Salman Rushdie, "Quichotte"

Salman Rushdie is the author of 14 novels one collection of short stories and four works of nonfiction his books have been translated into over 40 languages the book you're all here for tonight Keita was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and has received rave reviews from Time magazine and the New York Times among others inspired by the cervantes classic the protagonist in this story a mediocre writer of spy thrillers creates keyShot a salesman obsessed with television who follows an impossible love with a TV star together with his imaginary son Sancho he taught sets off on a quest across America to prove worthy of her hand meanwhile his creator in a midlife crisis has equally urgent challenges of his own this book is especially apt in the age in which we now live an age where fact is so often indiscernible from fiction of the book author Jeanette Winterson says lovely unsentimental heart affirming a remembrance of what holds our lives in some equilibrium a way of feeling and a way of telling love and language Rushdie will be in conversation tonight with Dolan Perkins Valdes author of The New York Times best-selling novel wench among other accolades she is a two-time n-double-a-cp Image Award nominee a first novelist Award winner and a finalist for the Hurston write legacy award for fiction she is a member of the pen/faulkner Board of Directors and an associate professor in creative writing and American University I believe some of her students are actually in attendance today please now help me welcome to the stage Dolan Perkins Valdes and Salman Rushdie [Applause] [Applause] all right so nobody came the cliche of like your heart pounding is happening to me right now but I'm gonna try to make it work okay how are you I'm very well tell you you know it's so interesting is when you read your work the first thing I think to myself is this man has an interesting mind I would love to talk to him and I'm sitting here talking to you I can't believe it it's crazy let's go talk to me about the origins of keyShot we all know that it is inspired by Cervantes Don Quixote and I'm wondering how this novel came into being well you know my books usually come into being in quite a messy way it's like I have fragments of things and I don't often understand how they go together and I only gradually come to see what the book is and bits of this book I'd had in my head for quite a long time you know that the the the material about the opioid crisis for example I'd been looking into that for quite a while the science fiction elements in the book in a way arose out of a failed project to write a science fiction series for for the Showtime network yeah I'd be working for Hollywood it's an education I mean what they did I expect a year doing drafts of a of a pilot and and after each drafts they would say this is the best thing we've ever read this is the most brilliant original material that anyone in television has ever had an opportunity and we are so behind it that could happen and then after a year of this I got a text message which said we've decided not to go in this direction it's very different anyway so you know I hate the kind of wasted work and and and so that that stuff stayed with me and a bit of it in different form got in according to this book so some of it was that and then some of it was that I think four years ago when I was at you writing the previous novel it was the 400th anniversary of Cervantes and Shakespeare and so there were a lot of litter events where we had to talk about both of them and and I was asked to write something about about them and so I thought I'd better read it Don Quixote which I hadn't read probably since I was 20 you know so I mean almost this is a terrible thing to say almost half a century had passed and what had happened in the meanwhile was that there's a much better translation that when I read it at the age of 20 what was then the standard they got a Penguin Classics translation was quite hard going it was quite you know you had to really wade through it and and at the end of it I thought okay but I kind of don't get it why is it that this is the book that everybody says is the birthplace of the novel etc and now we're picking it up again there's this brilliant translation the Edith Grossman translation and and it was like reading of completely content or novel that could have been written yesterday know and was so vivid and alive and excited me and an immediate or almost immediately I began to think about my variation of these two central characters because I had been thinking about a road novel that been when I was writing the golden house almost all of it takes place in knocks idiot and I remember thinking that when I finish this I should I have to leave town you don't have to and I I actually for a moment thought that I might do it as a nonfiction project that I might rent a car which would probably not have been as in the novel of beaten-up chevy cruze might have been better than that but I that I would take it right by that kind of travel book where I would go across the country in a kind of de tocqueville way and see what happened you know and I even went so far as to ask my younger son who was then I guess he's 22 now is 18 18 19 then I'd if he would go with me in or a road tripping well at first he said yes and then there's a comic pause and then he said but Dad are you gonna drive yes we driving lager that you've been alive but he talking about and he said you know I don't think you should drive up anyway so I fired him and decided to make it up which I actually in the end I'm I'm happy I did that because you don't want to be limited by what happens to you you want to be able to be able to invent everything that you want to happen yeah so it's then that don fiction wrote novel combined with reading Don Quixote and suddenly I thought oh I think maybe this is a book and then actually I wrote it quite fast once I had once it those pieces fitted together what do you call fast you know yeah just I mean by this time it's been by the time it went through the whole editing process it was probably two years but but yeah you know some of the reviews said that this was a story through Trump's America and I don't know that I necessarily agreed with that because I felt it was America's America yeah there is a reason why the name of the 45th president doesn't is not to be found in these pages that use more than one reason but there's a but I really thought I have not interested in him enough you know he strikes me as he's not even a character he's not even interesting no he's a he's a performance in search of a character and I just thought not it just dig enough to write about and also once the moment you say that name it just sucks all the air out of the room and then everything becomes about that you know what I really thought I'm not writing about that I wanted to get you know out of my comfortable area that I know very well and and get into this colossal a very different changing metamorphic country you know and and see what happened if I sent these two rather eccentric characters you know through it what would how would that go and I was I was right I wasn't writing about Trump was writing about America you know and and also that a lot of the like these macro issues that people have talked about in regard to the book are not only American issues you know these things are happening elsewhere in the world too and so yeah so I thought I was writing about something something more interesting than trouble which is almost everything actually some of the scenes do take place in London but I wonder do you consider this an American novel yeah I think I could I mean I think I do I mean I think like the last three books this one of the two novels before have both been even primarily set in America very consciously in order to try and you know writing books novels is my way of understanding the world I'm in you know and telling myself stories about it it's my way of trying to get to grips with where I am and what's happening you know and and so since since I've been living in here for almost 20 years it's it's it's not surprising that the books in a way have made that move as well they all including this have as central characters people of Indian origin I don't think I mean I you know this is as was mentioned this is you know it's the 14th novel and the 15th book of fiction blah blah but I've never yet managed to write the book which did not have a central character who was of Indian origin you know and I just think that's it's Who I am it's it's these are the eyes through which I see the world know yeah I I feel I should set myself the task of not doing it but I haven't done that yet so I mean I'm kind of because of what you're saying I want to jump to this question which I hadn't planned to get to until later but about racism in the book um these you know key shots and his son Sancho travel through the US and they have these racists encounters one of them happens in a park that's a very direct also they go to this imagine town of beautiful Kansas and you reference this real-life murder I remember when this happened when this Indian engineer was shot without the top of the bar yeah uh-huh and you reference the real tone I mean beautiful cancerous doesn't exist but it's in exactly the place where the the place where this crime took place which is the town I'm and I think I get the pronunciation round all the drivers I think it's called Olathe mm-hmm Ola th e which turns out to be Native American word meaning beautiful and and so I thought because I don't want to write about the news story you know I want to be able to fictionalize it so that it fits in with what's happening with my characters I don't want to use the real name of the town because then that fix that I have to talk about the new story you know but if I could just slightly change it then I'm free you know and so I thought well I'll call it what the name of the town means so so beautiful Kansas doesn't exist X unless you speak the Native American language of the region in which case that's what it's called and and that happened a few times on this I mean on this journey that there were there were places I knew about sometimes I changed the name sometimes I didn't change the name but I wanted the freedom to reimagine them while at the same time not wanting to be an idiot and I wanted to know what I was talking about you know so I mean for example there's a passage in the novel in which they arrive in this town in New Jersey just on the wrong side of the tunnel and and people are turning into mastodons right which as far as I know is not happening in the New Jersey area at this time uh-huh and the tyrannous has a made-up name Aaron bérenger which is the name of the hero of UNESCO is play rhinoceros in which people are turning into rhinoceroses and a mastodon is some kind of prehistoric elephant it's an elephant it's like the woolly it's like a mammoth but not so Willy okay and where that came from was what I was gonna say is that even though the town is fictional people who are familiar with New Jersey immediately recognizes as Weehawken which actually does exist and in which as far as I know there are no master dolls but there we are what I thought was when I was 19 years old when I was at Cambridge I was cast in a student production of UNESCO's rhinoceros I mean I wasn't the lead I didn't play behringer Benji I was just one of the town's people who were turning it around ostriches and because the thing is written like a farce you know there's a lot of running on an off stage and every time we run off stage there's somebody in the wings who sticks a bit more rhinoceros on you that you run back off and I was near I was 19 and I really didn't fully understand the play and I remember saying to the producer you know what's this about and he rather sweetly gently said to me he said someone it's about fascism and I said oh wow and he said well it's about what can happen in a community or in a country when suddenly the people living next door to you are monstrous they've turned into monsters suddenly the family whose children were playing with your children has become so changed and altered that they're alien to you and you can't understand that language anymore in the end and you're scared of them no and it's about that I thought that's clever and I'm thinking right now so this is about Trump's America I remember I got river which some very great writer once said to me if you're gonna steal steal the good stuff I thought I'd steal they said I can't have rhinoceroses because he had rhinoceroses so I'll have mastered odds but I thought maybe the reason to do its I thought maybe in a way we're there again you know maybe we're there in this moment when we don't understand our neighbour you know when when our neighbor suddenly seems to be frightening to us you know alarming and and what a wonderful way it is to talk about that because it plays entirely as comedy you know in fact as broad farce but it's actually it's all quite dark material it's kind of funny cuz when they enter the town the the hotel guy is checking their teeth to make sure they're not enlarged just it's so that's a hilarious scene that's the thing that you see one of the things I really love about certain kind of great literature is that terrible things can be described in completely comic terms I mean I think one of the reasons why I love Kafka so much is that his manner is completely comic but his meaning is not right so I mean if a man wakes up in the morning and discovers that he's lying in his bed and he's turned into a giant bug there is some dispute about what the bug is right because Kafka never exactly tells us what the bug is the consensus opinion is that it's a dung beetle right although some people say cockroach anyway that's a comic idea a man turned into a giant bug but the meaning of the story is tragic and poignant and sad and the same with with the with the castle every single scene in the castle is a comic scene it's played as comedy every single scene and yet the cumulative effect of it is what we now call the Kafka esque and and so I love that idea of being able to use comedy to say things which have the dimension which is not at all comic I love that like taking yourself seriously but not taking yourself seriously exactly but you know one of the things this reminds me I mean I wanted to ask you about like your relationship with the real because we're now talking about Kafka and bugs and so there's this book I teach my students sometimes letters to a young novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa and he talks about levels of reality point of view and one of the levels is spatial point I'm sorry yeah levels of reality spatial point of view temporal levels of reality all of these ways that a writer can shift between these levels in your book you switch so seamlessly between levels of reality point of view some people call it magic realism you know so yeah I don't you don't I don't because I think that term is belongs to a certain group of Latin American writers yes I've often argued that but I think people want to expand oh I know but you know what I think is these there are these various terms which are used in different countries at different times in America and the 70s there was a thing called fabulous ohm you know in in France before that there was what was called surrealism and they're all the same thing essentially you know that there's a I mean that what we've just been saying about Kafka that's magic realism no but I mean man turns into giant bug could be in a Garcia Marquez story right you know Bulgakov's Master and Margarita the devil comes to Moscow creates havoc it is accompanied with a ginger tathra who has a pair of six guns and another friend who is so thin that when he turns sideways he disappears you know I mean any so-called magic realist would be happy with that material you know what I'm saying is this thing crops up in every literature no and the magical realist of that term I think belongs to you know Garcia Marquez Carlos Fuentes Manuel Puig you know those guys right and actually Mario Vargas Llosa is the one who rejected it earliest you know and really defined himself against that as a much more really straight oh you know and so he I mean the great opposition is is his Garcia Marquez and Vargas EO so in there that they represent opposite things and not just because they had a fight not just because Mario punched Cabo and knocked him down I didn't know that and not just because it had something to do with Mario's wife so if you if you reject the term magical realism with your work what do what term do well I don't I don't you know I mean what I think is I'm trying to find ways of telling that fit the story I'm trying to tell you know and so there are books that I've written which have which are essentially I mean like the golden house has almost nothing that you would call magic realism and Shalimar of the clown literally and also has almost nothing except for one thing but sometimes it's very much in this fabulous vein and sometimes it's not it just depends what the story needs you know and and in this case I wanted to write a story this journey down this road I wanted it to change all the time so you know in the way that I mean I guess in some version of real life if you're going down a road having adventures the adventures can be of different kinds you know and so there's a bit of this book which reads like a spy novel and there's a bit of it which reads like a realist story of family life and there's and there's a bit of it which is like a science fiction novel and that and you know it does this metamorphic thing and that's formally that's what I was interested in to write a book in a certain way that would allow it to change nature as it went as it went on you know and and not just be a mess you know I mean I remember talking I talked to a writer a friend of mine when I was writing it you know the writer Kieran they say won the book of rises on anyway I said to her I told her roughly what I was tried to do she's very you know serious and truthful and she said oh it's a high-risk book and she said no because if you can do what you're saying you want to do that it'll be amazing but if you don't it's going to be a horrible mess nothing is between and then you went off and had some vodka and then yes have had another vodka yeah I heard you say that the bigger the car that you build when you're building novel the bigger the engine just to be yeah tell us what you meant by that because I think this is connected to what she told you right well what I think is for me story is always being the engine you know that if you're going to write a really big book you have better have a really interesting story to tell and what happened to the novel somewhere in the early 20th century somewhere around the modernist movement judo was was that these two things storytelling and literature decided to separate so so you have colossal great novels like Joyce's Ulysses which I mean the only thing they don't really do is tell much of a story what happens in Ulysses man walks around city you know while his wife is being unfaithful to him back home meets young writer in the red-light district they go home and go on drinking the end oh oh no also not quite the earth because she's upstairs I think a sex fantasy but it's not much of a plot right and the thing that makes it work is not story you know it's everything else and but I've always thought that that great period of the novel of the 18th century and 19th really but the kind of from you know thakur a fielding dickens obviously that the storytelling is absolutely absolutely at the center of the project and that's what i mean if you if it's gonna be this big book that tries to be panoramic that tries to be a kind of what i call it everything look you know scoop as much of the world as you can up in your arms put it in the book if you were to do that i'm gonna try and do that then that better be something driving the reader through it and i felt very much he shot had a big engine i mean it was really delightful i I didn't want to read it fast I wanted to kind of enjoy it but I also didn't want to stop reading because I wanted to find out what was going to happen well Skyfall have read it I mean now that it's been out a little bit I've had some readers telling me about their reading experience of it there are people who stayed up all night for two nights and just just devoured it and there are other people who do who do what I do which is what I'm really enjoying a book I slow down yes you know I want to read it slowly and then there's somebody I what are two people who said they already read it twice which is quite good given this really be now it's it's only via outs it's Labor Day but I think it was I think I may be wrong but I think it's Nabokov who said that if a books not worth reading twice it's not worth reading once so many books to read and we have so little time yeah exactly but anyway so yeah I read I I was I did a lot of work on the storyline because because you know as we've mentioned there are actually two storylines because there's the main storyline which is vodka shot and his son Sancho and going on this journey in search of love because he's obsessed with this television star called Salma R which is one consonant away from my name but but by some coincidence and I then this is other storyline which actually arrived and booked somewhat to my surprise unexpectedly not part of the original plan which is the story of the writer who is ostensibly writing that storyline right and how their stories mirror and echo and very differ from each other and so I had to do a lot of work on two stories and I'm showing the relationship between the stories and on gradually bringing the stories closer so you saw more intimate relationships between the two narratives and then somehow finding a way of of uniting them at the end which after a long time I didn't know how to do I'm just telling you in the green room that I thought the ending was perfect I don't want to spoil it for anyone but you can't spoil it because it's yeah because it's perfect let me ask you something more mundane because you know I have you here and how much time do we have okay a few more minutes your character key shot is obsessed with reality TV yeah and I know there's a lot of research that goes into the novel but you had it you knew everything about the bachelor or the Bachelorette all this other stuff and I know you like Sam cuz I've read that you like that but do you watch TV well curious well and what do you watch well you know I don't I don't for fun watching this kind of television this is this is not my poison you know but um but it's his you know and and if you're trying to say about this character that he's actually had his mind warped by watching too much reality TV alone in motel rooms for many many years then I thought well I've got a I have to know what he's like attack I have to know if I have to do write my due diligence well I I have I have consumed my share of all of this Real Housewives you know that of a saga that begins with K mmm I think I can safely say that I have not no didn't meet any of the people from the Jersey Shore or any Real Housewives or any bachelors or bachelorettes I think that's right I don't think I've even met a Kardashian I think I haven't okay it's hard to do it is hard they're everywhere it's like outside right now yeah yeah exactly yeah I got the door that I said no I I did I did watch enough you know you have to watch that much to get the point but that's the point that you watch it even though you don't need to watch it yeah but it's it's about addiction you know and and he is he's an addict of this thing and it affects it affects the way in which he sees the world and in the actually in a serious way the way that art expects the way which we see the world you know if there's a book if there are books that you really love and maybe there are not in a lifetime that many books are bit about which you could say I really love that book you know then those books become a part of the way in which you see you know the books way of seeing becomes also a little bit yours and and that's true it the kind of that's I don't like making these so high art lower distinctions really but if it's true of great literature it's also true of reality television you know that if you if that's what you consume all the time it becomes a part of your way of seeing and that's what happens to him and what can happen because has happened even in a little way to me the people who consume gigantic amounts of television begin to think that they know the people on the other side of the screen because the people are right there in their living room sitting right there I thought I knew I think Oprah has that trouble but even at my little non Oprah way you have the experience of people coming up to you and saying you know when we were last talking you said something and I just thought about it and I don't completely agree I want to tell you what I think and I say so we've never met that was something I said on a TV show I said no no no we were we're having this conversation and I thought oh that's so interesting that's so interesting that even when told that it's not true they go on believing it's true and so I thought so I take that and exaggerate it so that there's this guy who's in love with this woman on television and believes that she will love him but he will cross the country he will go through a series of what he calls valleys kind of like tests for himself to pass so that he could become worthy of her and then he's never met her in his life and she's as they say way out of his league but he believes that love will find a way and he proceeds you know and that has something to do with you could call that insanity she's an if you're the age of media which brings me to the next question um you write in the book after all it was the age of the invented name social media had made sure of that everyone was someone else now a lot of this book has to do with the various masks that we wear right lots of people in there have nicknames even brother the writer has it every moment of the book has a fake thing everyone has a fake name brother son uses a pseudonym to mask his cyber activities do you think this fascination with invented identities is particular to this age of social yes it's never happened so much how it used to be quite unusual to have a pseudonym you know not maybe some writers of course did you know the Bronte's of course started off using using male pseudonyms George Eliot but the pseudonym was a relatively rare thing now everybody has a pseudonym she have a Twitter account you've got a sweet pseudonym you know and so everybody is masquerading as somebody else we're all actors no no I often feel very exposed you think of my real name is on all my social media yes it's unusual it's unusual there's a wonderful line in the great movie Les Enfants perigee there's a there's a line in which the main actor don't leave out all says he says these actor is so pod dejan which means actors or actors are not real people and I feel that we've all become that we've all got fake people versions of ourselves walking around telling telling other fake people versions of themselves the stories of a of the lives they don't have a friend of mine used to call that sending your representative oh that's so took I like that yeah I like that you know I was friendly with the great German novelist Gunter Grass and he said about becoming colossally famous he said that sometimes he felt there were two people there was a person called Gunter who his wife and friends and children knew and then there was a person called gasps who the world knew and he said sometimes I send cars out into the world to make a noise that do stuff so that I could stay home and work sometimes yeah I mean there were certainly it's less so now but there was a moment in my life when everybody in the world had an opinion about me which wasn't based in ever having met me or read a sentence that I'd written but nevertheless it was strongly held and I thought that's weird and I'm sure there are a lot of people who come up to you and say they're big fan and they've never read a single word but I know you can tell I always know yeah how do you know well I was I don't very often go to that to the so called Hamptons but I was there I was there several years ago and I was at some fancy house or party and the lady of the house came up to me it said I love your work your work I love it and at this point it became clear to me that she do nothing just on the way she said it yes yeah she's the hostess I should have been polite said let it go but I thought you know I did so I said well any particular book and she kind of flushed and finally she said oh you know the one about the devil I thought okay look now I know that you didn't read anything and you know that I know so we're done here it's silly okay one more let me see one more question before we opioid crisis opioids part of the book it's a lot of it yeah because they key shots when we meet him is a is a pharmaceutical salesman and and his cousin that he works for he gets fired in chapter one but anyway his cousin is his cousin is a big pharmaceutical entrepreneur and at a crook and and basically part of the problem that everybody's facing in this country right now the 50,000 people a year dying you know one person dies of Ebola and it's all over the front pages of the newspapers free for a month 50,000 people a year die of opioids and hardly anybody talks about it anyway so I thought and also the problem is worst in these little towns in the middle of nowhere right you know through which my characters are traveling and so I thought well if I'm sending them on the journey in this part of America then I you know this has to be part of the subject and and and then it became very useful in the plots because because miss Alma are the autobiographical character it is a nope is an addict of these things you know um percocet vicodin oxy fentanyl and and that gives him a way of meeting her so it became a useful plot point but that's I mean this was very humanized I really felt her pain my blood because your the thing about her is that he sees her as a he sees her as this fantasy you know this woman who is beautiful and successful and powerful and famous and has everything you know but when you get to who she actually is rather than the fantasy he sees on television she's very damaged energy she's has a history of sexual abuse as a child and by a family member and and she has a bipolar condition which he inherited from her mother and grandmother and and then she becomes an opioid addict so there's an enormous amount of loneliness and pain in her which is the truth of her as opposed to the fairy tale which is what's on TV you know and I wanted to do that to show what's behind the mask and so yeah there's so it became a it became a very important theme in the book it's very very well done okay so we have to do yeah okay do you have the ending in mind when you begin a novel oh I mean that's a great question actually because the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no well I mean there have been books where I've been absolutely clear about the ending you know when I wrote the Moors last I almost the first thing I wrote was the last page and he gave me a thing to aim at which was not just in terms of the story it was also in terms of the kind of tone and mood of where it should be the end of the story you know and I'd if it's just like a target you know go until you hit that no and and and sometimes when you think like that when you get there doesn't feel right anymore you know but in this case it did so that ending essentially stayed the ending and the only other person I've ever heard say that it exactly that way slightly more successfully than me was JK Rowling who said that she wrote the last chapter of the seventh volume of Harry Potter right at the beginning and put it in a safe No and then got to it and that was the last chapter yeah so so she was able to see on a seven book arc what the last page would be which is I mean mind blowing really it's true my daughter loves JK Rowling what would be your top piece of advice to aspiring novelist Oh find another line of work no I mean what what I actually thing that I think really is maybe it may seem obvious but the thing that's really important I think is get to the end every time I've ever written anything once I've got to the end even if it's in a very crude imperfect state I can immediately see what it needs and you have something that actually see what I've done you know and then I can say okay it doesn't need this it needs much more of that it needs this needs to be done differently but I can see it you know and when you're in the middle of the act of making something out of nothing is the hardest thing by a million miles the hardest thing once you've got something and you're trying to make something better out of something that's easier and and so the thing is to get something there and then work on it so get to the end that's my advice do you read fiction for pleasure any favorite modern writers I'll tell you I asked the author Mitchell Jackson who interviewed you earlier this year like for advice and he said well he's read everything and I that gave me a little heart attack because I thought we're gonna be talking on have no idea I haven't read everything um and I've read less and less of the new stuff okay oh yeah because there's so much of it and it's hard there's a moment at which you stop reading to keep up but they're so and there's so many great books you know that waiting to be read but I mean I do think that there's something very interesting happening in in American literature right now which is the two groups one is American writers of color and the other is new immigrant writers transforming the literature you know and so whether it's I mean you know if you look at african-american writing now you've got in every field you've got exciting voices you know you know Tracy case-based etosha Trethewey you know just been Ward whether it's theatre or poetry or fiction or nonfiction there's something happening there and and the other thing is you know American literature was always very influenced by immigration but but historically it was either Eastern European Jewish immigration or southern European Italian immigration and those would be those were peak in American literature then but now there's people from everywhere you know literally everywhere you don't like this this year this young man oh should have wrong you know so there's Damis American or and before him Nam lay another very good Vietnamese American writer and and then there's you know Chimamanda Adichie from Nigeria or their Jhumpa Lahiri from South Asia or there's you know everywhere and and I think what that's doing is not just bringing in narratives from other parts of the world but it's also bringing in ways of telling from other parts of the world so it's both formally and in terms of content it's very interesting and I think I thought to myself you know hello I might be much older than these people but that's me too I come from somewhere else I've got bags full of stuff you know with other in it and maybe it's time to start unpacking that stuff and throwing it out there and see what happens I think it's quite interesting to be inspired by younger writers you know because it's tends to be not what happens you know I mean normally you're inspired by your could you know you're looking at your contemporaries all the time and you're looking at the great dead you know that your conversation is with those those two but it's very interesting where the conversation becomes with much younger writers that's been helpful to me in thinking okay next one thank you for your contributions to literature to challenge ideas is to have the right to push boundaries and to sometimes a finn and this time of extreme polarization it seems that being politically correct is more important than challenging ideas how do you find the right balance being politically correct is kind of living death a book that is only politically correct is not alive because it's too busy minding its manners to be alive you know and as far as offenses can set everything offend somebody I mean I go into book shops there's lots and lots of books that offend me some of them are written by Dan Brown you know but I I think he should be allowed to live you know add you know probably published you know not sure about that but what I'm saying is that I get offended by chunk that sort of feathers me I tried to read Fifty Shades of Grey you did I do I thought you know you might see what the ruckus was on yeah it also kind of like no men read it at all within reach I thought that's very weird so so there's all of those things on Amazon where they put up the first chapter so I thought okay I'll read the first chapter first chapter isn't even very dirty you know but it's so badly written but it was actually they did a pendant year it was impossible to turn the pages you know he walked it to the room oMG he was hot book the people are paying money for 20 million people pay dearly of people well you know as they say a fool it is money a suit party so 20 million fools no I would just say that there's plenty of things that get up my nose you know and and I mean that's the kind of comic end if there's more serious books that I don't like and they're a it's been said that there are some people who don't like some things that I write but but that's okay that's why in a bookstore there are lots of different books you find the ones you like I'd never mind the ones that you don't like and I think that's I've always said and at the time when you know if I was in the middle of all the far sides had to say quite a lot but if you're being offended by what you're reading you should shut the book at that point it loses its ability you're sending just a tip so that's what I think I think you know people have to write what they have to write which doesn't mean by the way that people can do anything they like and think it's fine you know and I think if you're going to write about subjects which are far from your own experience or which are sensitive you have to do your homework you have to you have to know what you're talking about you know in in in my math book drop this one in golden house there's a character who is very conflicted about gender you know it's trying to decide whether or not to transition you know and and although I have known a couple of people who have gone through that process clearly it's not something that is personal to me you know but but I wanted to write about it because it's so much a thing right now you know and and then I thought well I've got fine if I didn't write about it had to find out about it and I have to do the best I can to find out as much as I can about the psychology of this and what it feels like you know and and then have a go at representing it and then if I do it badly it's fine that people should say you did it badly well I mean that's a I feel I have the right to do it but other people have the right to tell me it's crap you know it's my business to do it well enough that they won't feel that you know and that's what that's what I think it's about it's if everybody has the right to every subject but you're saying do the work yeah if you having the right to it doesn't mean that you could be lazy about it you have to do it properly and I was actually amazed when that book came out that nobody trashed me for the further charge you're bracing yourself I thought you know anybody says anything about this they get trashed so I thought nobody noticed which would be disappointing that means you did the work but I feel tomorrow now there'll be some huge but I feel maybe that I I did I did do the work and therefore it seemed as if it was that the book knew what it was writing about where it was writing from ok I think this is the last question you are known to use myths and classic texts in works if you were writing a novel on Britain's current political and social environment what myth or classic work might you use it's such a good question well Ian McEwan has just published a novel called cockroach yes in which he reverses Kafka in which a cockroach wakes up prepared the man to discover that he's in this large body which is not only a man it's the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is a brilliant idea so that's one way that's one way which he's got there first damage otherwise I might afford to do that myself one of the things I think because it's interesting about the way in which myth works in a society is that what's happening in in Britain some extent here as well is that there is a myth that's being sold to people about the past and they be told if only we could do certain things like get out of Europe expel all these foreigners get back to a kind of you know white England everything would be better because it used to be better and so this myth of the past is used to justify actions in the present you know and and it's quite like you know what the message of the red hat you know I want to know when was it what is the moment of greatness to which we should now aspire to return when was what was the date now I mean my best guess would it be somewhere around the 1950s with kind of Norman Rockwell families and which was itself a myth which was of course itself a bit over the point about the golden ages it's always a myth it's always a fairy tale yeah but when they're asked to make America great again how long was that well they're still slaves you know was it when women didn't have the vote was it before the civil rights movement when was it you know because if how can we make America great again if we don't know when it was great tell us I think we should be told so what happens is that unscrupulous people construct mythologies which serve their purpose in the present no and and actually going back to UM if you need to have another very when we were all much younger he wrote a television play called the my man's lunch if you go to a pub in England even now there's a lot of pubs which will have on their menu the thing called the ploughman's lunch and if you order it it will be a half of a French baguette roll and some brie and some cheddar and a sliced up tomato and some lettuce and some salami right there is no British Plowman who has ever eaten that meal most of it is French it's a completely fictitious thing there is no such thing as that ploughman's lunch so again they're inventing a fantasy of a kind of bucolic England when people ate things like this while reclining on the lawn wearing straw boaters you know and it's done in order to sell something in the present so mythology stopped just writers who use mythology you know but we're in an age when politicians public figures are using fake myths of the past fairytales of the past in order to justify what they're up to now and I think absolutely I mean what do you think they're up to Boris Johnson he doesn't have a you know scruple in his body and all he can do is tell lies I mean it's somebody else's fool that's true but closer to home particularly in this town but they have in common those two you know Johnson and Trump the inability to tell the truth what naturally comes out of their mouth is a lie they say hello it's a lie and yeah he's entirely maybe for reasons which are absolutely venal and self-serving selling the country this fairy tale of the Golden Age of England back in the good old days in order to justify this disaster so yeah it's a we live in this strange age when politicians tell fairy tales and fiction I just have to tell the truth to end on a positive note in four days we will know who won the Booker oh that's so positive I'm on the plane tomorrow let me tell you something the last time Marlon James was in DC I dropped him off at Union Station he was gonna get on a train down the plane and hit so and I said good luck he was and he won and he texted me from London and said I would so I'm hoping that I'll have your good mojo yeah okay thank you you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 6,416

Rating: 4.5384617 out of 5

Keywords: Salman Rushdie, Salman Rushdie Quichotte, Quichotte, Quichotte by Salman Rushdie, Salman Rushdie books, Salman Rushdie novels, Salman Rushdie interview, salman rushdie on magical realism, Politics and prose, Salman Rushdie Politics and Prose

Id: gnVlSu0urAg

Length: 56min 37sec (3397 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2019