it's not your mother tongue it's not you want that one of the reasons that I never make a spelling mistake is because I learn the language people who just have the language very often can't spell I heard my high school teacher in the back of my head going dot your i's cross your T's and leave a full stop at the end of every exactly we got taught that yet yeah but I remember for a long time my biggest struggle with writing in English is I would put something down or I'll speak and it took me a while to realize I sounded like the butler like a butler yeah like it was a very colonial English like jeez yeah I can't imagine you writing the books you've written now you sir a few what gee I'm Tony I use that betwixt you know because one of the things that happened was I was very lucky when I was at Cambridge that I met Ian Foster yeah I mean he was 19 I was 19 and we were he was a fellow of my college Kings are so not where I thought that sentence was gonna go but God and he was sitting he was very approachable to underground so on and when he heard that I was from from India he became more interested because India had been so important to him and I remember reading Passage to India and loving it but thinking you know this doesn't sound like India he you know it's a foresters famous pro's idea of cleanliness so I thought the one thing India isn't is kind of fastidious it's it's loud and messy and noisy and smelly and crowded you know and I thought how do you write that yeah how do you write and so in a way the way in which Midnight's Children happened was like a reaction against Passage to India the book that I admired very much yeah also I thought that book is 99% about the English experience in India and I thought what about the Indian experience Romania yeah what about that 99.9 percent of what happens and so then that children has like it had one white character yeah who leaves quite quickly that they're likely jumps don't say a few questions is gonna ask about it writing being noisy smelly noisy against its coz astringent encoder like one things my biggest criticism with a lot of code and colonial post-colonial writers who shall remain nameless is there's this sort of astringency in their work as if they don't want to be noisy messy or that dreaded word lyrical yeah well to each his own you know of it I think I think there are there's a way of writing which is very simple and clear it takes like one clear beautiful storyline and tells it yeah and there's the other way which is the way that I've always preferred in which this book is an example of which is a kind of encyclopedia approach you know just trying to just scoop up great big chunk of the world yeah about reading it was kind of like a traffic jam in a way well I hope the traffic moves eventually it's uh it's it's it's it's it was like I remember once being in the middle of a street in Jaipur and I'm like somebody's gonna crash somebody's in a day nobody nobody they know it because it's it's it's only chaos if you don't realize that it's actually working yeah and it's also that even though everybody is doing everything wrong they're doing it very slowly yeah and so that's tied to get out of the way yeah when did Don Quixote first appear on your radar I read it when I was at college so I read it I must have been 20 or something is that that they let Stanley what his name translation no there was there was a really tedious Penguin Classics translation by somebody called JM Cohen call Cohan okay I don't I don't know who he is but there he was or the title page and it was not it was quite a dull translation and it was hard to understand why people revered this book well as much as they did so and then I didn't look at it again for a very long time you know and and then much later actually around the time I wrote the Moore's Law sigh I had I had to look at it and a Negro Sauron won the Grossman wasn't out then but what I found is there was this Tobias Smollett the 18th century English novelist did a translation of Don Quixote which is not entirely not precisely accurate but it's kind of huge fun yeah it's kind of rollicking small it was not unlike Cervantes as a human being he was quite a larger-than-life character and so his his translation I thought captured what I thought might have been the feeling of and then and then came to Grossman translation which i think is kind of just a brilliant translation yeah and that made me see the book in a completely different way more contemporary way yeah because well in things I've I picked up about Don Quixote as well and and and it's it's in like tristram shandy as well when we have these things about the postmodern novel which a lot of guys like the Columbus thing they invented it yeah but actually back in the 16th century yeah Miguel was doing it already yeah yes you know there's this famous essay of Cervantes of Kundera where he he says that the novel has two parents one is Samuel Richardson out of which comes the realist tradition and the other of which is is Stern out of which comes this other more playful tradition yeah but he's wrong about that gaston comes out of cervantes yeah you know I mean actually the characters of corporal Tremont uncle Toby in interest from Shandy are consciously modeled on quixote and sancho panza so so i think one of the great traditions of the novel comes from cervantes yeah and yes the other one may be from richard soon yeah but Cervantes also and I think he showed that key shot as well is that the narrator is insight into enter the novel and a narrator is and and one of the things about quixote and to me another novelist directly influenced by acuity is Tom Jones mm-hmm because it's it's the narrator has a huge presence but a narrator has such charm yes yeah and Cervantes also fooled around with the idea of who's telling the story mm-hmm because he invents the nura he invents somebody who's apparently written the book yeah which he is reporting on yeah except that that person doesn't exist that's and he's and he's the the ostensible author is you know cide hamete benengeli yeah apparently is the author of Don Quixote and and Cervantes just is telling us that he read that and his lady is telling us what that book says yeah so that also made me think about it's the first time ever I've written a book in which there's a writer writing a book mm-hmm it felt kind of scandalous because I've always kind of disapproved of that ya know that idea you know I'm a writer writing about a writer writing about a writer in a book no stop it and then I found myself doing it well when you start thinking it was a postmodern trick and Rios is pretty old well you see my happy fate is that I never studied English literature mm-hmm and as a result I don't know anything about all that see see that was my mistake I studied English literature it's I had to relearn to like boy exactly that's the thing is it yes English literature is a way of learning how to dislike books yeah and matches one of the moments when I almost agreed with VS Naipaul when I was present at a event he was doing at the hay festival in England the UK and he suddenly pronounced as he was prone to do that he said literature is not for the young without any explanation of 1 watt it docked and he said because of this all English departments of all universities should be closed down at once you know I was trying to keep this conversation because I actually met him before but alas strange anything all right well yeah of course you did do I disagreed with completely about everything you know and yet I was very sad when he died yeah you know we never agreed about we didn't agree about politics we didn't agree about literature we didn't anything but there he was yeah I still it didn't give me joy that is what the middle of passage is still applies to the Caribbean yeah you know when I read it and I'm like oh this is still true still chewing in so many ways it at his best he could walk into a room and sum it up pretty quickly yeah that's his best and the best is in the earlier part yeah that those early books apart from middle passage that you know Miguel Street mystic masseur suffrage of Elvira and of course this was mr. Biswas fantastic books oh yeah fantastic book said that somehow he lost his love of people I don't know what happened to him but you know he became colder yeah and the way in which he wrote about people was Olympian and aloof and I didn't like it so much yeah I think I think sometimes we have this idea that again that astringency is a sort of critical distance when it really is you're no longer concern about humans yeah well that afraid I'm afraid i think is what happened to it I mean there's a famous critical essay about about his first look about India about area of doctors he openly doesn't like India right and says so in a number of ways that the Indian the Bombay Indian Jewish critic missing Ezekiel was a great poet he listened wrote a review of area of darkness there's a scene in area of darkness in which nightfall is going to have dinner in somebody's house and on the wall they've got prints of one is a Picasso picture I think and the other is like an Indian miniature yeah and and Naipaul uses this to show how the owners of the house which were his hosts culturally confused so listen in his review says let's imagine the pictures on the wall were different its first of all let's imagine there are no pictures on the wall in which case the owners of the room the house are clearly Philistines yeah if both the pictures of the wall are Indian then they're parochial if both the pictures of the wall are western then they're deracinated and if one is one of each then they're confused in other words you can't win you can't win yeah when you talk about it eagerly Grossman's I'm Don Quixote I remember Gabriel Garcia Marquez somebody asked them somebody was criticizing her translations and said she made you so like a taxi driver and Marcus said finally I self wanted to send all along well Garcia Marquez was always very generous to his translators you know and he famously made a statement at one point about the solitude about Gregory drove us here where he said that he thought the English translation was better than the Spanish original but may not have been truthful reading is again because this it's it's coming out of Don Quixote of course it's it's a picaresque but the thing that struck me certainly in the in the beginning and the first service novel is how much inertia is happening with these characters oh they're really trapped yeah hold these it's got an unusually large cast I mean that that that yeah for a long time people are stuck yeah in various things and actually he shot this journey is the way by it actually means by which everything comes gets unstuck things start to move yeah it's true because lucky stuck in what Aaron's watching tons of TV yes he's just he's just in I mean he's a traveling salesman he's lonely he's never married he has no children he sits in motor you know Days Inns and and and other similar kind of Motel 6's and watches television yeah and is always happy when that when the room has basic cable yeah and he watches crap you know of anyone who watches reality TV and it drives him mad and makes him but I think there is a thing that happens to people who obsessively watch television is that sometimes they can begin to believe that they know the person on the other side is green you know I mean I do know it's happened to me that people somebody comes up to me at the event and said you know the last time we met you said such and such and I really wanted to say that I don't completely agree with you and I say no actually so we've never met you that's something I said on television yeah they said no no no it's it's when we were last talking and it's somehow the intimacy of the television being actually in your living room he can make something make some people believe that the people are in your living room and then you know them anyway that's what happens to him he begins to be obsessed with this TV show right and begins that falls in love as he would call it such a confusion with intimacy yeah and then because he has this relentless optimism he believes that love will find a way I remember yeah the thing about it is is because you know the book talks about Keisha mean that kind of madness and then I thought this is must be a massive worldwide madness because there's so many this goes for so many people yeah I think it's not unusual mm-hmm the derangement of keyShot yeah yeah this it's it's it's not it's not necessarily there our own sort of a critique or damnation of popular culture either no because there's so much popular culture in the book mm-hmm yeah one or two of the people who let's say have not liked it I have have said that the book is guilty of the thing it's critiquing see I was out saying it was kind of celebrating the things it was critiquing yeah I think I've never made really I've never really made a high culture local jurisdiction I don't think like that yeah I just think it's all culture and and and the novel I mean power the novel is not an ivory culture form it's it's not an ivory tower form it's not about high culture yeah it's about how people really are and what are they really thinking about and what the music in their heads and what is the slang they use and if you don't know how people actually live and what is that stuff in their heads that they thinking about you can't make them believable so so I don't I've never thought that one thing is is good and the other thing is bad but yeah a television is really crap [Music] this is it Colin it's called double box or something like that and it's watching people watching TV oh yes and I and I thought this is the worst thing I've ever heard and then four hours later I'm I couldn't stop watching it yeah and I realized watching people watch reality TV was way more fascinating than reality TV well that's exactly because of the because of the capacity of people to delude themselves and that question of delusion I think if we enlarge the canvas from just reality TV you know we live in an age in which we are constantly being asked to delude ourselves mm-hm and many of us do yeah and you know so Trump is president the lens that struck me in this is the nostalgic decision yeah which of course these are sent to the inevitable angler boat brexit makes it ultimately just dangerous nostalgia I think all you know these three countries that I've spent my life writing about I think they're all in the grip of dangerous no style yeah you know that the brexit thing is imagining of a fantasy England mm-hmm that that allegedly used to exist before there were any inconvenient farmers in that was because even King Arthur technically for question is when was that where was this could you give me a date whenever the pics and they were still living in tents you know were they wearing where they all wearing straw boaters and driving and riding around on rivers in punts and of course what they never talked about is that if there was such an age of golden prosperity that it was based on the rape of a quarter of the planet they never mentioned colonialism when they talk about this Golden Age so these Golden Age myths are in all three countries I mean here's you know the Red Hat's is the is the embodiment of the court the Golden Age myth yeah when was America great in the way that in the way that we're supposed to believe it should be again how long ago was it before the end of slavery or after you know was it before or the civil rights movement or after it the war did women have the vote you know when was America is great in that way that is required yeah you know and India now is is proposed is propounding a golden age of Hindu culture which was destroyed by the arrival of the Muslim conquerors no so and again let's get back to that so in all these three places we're being asked to accept a delusion about the past in order for people unscrupulous leaders to manipulate the present yeah the thing breaks it though I thought well I'll have a lot of opinions and breaks it but it also struck me how British it was well I'll just be a little bit more precise it's English yeah just to discuss not Scottish or Irish yeah you know the Scott said the Irish did not vote to leave voted by large majorities to stay mm-hmm the Welsh unfortunately well I don't know what we can say about the well there's nothing more to say yeah is it some reason why I thought I was so British is again this sort of weird idea of empire without conquest they sort of separate the two I remember when the British to the Olympics another piece hadn't happened in the UK and the opening ceremony which I was just appalled at how much it was like celebrating Empire I really thought that nones was gonna say Ceylon at some point or Rhodesia yes ready exactly it was it was embarrassing mm-hmm but it's what happens when countries don't examine their history you know in South Africa there was the Truth and Reconciliation thing but nothing remotely like that has ever happened in the aftermath of empire yeah or the aftermath of slavery or the aftermath of any of these historical crimes yeah anyway so this book is mostly mostly travelling across America mm-hmm but it does it's a really interesting stuff in New Jersey yes yes well there is there is there is no town in New Jersey called behringer but it's quite like Weehawken and what happened is it went when I was at college I acted in the production of UNESCO's rhinoceros in which I was one of the people who had to turn into rhinoceroses he kept trying to run off run on and offstage and every time he came back on you were a bit more rhinoceros eventually you were all right Oscars and I remember as I was 19 or something I remember not understanding the play I remember saying to the director there was this about do I have to wear a rhinoceros head and then he patiently explained to me you know someone it's about fascism it's about what can happen in a society when suddenly your next-door neighbors people with whom your children who your children were playing with their children yesterday suddenly your neighbors become monstrous yeah and you can't talk to them anymore they're alien yeah and when he wrote the play he was talking about you know Nazism and so on but I'd suddenly I felt that we maybe are living in a kind of version of that moment now we can are nowhere suddenly people we used to get along with perfectly well are absolutely alien strangers you know and and sometimes verging on the monstrous and we can't interact with them anymore and yet we used to yeah we remember when we used to and that I thought anyway so in in my novel it's not rhinoceroses but people in New Jersey turn into mastodons which which is I just thought they were funnier all right you're not gonna read what I'm gonna read from your book because I want to talk about is oh yeah you're doing yeah scissors yet so many of today's stories are and must be of this plural sprawling kind because a kind of nuclear fission has taken place in human lives and relations families have been divided millions upon millions of us have traveled to the four corners of the admittedly spherical and therefore Cornelis globe with a man necessity or choice such broken families may be our best available lenses through which to view this broken world and why is it and I want to confuse you with the with with with Sam but why do you think that the stories after they must be plural there must be sprawling what is necessary today yes I'm just extrapolating from from my own life experience which is there how because so much so many families so many communities are diasporic nehe families are separated sometimes by oceans on times by continents you know you get in a cab in New York and and he's sending money back to somebody on the other side of the family on the other side of the world and that sense that we're stretched across the planet now you know that that I mean that in the history of the novel the novel has ideally it liked to be parochial mm-hm it liked to be about this woman in a small provincial town in France who's unhappy with her husband and decides to have an affair he it's about these girls in a small town in the north of England who are looking for husbands yeah you know and the fact that those things turn into Madame Bovary and Pride and Prejudice is not accidental it's because the novel likes to be small and contained you know and then what do we do in a world where life is not small and contained yeah you know where it's prawns and I've wrestled with that a lot of my life as a writer yeah yeah because I remember before I read before I read your read you I also I thought social realism was the novel defined that's social reason was now perfected I know I'm realizing social realism is almost a fringe novel yeah cuz it doesn't work it really doesn't it's like how many sex you know how many sort of white middle-aged guys cheating on their wives with improbable mistresses the woman never work I know we've had enough of them no I just here's my $2.00 theory which is that the the great age of the realist novel in let's say in the 19th century is his based on a general agreement in the society about the nature of the world mm-hmm so that the the writer would stand how Zola Balzac post can assume that his readers will understand the world broadly speaking in the same way that he does mm-hm and on that foundation you can build realism yeah realism is about a consensus about the real no and and then what happens when the consensus breaks down and when reality instead of being something that we all agree on becomes something that it just highly contested yeah is violently disputed that you know one man's lie is another matter but the foundation crumbles you can't you can't build the realist novel on a disputed reality yeah you have to do something else I when I was reading this again this is also a novel about the the immigrant experience but it made me think of the characters in East West oh yeah and that's that's a book of stories I once wrote short stories but a lot of characters in East West did find a kind of harmony a kind of way to exist in country of adoption country or so on these characters are never they never they're cannot remain and stable well I just think it's the difference between then and now yeah I think well I thought of how the characters of east west deal with this reality you know well badly because it because things are more difficult now yeah you know and I you know I this these characters of my keyshot it is maybe we should talk about his imaginary child is imaginary child Sancho anyway they're up there in this Chevy Cruze driving across America mm-hmm and I thought if they're driving across you know middle America which they are for a lot of the novel yeah I can't avoid the fact that you know to brown men or brown man and his son driving across America in this moment you are going to come across some kind of hostility and I didn't want the novel just to be about you know racial attacks but I also thought I can't yeah then I can't pretend that doesn't happen you know so so they do it come to that at two or three in three I think significant moments of the book it was tough to write about actually because it's ugly yeah you think part of that the fact that they end up on the road was almost inevitable in the kind of America we're in yeah I mean actually I what the road is the first thing I had of this book yeah before I knew anything about the book I thought I want in fact there was a moment where I thought I might write a nonfiction book really yeah but I thought I might just go on the road across it I just see what happened just go we could do that yeah all right it's it's it's a date but and then I thought you know actually I think it's going to be more interesting to make it up than just just to rely on the happenstance of event yeah you know and so I I did think even when I had had worked out the book in to a large extent I thought maybe since I'm sending him on this very particular journey maybe I should make that journey yeah maybe I should go to those places what did you know but I've been to quite a lot of them in the past and some of them I been to places like that there are some places that I laid up right for example there's no there's a bit of a novel that happens in a town in Kansas called beautiful there is no town in chancers called beautiful but I was reading when I was sort of digging into things to write the book I read I read about a racially motivated attack in Kansas that in an attack on two Indian American men one of whom who was software engineers I think and one of them was killed when the other one survived that was a random shooting in a bar yeah and the town in Kansas where it happened as a town called Olaf oh la ta G yes and then I was digging into that and I discovered that ol 8th is a Native American word meaning beautiful Oh in I forget which language but anyway so I thought what I want my town to be not quite the real place and the events in the novel are not quite as they happen in real life yeah so I just 15% fictionalized it so so yeah I mean I kind of know I know the world that I'm writing about I think aspects of the world X other comes crashing in in areas or opioid crisis yeah how did that come about how they did well there it is yeah you know well I've been looked at that there's really the truthful thing is that my sister died of opioid 12 years ago mm-hmm at the age of 45 yeah my youngest sister and then you there's none of us knew the extent of her dependency and then you know when your sisters dead there's a certain amount of blame that goes on where you think I should have known yeah you know and why didn't I know etc so anyway it became personal to me yeah well cause because when I was reading salmo in Romania of actually prints and Tom Petty and we're saying that they have an opiate problem they know they have a pain problem yeah exactly and and and this is a it's a bad we are trying to solve it but if I can well you know miss Salva are who is the TV superstar that that key shot besides he's in love with I've been on the surface she's fantastically competent mm-hmm she's she's actually powerful yeah and she's a very formidable figure you know but then you hadn't lifted the lid and there's an enormous amount of pain underneath you know she has a history of sexual abuse in childhood and and you know she has bipolar condition which has to be treated with electro convulsive therapy and and then she begins to turn towards you know the vicodin permeate these things for solace and one of the things I really felt about the opioid epidemic is that it's it's somehow about loneliness it's all about how isolated we are from each other yeah you know and how we seek refuge in these things it's a quiet epidemic yeah and it's worse sort of it outside the cities you go out there in America and small places I mean there's whole communities yeah defendant so I think from pretty much all of you work at I've read is that your novels never what they initially seem to be and I wanted even with this novel how much of that was sort of planned out and how much of this was like I didn't see that coming you know it's it's it's I would say 50/50 mm-hm I mean I what I do is I used to have to plan very carefully you to have to have made your architecture and if I didn't have the skeleton I couldn't start putting flesh on it hehe and as I've gone on I've sort of changed my thoughts about that yeah now I have some architecture but not everything yeah and I want to see what happens on the page yeah I want to go on go ahead go to work and think okay I've got a little thread to tug on and I want to tug on it and see where it's you see see what's on the other end of it he and then you have to if you allow your imagination that kind of freedom that's fine but then you have to be your own toughest critic yeah you have to say is this good or is it bad should it stay or should it go yeah so I mean I'm more like that now it's more I mean I remember I interviewed Toni Morrison just after she wrote jazz yeah I did a television interview with her in England and I asked her since her novels called jazz mm-hmm I said is that what you do you know because jazz is a lot of it is about improvisation yeah and I said is that what you do achieve her first answer was that's what I like to make people think I do but then I we talked a bit more and she said that she as she did like the idea of of making literature in that way that in the wave of Miles Davis or something you know and I I remember being very struck by it and because at that time I was still in that phase of mind where I thought I got a plan everything good enough for Toni Morrison was good enough for me yeah I think are we going to audience questions are we all the time oh good audience questions all right okay I like this one which TV show in which you were referenced would you have read of appeared in Seinfeld or The Golden Girls any of your references you you forgot one which is cheers I mean I'm very I'm very humbled to have be present in all of those important works about I think I mean I think the answer I'm supposed to give you Seinfeld but I think the answer I probably would give is the Golden Girls I was always in a different floor of the hotel people would say oh so they understand he just went upstairs and the people run upstairs or they just took the elevator down and they I never actually appeared but I but I was in the building no Cheers was he was funnier because you know they're in the book they're in the bar and norm and cliff are watching TV and they're some award show on TV know that they want to watch because they've heard that a famous porno star is going to appear to present one of the awards so they're waiting for you know stormy Daniel yeah and I had that and the gag is that instead of her the people who were announced we can't see what's other TV TV has its back to us but then we hear the voice of the TV and the TV says more and more absurd presenters so you know the next award will be presented by the Pope and and they go boo hiss give us the porno movie star the next award we pledged by the President of the United States boo hiss I'm one of those people that they boo and hiss in the end they get the porno movie star they're happy sounds profound why explore man's basic in humanity through fantasy there's an answer to that which is why not which is probably the right answer actually because we all because fantasy dreaming imagination is one of our greatest gifts it's one of the ways in which we understand the world and so why not use it yeah because this this this book references Tolkien reference arthur c clarke in the interviews he talked a lot about Angela Carter yeah and I'm a first market and so on people who use the fantasy use fantasy elements one things I I think about when I think about Tolkien for example that Tolkien was wrestling with World War One and that it's the first time his generation probably had to deal with evil of such a monstrous scale and the only way he could think of processing it is the Eye of Sauron yes no I don't you know he rather disingenuously always denied that it was based on what I've experienced but we don't have to believe him yeah because I he's pretty pretty obvious yeah I just gave a talk where everyone's talking about Tolkien in World War one but you know when I when I was a kid I was I mean I was obsessed with The Lord of the Rings I could I actually could recite some of the vote I can't do it now did don't ask me some of the elvish I mean went over well with the girls and you know I could I could I could recite in them in the language of Mordor it's the the inscription inside the ruling ring so you don't think I can research is like chapter one afraid and Prejudice and I read and I read gigantic amounts of science fiction and I mean not just the you know there's literary science fiction there's no soliloquy in and telefónica you know Ray Bradbury yeah people but I was reading the hardcore you know the stuff that appeared in magazines called astounding that's a genuine magazine that there's another one called amazing represent incredible and at it there you had these writers called things like James Blish Clifford D Simak and Zeena Henderson and Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth who wrote together oh no Frederik Pohl and see that that's the hardcore yeah and and actually from there I found something actually I have to say that just two days ago one of the great early science fiction writers Katherine MacLean died at the age of 94 oh and Katherine MacLean wrote a story that I read when I must have been 16 or something called pictures don't lie which was then made into a crappy television series which show which is how she shot get could watch it yeah and how it gets into the book but there was a moment when I didn't know how to end the book and Katherine MacLean showed me how yeah but my memory of this story that I'd read when I was teenager mm-hmm popped into my head and I thought oh I can do something I can do this instead of that but that works and so I owe her the end of the book and yeah so respected yeah died at the weekend well this was an inevitable question how would you recommend or maybe would you recommend a key shot to Donald Trump you know to recommend a literary novel to Donald Trump a mug's game I don't think he could read them he could read Thomas Malan and somebody asked him how are you write down our drama and you say I actually am genuine it's them T me though maybe the world's only living breathing flat character yeah well I think what he is is the series of performances that he will be whatever is useful to him to be at a given moment mm-hmm a series of performances driven entirely by narcissism yeah you know whatever works for me I will be you know when he was in New York before he was president he used to be used to pretend to be liberal you know he used to be down he used to be like pro-choice things like that and so he'll just he's a chameleon he does whatever he needs to do and there's no character there there's just there's just facing masks you know yeah so very hard to right yeah from I want someone whose kids use a big catch with him and the person is how was it how was playing catch it uncle Donald then he says he always wins [Laughter] there's no winning in in catch well I I I met him three times here my daughter Trump stories I definitely hear the whole story only one though well okay but I'll tell you I'll tell you two little ones one is the first time I met him was this dates both of us was at Madison Square Garden at a crosby Stills and Nash concert which I'm so sorry Neil Young had the brains to stay away you know just CSN and by some accident I was sitting like in the next row to trump and his then much younger children this is like 1819 years ago yeah and he was on his feet and he knew all the words to other songs he knew all the words to all the songs really I thought Donald Trump knows the words to Woodstock that's not right but he did so that was the first time I met him and I think I thought it was just a random chance encounter I think he thought that we had somehow bonded so I met him again a couple of years later actually right about this time of year because the tennis was on the US Open and he said to me did I like tennis and I said yeah I you know I go sometimes and and he and he then said you know if you want to use my box you're welcome to use my box and the first thought I had is even then I thought this would be a career-ending move but that of course because he's Donald Trump he couldn't just make this nice gesture say please use my box he had to say well no you really should because it's the best of all the boxes you know it's it's you know there's no box exactly like my box see if you want to go to the tennis you you have to be at this box about any other box with you know this this is its gesture which I can't I think it Jimmy Kimmel but it might not be described this as pinching an invisible nipple what are those things once you've seen it you know you can't see it anyway these are my dog trumpet cultures oh wow what is your ultimate regret in life I don't know how long have you got no I gotta see my next novel I mean things pretty good right now I don't think this is not an autobiographical work but does this look up the most of you in it this book yeah you know in a way it has the least of the in it because there certainly isn't a me character in it mm-hm but the things that it does deal with that I can't avoid acknowledging are that one of the things it's about is growing old that that both keyShot and his ostensible author our people facing mortality right you know and trying to deal with it and certainly I mean I don't feel like I'm 95 and about to croak but but but you do begin to think about it you begin to think that the road ahead is shorter than the road behind and so in that sense yes I guess so and also both those characters have made a very similar life journey to me in that they that they both they both grow up in exactly the neighborhood of Bombay where I grew up mmm-hmm and and and then they move from that into the West but then both are no in there anything can happen years though yeah well anything could happen is the age we live in which is both good and bad yeah on the one hand it gives keyShot the optimism that he will be able to win the heart of Miss Salma or impossible improbable as that or delusional as that sounds you know but also the age of anything had happened as an age in which all the rules of life have broken down and we live in this age when somebody says in the book you can't predict the weather or the outcome of elections or you know nothing goes according to plan anymore and that decay of of the world that that that certainly I feel that I have lived in the decline of that world the the decrepitude of it is why one of the subjects in the novel is the end of the world I don't know I think when in science fiction people write about the end of the world they're usually not writing about the know that they're writing about the end of a world you know and I do think that maybe we live near the end of a world which is the world that I have inhabited all my life yeah and it's scary and I don't know what comes next mm-hmm you know so I wanted that feeling of that that kind of endtime feeling but that's not because it starts of some kind of like allegory yeah I agree is like an Indian disease do you fan at the times you're in her making you feel more like an outsider no cuz I always felt like that yeah you know and one of the things I think about about about literature is that you've somehow got to be an insider at an outsider at the same time you know if you don't feel inside a world inside a community or a place it's very hard to create it with the feeling of it you know but then I think you have to be able to step out look at it kind of very critically how do you get inside well just by sticking around long enough mm-hmm I think you know I mean I feel I've spent very large parts of my life in three different cities and I feel quite inside all three of them but also I'm only living in one of them at any given time and so two of them are changing all the time when I'm not there and I go back to London now I really have to be told how it works now because the city is changing so fast yeah you know the actual weight of the city is moving you know from what used to be central London it's moving east south and Peninsula the history of London is a move west that the city began in what is now East London yeah and gradually moved west and now it's as if going back the other way you know and the rate at which which buildings are being built in which the doctor landscape of the city is changing I feel sometimes I go there I think I feel like Rip Van Winkle and and Bombay sale it's the rate of change is so colossal I go there like I used to be very proud of the fact that I thought you could blindfold me and put me down at any Street in Bombay spin me around take the blindfold off and I'll know where I am yeah and that's not true I regret that yeah so that's the outsider part yeah but I think that's what gives the novelist it's kind of instability because it's also writing about our world as fundamentally unstable yeah I know it is about that that's the thing about the age of anything could happen when when when the laws of the print that you know when when the laws of science were the laws of the world when you can't rely on them anymore yeah that's kind of radical instability and that's where we are I think yeah I think we're all the time which is shocking well I don't think we on the bomb know it so who's gonna win the US Open male or female male actually no female well Serena she doesn't blow it you know I don't think anybody can beat Serena except Serena Williams unfortunately she sometimes does uh-huh she beats herself mm-hmm if she can hold it together there's she's the best player in the field the men I don't know I mean I'm a Fed or a guy and he just lost he now there are these two Russians and one semi-final and I kind of don't give a the Cold War is back on so you know I guess you're not oh yeah I mean who else is there he scratches is what a lot I know I'm like dude take care of that I just I just thought can't you get pants that fit yeah so does they've always riding up it's believed he's been doing it for decades and what's that scratching yeah well that's pete sampras used to hang his tongue out particularly when you're serving I thought you know your tongue goes inside you but anyway these are the people we love yeah somebody it's been a great pleasure speaking to you thank you [Applause]

Channel: PEN America

Views: 6,625

Rating: 4.852941 out of 5

Keywords: Salman Rushdie, Marlon James, PEN Out Loud, PEN America, Strand Book Store

Id: rx5LFdkMvas

Length: 63min 48sec (3828 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 09 2019