Q&A with Salman Rushdie

[Music] uh [Music] go [Music] foreign really [Music] uh [Music] my [Music] so [Music] so do [Music] hello and welcome you join us at the 2020 malta book festival for a very special q a with a writer who is widely considered to be one of the most important influential and celebrated authors of the past 50 years he's written 14 novels a book of short stories and four works of non-fiction his work has attracted countless prizes midnight's children perhaps his most celebrated novel not only won the booker prize when it was published but it has since been judged on two separate occasions to be the very best of all the booker prize-winning books it's therefore a great honor and privilege to be joined from new york uh by sir salman rushdie salman welcome hello how are you how are you good thank you um before proceeding um let me explain the the format of today's q a session uh in anticipation of this event we asked members of the general public here in malta to submit questions that they would ask salman rushdie if given the opportunity in of course a pre-covidien existence unsurprisingly we were inundated so my job tonight is to try to synthesize those questions as best i can and to touch on some of the most popular themes and topics covered at certain points during the discussion i'll cue in um some of the the people who wrote in and give them an opportunity to ask their question to salman rushdie directly but first of all i'd like to ask you your thoughts salman on this extraordinary year 2020 um both in terms of your own uh personal experience um of things like like lockdown what that has been like for you um but also your your broader perspective on on the issues that we see from afar um we've all seen the the rather shocking footage of mass covert burials in new york and of course at the moment we have this extraordinary situation um in the white house which seems to be um to all intents and purposes uh the early stages of an attempted coup uh so in the context of all of this upheaval and madness how are you well it as you say it's been it's been quite a year for for all of us um i i found recently a new year's eve photograph of myself celebrating the incoming 2020 little did we know what we were celebrating um i mean i is as far as i'm concerned i mean i actually am one of the lucky people who had the illness and um and recovered um i mean i i got it quite early on in march and and was and was quite unwell for a couple of weeks but i i was fortunate in that i didn't have the worst version of the illness you know i didn't i didn't have the breathing difficulties which are the real danger and um yeah so i was an early victim of this thing and since then in this country everywhere now i think we've crossed the 240 000 death barrier which is horrifying horrifying especially as it's pretty clear that with a different kind of administration many of those deaths could have been prevented um yeah i mean i as far as the attempted coup is concerned i'm not really sure that he's going to succeed in doing that um the election result is pretty clear and then the people are going ahead and certifying the vote and um in in december the electoral college will meet and will vote and that'll be the end of that and and if he has to be dragged kicking and screaming from the white house i'd quite like to see that um fiction of course and the arts more generally have been a source of solace for many people at this difficult time and yet so many people who work in the arts musicians uh theater workers in particular perhaps have borne the brunt of some of the the economic hardships that have been a consequence of of covert and the the attendant restrictions um do you think we are as a society guilty of taking the arts for granted well i wish that we could see that they are in fact essential you know that's to say people turn to the arts particularly in times of distress and trouble as a way of trying to understand the situation that they're in and it's always been a function of the arts uh to to offer that to offer that to to society in difficult times and for some reason we don't in many countries discuss this country the united kingdom many countries fail to recognize um that the arts are essential in that way and i mean i think the effect as you say the effect on the performing arts has been uh close to calamitous and rather strangely for me in the in this year when all the theaters in the world are shut i found myself writing my first play which i've now finished um the the most the most useless object one could produce in this year is a play which cannot be staged because there's nowhere to stage it um but you know one has to hope that the world will return slowly and and the theater will return sooner rather than later um and uh i'll be very happy to be able to be part of that return when it happens it seems like a literally active hope in fact writing writing drama now um unsurprisingly many of the questions uh that we received uh are curious about your your thoughts on the responsibility of writing and the responsibility of writers at this this difficult time emma barriel uh for instance goes so far as to ask why is it still worth writing a novel in 2020 and rebecca zamet wonders what a writer can do to raise socio-political concerns without sounding like a broken record in a world endlessly saturated with stories and this this reminds me of your essay outside the whale in which you you take george orwell to task for what you perceive to be his quietism and you recommend instead i think you call it rowdyism um uh making as much of a clamor as possible i wonder um in a world endlessly saturated with stories to use rebecca zamit's phrase is this still the the best way of breaking through the noise do you think well it's one of the ways you know i i think uh i don't make a distinction here between the various narrative arts you know between whether whether we're talking about the novel um or theater or cinema you know uh of course as the as the arts become more expensive they become more difficult to produce in this time one one of the great advantages of of of the book is that it can be produced by somebody sitting alone in a room and doesn't require theater doesn't require a film studio doesn't require anything like the apparatus that the other arts require which is why the other arts are in more trouble but what i think is this that um what's the point of doing it um we are creatures who have always used stories as ways of understanding ourselves that's that's one of the one of the things human beings have always done um i've often used the phrase uh that we are the storytelling animal you know that there is no other animal on earth that does this um and so stories fulfill a very deep need uh in in human beings and um and i think well to put it at its most if you like contemporary we live in an age of lies we live in an age in which in which an enormous amount of public life uh can is filled with the sound of people lying to us and and certainly in this country that's been truer in the last four years than at any time that i can remember um and there's a very important distinction between between lies and fiction um that's to say that fiction literature its purpose is to approach the truth it can do so by all sorts of means some of them naturalistic some of them surrealist but the purpose is to tell the truth about human beings about how we live together about what we do with each other about about how things are you know and and uh the art of the novel is definitely an art which is dedicated to the truth um whereas the lie is a way of obscuring the truth you know so so so in many ways these are opposed things you know and and it may be that in the age of the lie the novel actually has a purpose you know i slightly resist the kind if you like the kind of utilitarian view of literature that that literature exists for a purpose you know um i think literature exists to be beautiful um and to please people and to challenge people but it doesn't exist you know to to achieve any simple social goal what it does do i think is to engage readers in a dialogue about about what the truth is about what the world is like you know and and when we like a book when we when we love a book some part of us accepts the vision of the world that the book is offering us and and that becomes a part of our vision of the world and i think i think that's that's what books can do in a time like this i think um rather than rather than to offer some kind of polemical uh viewpoint because polemics don't last you know and and certainly if you're if you're my kind of writer you want to write books that will endure that will have some kind of lasting value um that's that actually leads in nicely to some of the the other questions that were sent in um you're clearly not as your your answer there has just demonstrated you're clearly not a a didactic writer and yet mixed in with the abundant pleasures of your writing i think there is a degree of uh instruction even if that instruction is um is never direct um and so one question that that came uh to mind in uh in in the the questions that was sent in is that you know despite the the the lightness fluidity and width of your writing the the zip and zing of your writing you do take on deadly serious contemporary issues and we've had numerous questions on your your your bravery and courage in doing this from sandra dingley jasmine vasalo jasmine de batista and kirk greck and if i could sum up all of these questions i think it would be how important is moral conviction to you as a writer well i think i think the truth is that i do believe that art is is in essence a moral exercise you know i i think that the art of literature is engaged with the question of what is the good you know what what is what is right action and what is wrong action you know and these are questions that human beings ask themselves we ask ourselves all the time and it's it's a very problematic thing because essentially we all tend to believe think of ourselves as in some way good very very few of us think of ourselves as bad people you know we um and yet it's not possible that all of us in fact are good people so so there's an element of self-deception in in many human personalities and it's part of the part of the project of art to see that to see when people are behaving badly while they think they're behaving well you know uh i mean there's the famous example of graham green's novel the quiet american um in which his central character pile in in what was then indochina believes that he's acting for the best at all times and yet wreaks complete havoc wherever he goes and so yeah i do think that there is a moral vision in in most good art you know but but as you say the the difficulty is not to make it preachy you know i i mean i i don't like as a reader i don't like to read books that are wagging a finger at me and telling me how to think you know um because my view as a reader is is that is that that's my job you know i'll be the judge of that but i do think what the book can do is to create a world in which the reader first of all in which the reader enjoys being but also in which the reader can be faced with serious questions you know and and and needs to find his or her answer to those questions so yeah i mean i think a book without any kind of ethical sense uh would be not to my liking i have to say mention of the the lightness and and wit of your your writing um brings us to a topic that a lot of people are very interested in which is uh your use of humor um and wit more generally uh clara cootie for instance um was interested in the irreverent tone that you're able to conjure and many people including robert pizani were curious as to whether the jokes in your writing are planned or spontaneous and at this stage i'd like to cue in uh christine caruana who extends this line of questioning in what i think is a is a rather delightful way christine are you there you often speak about the dangerous power of comedy and the admiration you have towards writers of the alternative great tradition like rebellio gogol kafka so with whom you share a love of grotesque humor all this is keenly felt in your novels as well but i've often wondered to what extent if at all do you change elements of plot and character for the impulse to elicit a laugh or for the sake of an irresistibly elegant punchline in the sense are you as the author in full control over the reader's funny bewitchment or does comedy hold a spell over your writing as well you know that's it's such a good question um and well i would say one thing i i what i don't do is to shape what i'm doing to lead up to some kind of gag you know i mean i'm not i'm not uh i'm not in that sense uh a kind of joke smith you know and and to my mind if there's comedy it has to arise out of character and situation um and uh and in many ways i'm led by by those things i'm led by the character i'm led by the situation and and and very often things that i put down i'm not actually you know sometimes i don't know that people are going to find them funny um i'm very often people who read my books tell me that such and such moment they found you know made them laugh and and i didn't think it was i didn't think it was going to you know so so there's there's a part of comedy which can surprise even the the author um i mean in general i think what i what i try and do is to is to have humor in everything that i say because as a reader i don't like books that are completely humorous um even some very great books that are completely humorless i find i find problematic and so to some degree this is just how it comes out it comes you know the writing comes out this way because this is this is what i like to read but no i mean i think it would be completely pretentious to say that i'm completely in command of the material i find more and more as i've gone on that writing has become not a carefully pre-planned act but an act of discovery you know that when i when i started out a long time ago i used to need very very careful architecture and planning and if i didn't have that i was unable i mean i was unable to to get going now i find that obviously i have some sense of what i'm doing but i'm very much more willing to see what shows up on the page on a given day you know and and the way in which i think of this is that that earlier kind of writing had more in composition with in common with if you like classical composition where you you compose something um and this kind of writing has more in common with jazz if you like where it feels more that it allows more room for improvisation you know and i mean i remember you know tony morrison who i enormously admired and and was lucky enough to know somewhat uh wrote a novel called jazz and and i remember interviewing her and asking her whether she allowed elements of improvisation uh to to be part of her writing process and she said well i i'd like i'd like to make you think that that's what i'm doing which was a way of not answering the question but i mean i do i i that i do sometimes i like to surprise myself on the page you know and and uh find the story acquiring an unexpectedness uh and then having to decide if that's good or bad and and sometimes that can that can be that that can have to do with comedy yes thank you thank you very much christine um salman your insights there into uh how you how you write lead us neatly into another series of questions because many of the people who sent questions in are not just uh keen readers of your work they're aspiring writers too and so there are lots of questions about the writing process your your particular writing process um your your books of course are full of fiction you know they're they're often meta fictional um and some of them such as midnight's children uh dwell on the the writing process as uh david hudson who wrote in uh points out whereas elsewhere it's often taken for granted um for instance um your latest uh work keyshot is among other things a story about a writer and a story however the actual writing of the story um isn't isn't given much attention and so a lot of people wanted to ask you to expound a little bit on your own uh writing process what your routine is like where you find inspiration and of course that age-old question um how do you deal with with writer's block and we've had questions from christine gaglia charlene zameet tommy fenik liam karl adjust camilleri and many others on on these topics yeah i mean well to take that the last thing first um the way in which i deal with writer's block is i i don't i refuse to accept that it exists um and what happens you know when you finish a book uh or when i finish a book uh characteristically i feel very um i feel very hollowed out i feel kind of excavated you know and as if there's nothing left in my brain and and and it's uh it's a worrying feeling because you you wonder if it'll ever fill up again and if if anything will show up that is worth thinking about or writing about um that happens every time and and one of the things i guess that you learn from having been doing it for a long time is that actually the tank does refill you know it can just take different amounts of time i mean there have there have been moments when for example with keyshot when i actually had the idea for the book while i was still writing the previous book um and and so it was very quick to move from from one to the other there have been other times when i've had a period of a year or even a little bit more than a year when i have not been clear uh what i what i should do next you know and and what i've come to think is that that period that kind of if you like fallow period is is just a different kind of creativity because what happens is that i i work just as hard in in that time when i don't have a book to write and i sit every day at my desk and just see what is in my head see what it might have to do with something i've read or something that just cropped up across my field of consciousness you know i just put down whatever is there whether it's whether it's the germ of a character or whether it's just a sentence or whether it's a a thought about something you know and i just just work on it and usually the next day i i can understand that all of everything that i did yesterday was garbage you know and then i then i try and think about today's garbage you know and and and what happens out of that process of being in a constant dialogue with yourself and in some kind of constant dialogue with the world outside yourself just working you know working without a goal gradually what happens with me is that something that i've been thinking about starts sticking i wake up in the morning and i'm still thinking about the thing i was thinking about yesterday and and characteristically that's how the books begin i begin to then ask myself why is that thing sticking in my head you know what is it about that thing that is interesting me and so you see it's not it's not completely an active will some of it is half unconscious you know you you interrogate yourself why why am i thinking about this and if i am thinking about this what do i do with it you know and and and the books emerge from that you know so yeah sometimes you're lucky and you know exactly what you want to do next you know it's said of anthony trollope that when he finished a novel he would not allow himself to rise from the desk until he had written the first sentence of the next novel i don't think all of us are able to do that um of course trollope wrote novels which many of which were long sequences of novels so in which the same characters continued so it might have been a little easier to do um but yeah in my case there's no rule really that the gap between books can be very short or very long this year for example i mean partly because of the weirdness of this year uh i i think like many writers i've i've actually found it quite hard to get going you know and certainly for the first half of the year i was doing what i've just a version of what i've just been describing which is sort of starting things out trying things out and then thinking you know i just don't like that at all that's just not very good and and putting it aside and i had at least six months of that you know and it's only now in the in the second half of the year that i feel that i've begun to have some sense of the direction to go in and do you have any particular routines or observances as a writer yeah i mean i'm not an early in the morning person you know i mean i have friends who you know who set the alarm clock for 5 am and and and you know are at their desk at 6 00 am and and have done their day's work by lunchtime and have the rest of the day available to you know have fun drink um but i i've never been any good at that i i'm i'm better at night than in the morning you know but i mean normally i i kind of work a nine to five day i mean i'll get i i sort of get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee and go to my desk and do like something something close to an office day but what i do feel i mean the one piece of advice i can give perhaps is that i i feel that we wake up every day with a little little ball of creative energy for that day you know and and um and we can waste it you know if we if we um make phone calls or write emails or send text messages or or or kind of surf the web or all the things that there are now for us to do at home that energy can be dissipated and by the time you get to try to do your writing it's gone so so my view has always been the writing comes first before you do anything else you know no matter how important other things may be to do if there are unpaid bills you know if there are people screaming at you for things that you're supposed to have done last week doesn't matter the writing comes first and when you have done your writing for the day and used that bit of creative energy then you can do everything else but that that's been my lifetime process is is the work comes first and and i think it's a very simple piece of advice but i think uh and sometimes hard to follow you know but it's uh it's it's worth thinking about that it sounds like excellent and and truly galvanizing uh advice um one question we we had concerns something that i think is much bigger in the states than than it is in europe though of course it's it's becoming more and more popular here which is the the kind of pop the creative writing course and um marcus brewster wants to know your opinion on creative writing courses and the kind of advice they impart you know the the more formulaic advice of the the three-act structure and so on yeah yeah well i have never taught creative writing um although i've taught in american universities now for something over 15 years um i've always preferred to teach literature prefer i prefer to to approach the subject of writing through texts which which are worth scrutinizing and examining you know and for me that's the that's that's the the best way you know i i myself never studied english literature i mean you know i mean my subject was history i was a historian before i was a writer of fiction and that has had a lot to do with how i think about writing i think history whether ancient or recent or contemporary history has always been somewhere close to what i what i end up thinking about but um but i never studied literature and so now i find myself teaching it which is also a way of studying it so um and and uh and that's enjoyable to me i do i i teach one semester a year at new york university and and uh and that's um i enjoy that you know as far as teaching writing itself i used to have a low opinion of the creative writing course i i used to feel that yes it's possible to teach craft there's no question it's it's possible to teach people how to be better than they are just by giving them craft skills um and helping them to hone their craft skills what i worried that there was a kind of sameness about people emerging from literary writing courses and in a way they all came out writing the same way and that seemed problematic i i've actually become i i don't quite feel that anymore i think it may just be that uh the way in which creative writing is taught now the number of very very fine writers who are involved in teaching it um has changed that you know i i mean i know that at nyu you know you have zadie smith and jeffrey eugenies and i mean all sorts of wonderful writers uh teaching such courses and i think that must be very exciting to be on i mean i wouldn't mind being in zadie's class frankly you know um and so i've changed my mind really um about it i i now think that there is a use in it because again it's a temperamental thing i think there there are writers who benefit from from a group writers who benefit from showing their work and talking about it and discussing it and getting notes and feedback uh from from a group those writers i think would be really helped by by by a creative writing course there are writers like me who are extremely scared of unveiling writing when it's unfinished i find the writing is far too vulnerable like it's very easy to become discouraged about it if i going back to the question about comedy you know if i think something's funny and i read it to you and you don't think it's funny that's really very depressing so um uh so i i think it's to do with your own personal temperament i think there are people for whom that collective act uh is valuable you know and i think there's a lot for those people to gain um and there are other you know a lot of writers are by nature solitary beings and and those writers i think would do well to remain solitary uh in thinking about the the diversity of different forms of of contemporary literature um i would here like to cue in ambrose galia who has a question specifically about literature's contemporary evolutions ambrose are you there yes um hi hello um sir looking at your career from up from the outside then from grimers and midnight's children took a short it would seem as if you've moved between different degrees of meta-fiction not only writing about your ex about places and your relationships with them but also about what constitutes these spaces how they are formed and how they might yet be changed yesterday you called yourself a great metamorphosis which you are um so with the notion of transformation and rebirth and even metamorphosis in mind where do you think literature is going where do you think it should go and if you could invent literature new for this area where where would you begin whoa all right how long have you gone it's a good question but it's a it's a really big one um well to speak for first of all just for the earlier part of your question to talk about my own um thoughts on this for me because of my life having been divided between essentially between three big cities um in three different countries the question of place is very important to me you know unless and until i have to i have to know the exact place and time in in which a story is going to be set before i can begin to think about it you know and uh i mean there are writers particularly writers who are i've lived in one place all their lives for whom places are kind of given you know that they it doesn't need to be something they start with if you're william faulkner you have your batofa you know you you don't need to uh worry about it it's there uh oxford mississippi is there outside your window if you're a writer like me you have to really worry about it if you if you don't have to use the title of one of my novels if you don't have ground beneath your feet then you know then the wheels can't turn um so so there's that as to where literature is going i mean one of the things i think is very interesting in american literature right now is the way in which so many more if you like immigrant stories have come into american literature that you know american literature always used to be rich in in immigrant stories but they were very specific they were either eastern european jewish immigrant stories or they were southern european italian immigrant stories and to some degree coming up from latin america uh stories with a kind of spanish background or hispanic background but now here we have writers literally from everywhere you have writers from africa from vietnam from the caribbean from south asia from china all redefining themselves if you like as american writers and by doing so redefining american literature because because the stories of the world pour in um and and make the literature of this country much less parochial than than maybe once it might have been i really like that and it's very and it's it's it's a it's a thing happening in a generation much younger than mine you know and and and i think it's quite rare for writers to be inspired by younger by generations younger than themselves you know uh we are all looking at the great forebears you know we we're all in dialogue with the great dead um but but i find that i've been really excited by the work being done by these younger writers from elsewhere like i mean for example this year masa mengiste's book the shadow king you know for um wonderful things are happening in african literature largely because there's a generation of young women writers the african literature particularly sub-saharan literature was dominated by giant male figures for a long time there was bungugi watiango there was genoa chebe there was wales and the the biggest woman writer you you could name in that generation would have been nadine gordon but she was a white woman and now we have a range of brilliant young african writers from all over the continent reinventing the literature so i see literature as being in the process of reinvention uh and and being actually in quite an exciting moment so for example in it i think in america right now there's a generation of african-american writers who are completely taking charge of american literature you know um you have writers like jasmine ward who had won the national book award twice before she was 30. okay um and and you know colson whitehead and poets like natasha tretherway and tracy k smith and non-fiction and fiction writers like tamahassie coates and there's there's a real surging generation of black writers in many ways paralleling the increasing interest in the subject of what it is to be black in america and and of course the the racism that is the counterpart of that so i think you know literature is actually in quite a healthy state in terms of in terms of the product productivity and originality of the people doing it you know i think if there's a worry it's whether the readers are still there you know and and um uh i mean i think i i don't quite know the answer to that i think they they are for some writers you know and and and for others i think it's gets harder to find readers and that that that i think is more of a concern despite the uh contemporary transformations of the literary that you've just discussed in response to uh to ambrose's question you yourself seem firmly attached to the novel and it's seemingly endless possibilities and the fact of course that key shot is a loose adaptation of don quixote by cervantes which is generally considered to be the first novel as such um seems to nail your colors even more firmly to that to that mast um it's a form that seems particularly well suited to your to the to what i would call the the the incredible centrifugal um force of your your imagination um which is always moving outward um but crucially always always connecting and i was struck by just one example that i thought i could recount for the um perhaps for the the benefit of people at home following this discussion i think it's illustrative um so one of the the concerns of course of keyshot is the current opioid crisis in the u.s which is blighting many many communities and the line that recurs in the book is turn off your mind relax and float downstream of course many people will recognize that from the beatles song tomorrow never knows written by john lennon but he of course took it from the psychedelic experience um the book by tim leary ralph and richard alpert a book that was dedicated to aldous huxley who of course recounts his own experience of with psychedelics in the doors of perception and the book also of course deals with the so-called titan book of the dead which is a book about enlightenment and spiritual questing which is another topic dealt with at great length in in keyshot so from one apparently throw away pop reference were led down a rabbit hole and it's not a a rabbit hole that leads you away from the themes it's a rabbit hole that amplifies the themes and brings out yet further connections and there seems to be something like that happening at every turn in in your work um and and the question i have is whether that's that profusion is a deliberate effect um is it what delights you as a reader or is it simply how your your mind works well it's both it's both i mean i think it's important for any writer to recognize the kind of writer that they are you know and and uh and the kind of things that they are more successful at and less successful at you know um i mean i'd i don't think for example that i would be very good at writing uh a minimalist novel you know i think i think there are people who do that with much greater skill than me to take some very very simple thing and turn it in the light and show and show beautiful things from it you know um i mean i envy it i envy that skill but i have to understand that it's not mine um what what i do think that i admired as a reader before i became a writer was the kind of writer who embraced the abundance of the world you know the kind of the kind of writer who wanted to take great armfuls of the world and and bring it into the book you know and i mean charles dickens is a writer of that kind saul bellow is a writer of that kind um doris lessing was a writer of that kind in a very different vein i like that sense of of hyper abundance and and of the consciousness that the story you're telling the story of the human beings who are your characters is always in the context of a world of other stories which you are choosing not to tell that your story has to so to speak push its way through a crowd of stories and then we have to understand why it is that this particular story is being told you know um but the context of multitude you know is is is always there and i think some of this has to do with when i started out like when i was writing midnight's children of course one of the most obvious facts about india is multitude you know that this is a gigantic country of well then it was not as many hundreds of millions of people as it is now but still hundreds and hundreds of now over a billion people um how do you find a story to tell when there is such a crowd of stories you know um it is was a question i had to ask myself from the beginning you know and and um and in a way i've gone i've gone on asking it you know so so um i also like rabbit holes by the way i mean i think i think you know to find a little something which opens the opens the key you know the door to wonderland you know and and and you plummet into it and it can take you a lot of places and and if you can stay in control of it it can take you to places that you want to be you know so uh this connects to that which connects to that which connects to that you know um i've always enjoyed that that kind of process and i think it actually is unfortunately this is the way my mind works so so it comes it kind of comes naturally um often uh the the novel form exploits what happens when uh the those those stories stories creativity fiction itself um come up against the hard kernel of reality i suppose when there is some sort of settlement between um a subjective expectation um and you know the hard reality out there and we we have a question um from luke mcallef who i'd like to to cue in um because he's he's interested in how keyshot might have turned out differently if the fantastical side of it had been uh more constrained by by real life experience in a very particular way i'll let i'll let luke elaborate on that okay hey so um thanks yes my as professor kobe was mentioning i was wondering with regards to the writing process of kishore you've spoken about how you originally planned on renting a car and basing the novel on a real-life road trip but that you eventually moved away from that idea as you didn't want to be limited by what actually happened in real life so how does this differ from attempts at auto fiction in for example another road trip novel such as lost children archive by valeria livaselio fellow 2019 booker nominee i was wondering whether there would have been any disadvantages of having kishore to be rooted in fact rather than in this mixture of various fantastical genres and techniques well first of all let me say that valeria's novel is a wonderful novel and as one was one of my favorite novels of last year and justly acclaimed it's a wonderful book which everybody should read um and you see i mean i think what i would say is that is that although keyshot is much more uh if you like fictive it's much it plays a lot of games with different kinds of fictional form you know at certain points it's a spy novel at other points it's a science fiction novel and sometimes it's an absurdist novel and and so on in spite of all that it is very deeply rooted in the reality of the world it's trying to describe uh so that for example um there's a scene in the novel in in a town in kansas uh which i which is a fictional town it's called a town called beautiful um and in this town there's a couple of indian american men at a bar the crazy guy with a gun comes in and shoots them and one of them dies and one of them does not and um this was this was based on something that did in fact happen in a non-fictional town in kansas um and i remember being very struck by seeing an interview on television with the with the widow of the dead man uh who talked about how they had lived in this town for a very long time decades they had their children had been born and raised there and and uh and they thought of it as home you know and and and then she said but now we have to ask ourselves is there a place for us here and i it just that sentence struck me and and and i remembered it for a long time and actually in in keyshot there is one of the characters asks that question is that is there a place for us here so even though the setting of the novel is fictionalized uh it it it is rooted in truth you know and and even in in in one of the most absurdly fabulous moments of the book when kisha and his sancho arrive in a town where people are turning into mastodons where that came from was when i was i guess 20 years old i i was and i was at cambridge uh i was actually cast in a production of ionesco's play the rhinoceros um and in which set in a small french town where people are turning into rhinoceroses and i remember as a young person being unclear what the play was about and and and saying to the director you know what's going on here uh what is this um and he said to me very kindly he said he said salman it's about fascism and and i said um okay but how is it about fascism and he said well it's about what can happen in a town in a community in a country where suddenly people who were your neighbors yesterday people whose children were playing with your children yesterday suddenly to you seem to have become monsters they see they seem to have turned into something so alien and frightening that you can't speak their language you can't talk to each other you don't understand each other you're afraid of each other and that can happen in a society and and unesco is talking about nazism you know and um and i thought well that was that's very good i thought and then when i was writing this book of mine it suddenly struck me that maybe we are to some degree in that place again where where our neighbors seem so alien from us so so remote from us across a chasm almost that they could begin to seem monstrous to us you know and and no doubt us to them you know and um and so i so i borrowed unesco's divisive of metamorphosis and i just thought i can't have rhinoceroses because he's got rhinoceroses um so so i chose mastodons because i thought pink elephants are funny you know and and um but what i'm saying is that reality is never very far even from even from very very highly fabulated material you know and and i think for example in the term magic realism the problem with the term is that when people use it or hear it they hear the word magic and they don't hear the word realism whereas actually everybody who writes in this way will tell you that the the work is very deeply rooted in the real world and that's what makes it work you know so so actually valeria's book and my book are not that far apart what's different what's different in them is technique but what's not different about them is purpose uh the purpose in both cases is to make a portrait of a real world uh thank you and thank you luke um one of the ways that keyshot is very obviously embedded in our contemporary reality is through the the numerous pop culture references the eponymous hero is obsessed by daytime television of course and it seems as though the overwhelming popularity of what you've referred to as junk culture is analogous with the the deadening effect perhaps of of opioids and and the opioid crisis and i think many people would instinctively be inclined to to agree with a condemnation of those those mindless forms of popular distraction um but i wonder what do you think is the the real root here you know what what is the cause of this desire for escape and does the um albeit playful criticism of junk culture risk further entrenching the the various culture wars that were seeing rage afresh well it would be flattering to think that a novel could entrench a culture war but i think it more reflects the culture war that's already there um i you know i think that you're right that there's the novel is about in a way as you've said is about two different kinds of destructive addiction if you like you know um one chemical and one cultural and i do think in the way that in the way that cervantes felt that the romantic literature of his time uh was in danger of literally rotting people's brains you know um i mean he he presents don quixote as somebody whose brain has been rotted by overly over consumption of these of these novels i think that this this world the cultural as well as the the addictive world is in danger of damaging our our our perception yeah um and and um if the novel has a like an author's message underlying it it might it might be that you know um and i think that this has to do with something that is much spoken about these days which is uh the the the question of living in a kind of post-truth world you know a world in which uh it has become very hard to distinguish what is real what is truthful from what is untruthful and that can be a kind of madness you know if we if we can't tell the truth from from a lie uh that that is a kind of derangement not unlike the derangement suffered by don quixote you know and but with different sources i mean it did strike me that if cervantes were alive today what would be the targets of his satire and and and i tried to make those the targets of my satire uh the the question of of home and indeed belonging feature strongly in in keyshot as it does of course um in your other other work and here i'd like to queue in uh a question from sandy kaler portelli on this subject sandy are you there um go ahead the protagonists of kishoti are are all aware that although they believed themselves to have planted deep roots in their adopted homelands those roots are neither as deep nor they're welcome as warm as they may have thought would you say that the sense of always being an outsider has always been a migrants reality or would you say it's the result of major countries lurching further to the right you know i've thought about this all my life really the the the the way in which uh in which migrant communities uh exist in the country to which they come and and also what is their relationship to the country which they have left um both are problematic questions um my view is that it's not i don't have a completely despairing view of this you know i i do think that anyone who lives in new york city sees the whole world walking down the street every day people from literally everywhere uh who end up here the large majority of the population of new york was not born in new york it it came here from somewhere else sometimes somewhere else in america but but uh but it's a city composed of people who have arrived in order to make their lives here you know and and most of the time that works pretty well you know most of the most of the time in this city anyway that reality that composite reality made up of that kind of mosaic reality made up of people from everywhere jostling and on the sidewalk that works pretty well so so so one shouldn't assume that this is only a tragic phenomenon you know but but clearly there is bigotry uh and there is a resentment of the other and of the outsider and people who who live in in a in let's say in a majority white culture will experience that to some degree it doesn't you don't even have to be an immigrant actually because the major target of american bigotry is uh is not the immigrant community it's the african-american community um who have been facing this kind of bigotry since the foundation of the of the of the nation um so it's complex but i certainly felt that for my characters to make this car journey from the american southwest all the way across the country to to new york city and then back again uh to california they make they cross the country twice it would be absurd if they did not encounter any hostility of any kind because that that's that's not the american reality sadly and so there are i think four occasions in the book in which they do encounter some kind of ugliness sometimes it's just verbal and sometimes it's more violent and more physically dangerous but unfortunately this is the truth you know and as i say it's not a truth limited to migrants it's a truth also for for people here in the most important ethnic minority which is the black the black minority um who have experienced this all their lives and and and know a great deal about it and there's a great deal that can be learned from their experience thank you sandy um speaking of of home and belonging there's a strong sense in in keyshot uh that both of those things are tied in a very strong way to to family uh and to familiar love familial love um rather than perhaps romantic love one one timeless expression of parental love is of course the telling of stories to to one's children while i'd hesitate to categorize luca and the fire of life and haroon and the sea of stories as children's books per se one of the the people who wrote in martina mifsud would like to know more about your use of allegory through magic realism in those books specifically and how you hope younger readers might respond to those elements well you know those were books written for specific children i mean that's to say um each each book was written for one of my two sons and in in both cases the title character's name is is is my son's middle name so um uh so my older sons offer his middle name is haroon and my younger son milan's middle name is luca so so that's that's where that came from and and the books were written very much in the first instance to please one reader you know and one might say in the way in which lewis carroll wrote alice's adventures in wonderland to please one reader and and ended up pleasing of course countless millions of readers as a result um i mean i remember my older son long time ago asking me why i didn't write books he wanted to read and um and haroon was sort of my way of answering that and and then my youngest son grew up and he said where's my book um so so i had to do it again and in both cases the books are take their inspiration from an enormous wellspring of of cl of classical mythological folkloristic stories you know and and try and uh try and bring them into a into into the contemporary world you know so um for example there there actually there's a collection of a sanskrit collection of stories uh which originated in kashmir um which actually a collection is actually larger than the arabian nights which is called uh the ocean of the streams of story katha sagar in sanskrit katha story sarit stream sagar river and i thought suppose there was such an ocean supposing and as a as a metaphor for what for what the art of story and literature is the idea of a of an ocean in which in which streams of story of constantly flowing mingling with each other in order to make new stories uh seem to me like seemed like to me like true you know and and um and then the book is you know develops a kind of plot because there's somebody trying to poison it because there always are people trying to stop us telling stories uh and that becomes the drama and and luca and the fire of life took its inspiration from from kind of other kinds of mythology from various forms of divine mythology um even though in itself it's not at all a religious book um so i mean i've always been very very interested in these the oldest stories you know i i think one of the reasons why they survive is because of their power as stories um and and uh and they have so much to show us you know for example when i was writing the ground beneath her feet i was thinking about the myth of orpheus and actually if you take the story of orpheus in eurydice you can tell it in less than 100 words it's quite a short story you could it's you know seven or eight sentences will tell the story um and yet here's this inexhaustible story that has been inspiring to us and has stayed alive for for thousands of years you know and and ask such interesting and profound questions about the relationship between art love and death you know that that it you can unpack it almost infinitely and i mean i found myself writing a 600 page novel uh you know originating in this story that one could tell in a hundred words and i think that's one of the great powers of these old myths these old stories is that they're so they're like compressed little bombs of meaning you know and and if you push them in the right way they can explode um drawing uh the discussion uh to a close today um i thought it might be interesting to explore the idea of hope kishore seems to end on on a hopeful note keyshot is the same man at the end of at the end of the book and you've you've commented a number of times in interviews on on the fact that you consider yourself to be um a sort of incurable optimist um and you've you often quote the uh the line from gramsci from roman roland originally uh pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will i wonder if you could say more about what that leaves us with does that does that attitude which is a kind of hope against hope does that help us to endure or to overcome i think it helps us to both endure and overcome because it's a way of seeing the world which is not through rose tinted spectacles to try to see the world clearly but refusing to accept despair as a response and and believing that something can be done about it you know all right i mean this is i think something which for me is more a way of leading my life than of that that than of writing my books if you like you know um but i do think i think yes one of the things that happened with kisha is that i gave him a magnified version of something that my friends poke fun at me for for being for being too optimistic you know like we began this conversation by my saying that there's not going to be a coup in america that that may to some people seem absurdly optimistic right now but i see one of the other books that less disgust that stands behind kisha is other than don quixote is is voltaire's novel candide uh which is also about a kind of uh innocent fool traveling through a world which is not innocent um and and actually the subtitle of khan deed is optimism the book is called kandid ul optimism you know and and candide also is an absurd optimist you know along with hit the philosopher pangloss believing that they live in the best of all possible worlds when they quite clearly do not and and i thought that to take this spirit of optimism and propel it through america at what might not be the most optimistic moment in american history that the contrast between those two things the friction between those two things would provide me with the book you know and and so that's that's what i thought i was doing um but i do you know i do believe and one of the things i think i i took away from the study of history is that history doesn't run on tram lines you know history is not inevitable uh it doesn't proceed by and by a kind of inexorable logic it's capable of making very sudden left turns without any notice you know the world can change very suddenly and very rapidly without without any warning you know and and i think we do live in that moment i mean we just had a terrible example of that in the in the corona virus which which is something which changed everybody's lives for the worse almost overnight but another example of that the other way is that is you know the the fall of the soviet union and that's to say if in september 1989 i had told you that the soviet union would not exist at christmas you would have thought i was crazy and yet actually actually it wasn't christmas it was about two days later but but you know what i mean it by the end of the year this this what seemed to be a powerful force that was simply there had simply blown away like dust you know and so i think once you see how history is capable of that kind of very rapid metamorphosis uh it's it's foolish to feel despairing because you have because the one thing you cannot tell is what the future will be you know the future can be worse than we hope it can be better than we hope but but it will be different than what we hope you know so the question is to believe in our power to make it i guess that sounds like a wonderful note to to end on um i'd like to thank everybody who sent in questions we got through a fraction of them today and we were spot for choice there were really some excellent questions sent in so thank you to all of you and salman rushdie thank you very much for your generosity and for being with us today we really appreciate it thank you they were great questions thank you thanks a lot thank you bye-bye you

Channel: National Book Council MALTA

Views: 1,437

Rating: 4.9130435 out of 5

Keywords: Malta Book Festival, Salman Rushdie, Malta Book Festival 2020, Books, Literature, National Book Council

Id: ZO0UwoD4sw4

Length: 76min 15sec (4575 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020