Salman Rushdie talks to James Naughtie at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

friends welcome to the International Book Festival seems rather strange because it started three weeks ago and if you're here for the first time you've almost missed it because it ends tonight but many of it I know have been here throughout these three weeks it's an enormous pleasure to welcome our guests this evening we thank RBS for their sponsorship of this event we hope we're going to have a wonderful hour we'll talk about all kinds of things we haven't quite worked out how we do it except we're going to have some fun please welcome Salman Rushdie now the first thing people should know is it's terribly funny oh good yeah I think so and well you would but yeah what happened is when I was writing it and I started writing it I mean it's quite a weird book we'll come to that yeah and I got worried about it and I normally don't show anybody anything while I'm writing but when I'd written about I don't know 50 or 60 pages of a first version of it I called my agent Andrew Wiley at night and I said could he has read it for me and tell me if it's good weird or bad weird and so Andrew is you know relentlessly honest yes good so I they say well he read it and he called me up and he said look I don't I don't completely know where you're going with this because it could go in a number of directions and neither did you because I see you've got quite a couple two or three story lines he said well what I will say is it's the funniest thing of yours I've ever read so I thought okay that's comforting so Andrew Wylie you know you know laughs then maybe it'll be easy to make other people love it what's interesting about that answer is of course you're talking about will come to this later but you're talking about a society American contemporary society which you clearly think is falling apart is rudderless is is one that leaves people hopelessly floundering and all the rest of it and the only way so unlike this one well but as ever they do it on a different scale the but under and the way you're dealing with this I mean your anger is challenged through humor its channeled through humor now how did you get there when did you decide to go back and read Cervantes and why what happened was about five four I mean four years ago was this famous double anniversary of both Cervantes and Shakespeare and and a year before that when people were preparing for all of that I got asked if I would write something about that and I also knew that there would be some events like this at literary festivals where we would be asked to talk about that so I thought I better read this book again I hadn't read the book since I was 20 years old and at college and and the thing is that back then when I was 20 years old the standard available translation at Penguin Classics translation by a gentleman called JM Cohen what's really boring I mean it was a very dull it didn't Sparkle no it was searched you know and you tried to force your way through it and you thought I don't get why people say this is the greatest novel ever written because it seems really awful to me you know what I hope he's no longer with us I'm so sorry Jeff kind of anyway in the intervening 50 years that had changed I know there's now certainly one absolutely brilliant translation by Edith Grossman and reading it was like reading a completely new book it was like reading something contemporary and vivid and funny and inspirational well the fun we'll get to but one of the interesting things about this book and I think it's fair enough to say this because it hits you in the second chapter in that chapter is that what we're talking about is a character who is invented by a rather second-rate by another characters by novelist there which you I think you you say it's something you've always wanted to be I've always wanted to be a second-rate spy novelist yeah you might be a anyway and it turns out that he shot and we'll come to pronunciation as well is somebody who is invented now there is a bit in the second volume of the original seventies story where Quixote here we go we're getting into trouble already but anyway Quixote goes into a shop and finds a book which is the part two of Don Quixote and he opens it and says I didn't do any of these things oh it's a forgery and is that where you got the idea of the mirror well not exactly what it is is that there's a point in fact in the first volume where Cervantes pretends that what he has found is a story written by someone else and he hasn't there's an ostensible author yes who is actually Arab cide hamete benengeli apparently wrote the book that Cervantes has discovered and is now offering to us yes as Don Quixote so it gave me the thought that I might do something I've never done before which is to write something about writing something yeah you know I've always kinda rather avoided that self-conscious yeah book about a book thing don't worry we'll try to keep this clear as we go and and so no so what it is is you first meet my character keyShot and his sidekick slash imaginary child who doesn't exist yes he starts off in black and white that he gradually could arrives at full color with the help of a talking cricket who speaks Italian it's very simple story and then you discover in chapter 2 that there's actually an author who is writing this story Sam Sam Duchamp not to be confused with the singer of wooly bully and the hero is called smile smile so you get the feeling okay so so we discovered that this second-rate spy novelist as you say decided to write a different sort of book in order to help him work through his own life crises you know and and so the story these two storylines kind of alternate in the book and and actually I wasn't intending to do that I mean when I first thought about the book I didn't think there would be that second storyline at all I thought it would just be about my key shots and his sidekicks why did you find it springing out of nowhere and and catching you by the neck no I mean nobody can say Yui comes out of nowhere just did come out of nowhere and then right and then I I really for a while was not sure if it belonged in the book or not you know and I reserved the right with myself to take it out and I just thought I could just okay I'm gonna go down this road for a bit so when you sent the first 60 pages to your agent yeah and while it was both as both and yeah and you were you were wondering I was uncertain yeah and and then what happened as I went on with writing is that these two stories kind of started talking to each other they started mirroring and echoing and being being sort of variant versions of each other and I'm thinking if that was that was good I liked it and so it's so we've got so it stayed in and we should say that the character key shot and you provide a very helpful pronunciation guy I'm on page one which it goes through the I don't know five six or seven Kehoe T's and all the rest of it and you say look forget it it's key shot so can we no questions on that please thank you very much it is settled you like the French it's the French pronunciation but basically a key at a shot you put them together exactly but actually the strange thing about the ex is that in Spanish that X in the time of Cervantes that X would have been pronounced like a show yeah so so in his David of course have pronounced the e so he would Cervantes would probably have said key short a you know the the X turning into a hurt sound how much laters much later and everyone thinks they've been right when they say hoodie emphasizing the age the age but I for example even now in Portuguese the X is pronounced like a show yes it's almost a J yeah so and the French has always been key shot and the German is key shot E and the Italian is key shot a so you've taken my handle so you know I have the cut off majority on my side before we get into the details of this I mean the character key shot if you look at the old man in the original yeah he does he's melancholic yes and he's the knight of the dollar s countenance and anarchy shot is I mean he's actually quite sweet natured yes you decide to make that change well I didn't want him to be an exact imitation yeah instead of having the kind of mournful face yeah that we know yes he's actually quite cheerful yes and he said he's charming you know he's he charms fee he's charming and hopeless and useless you know and and and borderline nuts yeah I mean not even borderline I was gonna say I think you're being a wee bit kind there he said he's in pursuit of double T V and I thought you see I thought reading Don Quixote when he falls in love with this this girl in an adjoining village yes who may well be a prostitute by the way and and renames her I mean her real name is al dancer but he renames her Dulcinea because it's more fittingly aristocratic and romantic and he doesn't know her no but he keeps sending her messages through people that he meets and if you translate that I thought that happened now that might not be seen as romantic love with a distant TV yeah the person you don't know anyway so he falls in love with this woman on the screen you know it was a TV host daytime TV it was like somebody describes her as Oprah 2.0 so the only woman in America more favors as a than her is Oprah Winfrey maybe Michelle Obama she's obviously she's the definition of the unattainable yes you know but because he's crazy driven mad by watching too much television and beginning to believe that he knows these people on television he thinks that he can if he proves himself worthy that he has a chance of winning her hand in what he calls the age of anything can happen with this imaginary Sancho Panza by his side he wants you to Sonny I never had a son so he decide he wants a woman so anyone the son with that no he does have the facade without the woman actually yes yes the son first yes but it is unusual but it's a it's magic realism son is no alien with the age of the aid of a magical meteor shower but as he travels around America contemporary America and you remind us all the time about the population of Seattle the population of New York the population of course of Mumbai which pops up and and of London and you have this wonderful way of kind of throwing all this information into the pot so we're bamboozled in a reflection of the way we live our lives now with this sort of endless tide of fact what it means maybe nothing and factoids and you know there's a town in here which pops up quite a lot called beautiful yes Kansas yes now tell us about beautiful there's nowhere there no such place but ours as well I mean I don't like what I did when I was working the book out I read about a murder that had taken place in cancers of a couple of well of the shooting of two Indian American like software engineers who were in a bar and somebody came and shot them one of them died one of them didn't die and in Kansas and this was in a town called Olaf Ola t-h-e and I thought well I don't want be exactly like that because I don't want the people to have to be the real people I want to be able to make them up and so on and so I changed the name to beautiful because I discovered that the name onlythe is a Native American word meaning beautiful and so that just gave me a way of putting it a 10 degree angle to the truth and magnetic north yeah exactly and make it and just being allowed to fictionalize it so I mean some of the places in the book are real places some of the places are these slight variations I mean there isn't a town in New Jersey called behringer where people turn into mastodons yet um but but i but there is a real town exactly where i locate this imaginary town which is not unlike the real and of course you've taken us into the meat of the book in a way that it is the story of contemporary America its its dislocation one part from another its obsession with the moment its obsession with image in the form of television in obsession with Fame but you've decided that the only way to fire a kind of an arrow into all this is to be funny yeah I'd like funny you know I don't like books that have no sense of humor it's mean I mean I got into real trouble before for I'll say it again it's yes it's one of my problems would get in to be the problem mind with people like George Eliot I acknowledge the genius yes but there's not a lot of humor in George Eliot you know you don't giggle a lot while you read well not a lot but I mean yes it came out just discarded I mean what I liked the thing that I did like about the Don Quixote is is there is the the form of the picaresque novel yeah which wanderings yeah I mean the picker the word picaresque comes to the word Picaro means a sort of row or Chancellor you know and he goes it's a knight-errant really he goes down life's road yeah and things happen to him and so becomes a road novel and of course in America there's this long tradition of the road novel and the road movie you know you've everything from Lolita to Easy Rider and so I was thinking about that and the great thing about the both the picaresque novel and the road format is it allows the book to change all the time because you know as as speaker it's true about life as well that as you go down life's road and you see no but you come to different places in different moments and things happen differently you know so so it gave me a way of writing a book in which the figure of key shots making his journey would unite a lot of different kinds of America a lot of difference of styles of writing there's a bit of it which becomes a spy novel that's a bit of it which is a science fiction novel there's a bit of it which is a kind of absurdist parable and all of that is strung together by the by the road but of course if you just have somebody who goes wandering around apparently aimlessly meeting different kinds of people yeah I'm having you know adventure here at an adventure they're not enough you know what's the point no point so what what makes it what makes it congeal well I think two things which are two aspects are the same thing one is that he's in pursuit of love that's that's his gun can't find it and thinks he knows how to think believes himself capable of finding it but he's deluded but he's deluded yeah but what the pursuit of love makes him want to do is to be a better person you know he talks all the time about making himself worthy but he what he wants to he's very invested in the idea of goodness of being good that's right and and that's I think the thing that holds the book together that wherever he goes and whatever is happening to him he's interested in the business of proving himself worthy and he has that sort of in common with his author in the other storyline who is also somebody in in later life contemplating the mistakes of his life and wanting to set things right and to be a better person what of course he's funny about this fundamentally is that keyshot thinks that he can apply is the seven rules yeah seven seven valleys seven valleys and they include you know wisdom love and all the rest and he has this rather touching faith that if you accept these rules of nature and if you go through the fire exactly then you will come out at the end and you'll be alright and of course it is completely ridiculous I mean he says at this point in the valley of love he shot said ones goal is the pursuit of love itself not the small they're often beautiful individual love of one man for one woman or one man for one man or one woman for a woman or whatever more contemporary combination you prefer and in this category I include my love for my own destined inevitable soon to be beloved this is the woman on the TV screen I mean it's not yes it's not but he's forced to walk across a landscape and he's be enacted and he believes deeply that if he behaves according to the principles he has set himself that love will find a way and and not to give anything away we won't talk about the end of the book but look if you had been writing this living in America yeah fifty years ago in the sixties what would really different about the way you looked at the landscape the society and the people used to be I mean the book I think that answers that question yes it's Saul Bellow's novel The Adventures of Okemah in which Olga Marsh from a poor Jewish family in Chicago in a way sets off his life becomes a kind of Odyssey through America but the America that's being written about is described much more optimistically here you know as as a place of energy and drama and and people who are competent and able to grasp life and make it what they want you know etc and and so bellows America which I mean I remember reading The Adventures of Augie Marsh when I was much younger and loving it just thinking this there's the sense of the horizon that will always take you ever westward towards this there's a wonderful I'm gonna try and remember and if you forgive me forget it slightly wrong the ending of Augie Marsh when he talks about he says I have been a Columbus of the near at hand and and he says something like I'm setting forth into the terra firma that spreads out from every gaze well you see that sense of the discovery of the world and then there's this beautiful ending where he says Columbus probably thought he was a failure too when they brought him home in Chains which didn't prove there was no America I think I mean it's a lovely phrase that because the the sort of phrase that he shot attaches to himself is that it's an anything can happen yeah place but involved in that label is the idea that it might not be a very good thing no it's catastrophe yeah I mean listen we we talked about whether we were going to mention the world the wording on outlet there's 45th president it has I said he's not mentioned no he's in his name isn't there cuz I did his footprints are in every page didn't want him in my book I was just trying to get him to say that I mean he's in our daily lives every day yes I just thought I don't want it I'm gonna put it in so let's call it 45 I mean if that person can be the President of the United States than any can happen yeah they used to be this this footballer playing for Arsenal Football Club was a fullback Lee Dixon oh who played once for England he was lousy and and my club's first but the Arsenal would come to play they would sing if Lee Dixon can play for England so can I not sadly not you know we're playing I know we always beat you these days apologies in advance okay but some I mean that's what Trump is he's if Donald Trump could be President so can I accept I can't because I'm not allowed to my law but being serious from leaving that subject to the the society that you picture here the society through which he shot wanders unknowing hopeful it slightly bonkers but not at all an unlikable figure a bizarre figure is one that you obviously sense has changed for the worse in last generation yeah and and had done so before Trump yeah the Trump in some ways was in effect rather than a cause and then worked very hard to make that rift deeper I've got a phrase which comes back to me quite a lot if you if you look at Alistair Cooke series America yeah the TV series which I think was broadcast on the BBC in 1972 and those of you who remember it it was a time when Eunice civilization and the ascent of man I mean he's great sort of majestic TV series first ever went to America well Cook's America with them and there's a there's a scene at the very end almost at the end of the film he gazes for that sort of quizzical expression at the camera and he's talking about a country that he loved of which he became a citizen in the 50s and so on and had more or less lived there permanently since 1930s and he said in this land of the most of the blandest cynicism and the most persistent idealism the race is on between its decadence and its vitality hmm now that's a really good way of summing up the country that you're picturing here yeah would you enjoy and where you live and so on and as I mean actually connects to what we were saying about about bellows America in which that vitality yes was so central yeah and now an unquenchable and unquenchable yeah and joyous and you thinking in a way the decadence whether it's in politics in finance in social cohesion and so on has taken over but I think you know allowing me rather unusually to use a religious phrase yeah which is original sin and it seems to me that sometimes nations have an original sin and the original sin of America is twofold one is the eradication of the original population and the other is slavery and its consequence which is race a race I told not long ago to a presidential candidate in the 2016 election and it wasn't Donald Trump hmm who described so it leaves you with little imaginative leaps to be made and she just to make it clear oh said Jesus Stein said said that there is no question that in America the original sin and she used that phrase it was race well it's the explanation behind everything that's happening yeah you know this year actually is rather an extraordinary year in American history because 1619 is the yard which the first slave ship arrived in America so four hundred years ago is when the first slaves arrived and next year is the Mayflower yeah so you know so the two things slaves got there first but that fact has shaped American history ever since and has never really been apologized for it's never been there's never been any reference if it's some bad why do you live there well I don't live in America I live in New York well yeah and and but you know I mean seriously I think the it's very often the case in countries that the great metropolis is not like the country that's in you know I don't think London is particularly like Britain you know Paris is not like France and New York is not like America but it's the thing about America is that people you know in let's say the rural Midwest who would tend to be more sympathetic even dramatically sympathetic to Trump than people living in you know Seattle or New York will say these people live in a bubble but the bubbles that you get in rural Texas hmm a much more impenetrable and any bubble you would get in New York the question is who's in the bubble yeah I knew that I wanted in this in my last novel in the golden Houston that that book was set almost entirely in Manhattan yet and I remember when I finished the book telling myself get out of town you know you can't just write about this tiny little safe area in which you feel at home you know and so in this book I've quite deliberately got out of town the book most of it much of the book yeah I mean there are several there's more than one journey there's key shots journey east yeah from from the Midwest and then there are reverse journeys as well so this two or three Criss crossing journeys going on in this book and so a lot of the book takes place in this other America Wisconsin you know places the the red states yeah I mean one of the things I had to learn when you go to America because here red is the color of left to lose the color right yes and you know red is the color of conservatism and blue do other good guys couldn't possibly comment so I did want to try and you know I've been there for almost 20 years I mean in that time I've actually traveled really quite a lot in in America and I didn't what I didn't do was do the journey that keyShot does you know I thought about it I thought maybe I should go to the Midwest and rent a chevy cruze and a drive across America exactly as he does that I thought no he was too literal most of the places are places I've actually have been to or what versions of places that I knew so I felt on confident ground that I could create that world and then the thing that I had to face I've actually very little in my life written about racism I mean actually in the Satanic miles there's a bit yes but American racism I really hadn't taken it on you know and and since most of the characters are Indian and the leading characters are Indian American that is very interesting to me because you know the classic was we've been saying the classic location of race in America is between African Americans yes white supremacists but Indian Americans have this funny in-between message we should make clear for older members of the audience including myself that when someone mentions Indian Americans he's not talking about I'm not your Native Americans he's talking about people from the south from so this is awful thing that people sometimes say in America it really annoys people where they say dot not feather not feather it's awful that's a very politically incorrect way in which privately well the family at the center of this book keyShot who's the invention of Sam the second great spy novels it's a man whose name could be translated because his first name is Ismail a nice smile too could be smile smile smile smile his his cousin he's our cousin isn't he doctor smile yeah runs a pharmaceutical company from which he's eventually fired let go it's the phrase no it strikes me that if you're looking at the social turmoil of the states at the moment which takes all sorts of forms the opioid crisis which doesn't get that much treatment here is colossal it's colossal and it's more profound in the retina in the red states in the rural areas than it is in the big cities where they've gone through all that you know drugs and aids and all the rest of it but people are discovering I mean New Hampshire's a very good example of places where extraordinary numbers of people are dying you know deeply addicted because of their addiction to prescription drugs which over a long period have been prescribed unnecessarily by medics who make money out of prescribing mean it's it's a it's a social crisis of huge proportions and what I mean I was I mean yes because if you're gonna set a lot of the book in that part of America then you need to recognize that that's what's going on there you know and and so I dug around a little bit and and I actually found an Indian American gentleman he's now in jail so I think we could say initially that he's a crook who was I mean in in who is like my doctor smile I mean not he's different in that I mean my doctor smiles operation is in Atlanta Georgia yes and and this fellow was somewhere else in Illinois somewhere but he had he had come to America and started up a pharmaceutical company and done very well and and then invented his breakthrough thing was he he his company invented this sublingual spray of the very powerful opioid fentanyl fentanyl was what killed Prince and sublingual so it worked very very fast if it gets into your system fastest and this had and this was designed for exclusively for use with terminal cancer patients you know in order to overcome what doctors called breakthrough pain yeah which means unbearable pain so he became very wealthy because it was very successful this product and but unfortunately he was a crook and so what he started doing was bribing doctors to prescribe this product what's called off-label which means not for the purposes for which it's for which the label specializes in other words recreationally even yes you know and and that's one of the I mean he was one of the people who did this the you know the oxycontin family the cyclists they you know they have their they have kind of their hands dirty as well and the thing that struck me was not just that there are in your individual crooked people which there are but how easy it was for relatively small amounts of money to corrupt the medical profession you know that the the amounts of money that doctors would be given to do this you know they were like twenty five thousand dollars forty thousand dollars you know not like money that would like you to buy a yacht you know and for that they were willing to prescribe large quantities of these lethal drugs to anyone who wanted it but of course the thing one of the reasons that the satire works is that what you're saying is that you're offering people a way of escaping from the world yeah yeah keeping what's a random I think one of the things that I really thought writing the book I'm in the book II I promise you it is funny I mean we're not making it sound funny but actually even my crooked doctor smile I mean I'm extremely fond of him he's a he's a he's quite engaging he's got a delightful crook he's just also lethal which is a fault but I felt how should I put this the loneliness of America how many people are isolated from each other and how they need things to help them face that loneliness and who feel whether they're you know liberal Americans vaguely on the liberal left side of politics or whether they are conservatives even you know serious Trump IDEs there's a feeling among so many of them that something has been lost yeah they're not quite sure what he is but ya Gong and that people are lying to them yes I mean I revised it I went to lecture year or so ago in Florida in a little town called Vero Beach which is near Cape Canaveral and which is absolutely Trump country yeah and I was lecturing to a large audience or actually even bigger than this if that were possible yes and I would say 95% of it was people who voted Republican and and yet they were completely not like the cliche of the Trump these were not ignorant blue-collar you know they were white color they college-educated had had good jobs many of them were retirees they were book readers I mean why else would they come to me you know and yet they had completely swallowed the kool-aid you know so I would have this the QA and a gentleman would stand up Jerry you know cultured gentleman and he would say so do you really think that the New York Times isn't just lying to us every day you really believe that and I thought well humor is the way of dealing with this so I said well sir I'm aware of the fact that I'm in Florida the home of Florida man but back home where I come from it's our hometown newspaper and we like it I said so yes I do believe it except when they're reviewing my books and somebody else you know stood up and made a kind of statement denying climate change and he said when you say all that about about climate change I have almost how all the scientists of the world agree with you that's not true you know actually yes it is true no it's not so I'd like to say - I said sir you know we can't stand here going yes it is no it's not because that's silly you know I said but let me put it to you this way if you believe the world is flat the earth doesn't need you to believe that it's round to be round it just is round even if you don't believe it because there's this thing called evidence but it was first of all I liked it that they didn't they it was not rude was not discourteous they listened the the the form of conversation was courteous non trumpets and and you know nobody threw things or walked out or I think you know I thought ok you know at least we're having the conversation you know which which in America it's getting harder and harder to do before we go to questions which I want to do in a couple of minutes or you know three or four minutes I do want you to read a little section if you can think of you know just give us it I mean you don't have to do it by heart no no I've got a pristine copy here just a little you know but let me just ask you one one general question yeah before we open it up well you think about we all know what happened to you 30 years ago and I remember we had a conversation on the world at 1 which was on the very day that this news came from Tehran have you view in your own life dealt with the aftermath yes excessively do you think far enough away now yeah I mean yeah I mean I only it really only ever comes up and I'm talking to journalists yes I just thought it but some people might think it odd if I didn't allude do you know well you could elude and if I asked you about something that happened to you thirty years ago you might think that was a bit of one of the things that happened to me 30 years ago was saying to you in the really we've just had this news from Tim that you've been sentenced to death I mean that was quite as regards me in the beginning since I mean this is the first event for this book so let me read read the beginning you know this is how it begins chapter one he shot an old man falls in love embarks on a quest and becomes a father it has long chapter titles there once lived at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America a traveling man of Indian origin advancing years and retreating mental powers who on account of his love for mindless television had spent far too much of his life in the yellow light of tawdry motel rooms watching in excess of it and had suffered a peculiar form of brain damage as a result he devoured morning shows daytime shows late-night talk shows soaps situation comedies Lifetime movies hospital dramas police series vampire and zombie serials the drama's of housewives from Atlanta and New Jersey Beverly Hills in New York the romances and quarrels of Hotel fortune princesses and self-styled showers the cavorting zuv individuals made famous by happy new disease the 15 minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social-media followings on account of their plastic surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post rib removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company's Barbie doll or even more simple their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis as well as singing competitions cooking competitions competitions for business propositions composite competitions for business apprenticeships competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles fashion competitions can pit competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes baseball games basketball games football games wrestling bouts kick boxing bouts extreme sports programming and of course beauty contests he did not watch hockey so for people of his ethnic persuasion and tropical youth hockey which in the USA was renamed field hockey was a game played on grass to play field hockey or ice was in his opinion the absurd equivalent of ice skating on a lawn and we can [Applause] and unfortunately we can't confirm the rumors that people have finally what band daytime television watching in the White House oh did they still they can't possibly have what would he have to do all day on that happy note can we have the lights up and get some questions we've got a little time hands up mics will reach you there's one up there certainly and one here so I think you get first shout and then that one so yeah find a way if you've got the mic just second row that's it your comment about the original since the two of America the eradication of the indigenous population and the slavery do you think there's a way to for redemption well strangely many of us thought that that had begun with the election of a black president and in fact what happened was the opposite that the election of the the presence of a black man in the White House so much outraged a section of white America as Jim so as to give it extra energy kind of energy that hadn't had before whether that's temporary or permanent I don't know we'll find out next year I'm actually more optimistic about the situation in America than the situation in the other two countries that I've cared about which is to say India and this one the Trump victory was very very small it was very narrow in the three northern industrial states which he should have lost it which he won the total vote in his favor majority in favor was only seventy five thousand votes so the number of people required to swing in order to lose those states he lost the popular vote by nearly he lost this or puffy Evert by nearly three million but you know you've got to play the game according to the rules that said it's it's possible to see a reversal there whether it will happen or not I mean unfortunately the Democrats have an enormous gift for losing elections for the circular firing squad you know and I begin I begin just I see the circular firing squad begin to fall right now we'll see I mean I think there are there are actually good signs I mean I was wrong last time I thought I mean I thought trumpet news I had to think I had this in common with Donald Trump you know well I think if you see the pictures of election night you see a man in deep shock what I've really got to do this job now and afterwards he gave this interview in which he said it's much harder than the job I had before with a bath with an air of surprise it hadn't occurred to him that running the United States might be more complicated than running a real estate company but yeah and I think it is changeable you know I worry much more for the irreversibility of the decision that this country is about to make and I worry even more about what's happening in India where the the rise of of Hindu nationalism has is a tidal wave of popularity the government there is I mean it's there for as long as it wants to be and feel and seems to be unleashed as a result things that are happening in the country are really very tragic so oddly I think of these three countries the place to have a little bit I mean a little bit more optimism about it is the United States I think it can't change someone has the mic up here I think thank you sorry oh wave thank you so much this was a delight I'm interested to hear you say that the way to deal with questions like the ones you got in Florida is with humor because in that scenario it seems like the humor is a way of dissolving the darkness and yet in the excerpt that you've just read for us I think so striking is that the humor is part of the darkness and the oddity and our ability to laugh in these times is precisely part of what alerts us to how dark they are so I wonder if you could say a little more about about humor about what's going on for us when we laugh in the darkness you know the way of is it a salver is it what makes it so bad no yeah oh you're quite right there is an argument which says that this stuff is not funny and we shouldn't laugh I all I could say isn't right now living in in the United States I'm very grateful for comedians you know when I when I I find I've actually found it impossible to listen to the straight news because I can't stand his voice I just don't want to hear his voice or his gestures I think Jimmy Kimmel describe this unforgettably as pinching invisible nipples what you've seen it you can't see it I think people like Jimmy Kimmel and and Stephen Colbert and Samantha bee and not really give me felon he's no good he's not good at political comedy you know but these people have been actually they've been sharper political and they get away with more than people think here people say oh you can't you know you can't criticize Trump no no they really did and it's tough and they do it because they're funny they get away with making extremely sharp yeah political points so my view is that on the that experience the comedy allows you to go deeper you know and also to go deeper into people's consciousness you know because if you laugh at something to some extent you've received it and I felt that I felt that during the previous Republican administration that that Canadians like like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart and and so on were really doing a public service and I still think that I mean my problem is that it comes out this way naturally you know I mean I I'm not good at I'm not good at serious writing you know I get bored with it I mean I have very low boredom threshold and I don't want to bore myself first of all because I think if I bore myself I have a serious chance of boring you it's a good test isn't it yeah here we are boredom and embarrassment those are the best tests for writing if you if you're embarrassed about what you've written it's not ready to show anyone it would be a good rule for a political leader wouldn't it good title for a sitcom boredom and embarrassment up here I think every four people would watch it yes we're sorry could you put your hand up so I wondered if you could comment on how on earth this mantra take back control worked it didn't seem to work in Scotland it didn't seem to work for people we take back control which was the the great motto of the 2016 referendum yeah the brexit referendum coined and pushed by Dominic Cummings who's now most people on the screen thinking or looking like they were thinking do we have to you had people erasing it who to say they were thinking do I have to say this nonsense but it worked what are your thoughts I mean I don't have any very profound observations about about the brexit business except that I think it's a calamity on the edge of happening this isn't you know this country isn't going to take back power it's going to lose a great deal of power it's good to lose enormous influence in the world it's going to be much poorer and it's going to be very hard for that I feel you know I have two children growing up in England I feel worried for their future and what will what will it be like when the door of Europe is slammed in their face instead of having the world open to them there's going to be this tiny island I it seems to me like in my lifetime the greatest historical mistake that I've seen a country make I saw a tweet the other day which was some sort of thread had been running on Twitter people collecting the weirdest reasons they had heard for people who had voted dragged said and this one was a chap who said he'd been in a charity shop and he had a person who was serving there you know I'd have a good public spirited thing working in a charity shop in the afternoons saying that she had voted rexif because the European Union had stopped them selling old toasters with dodgy wiring no so the idea that this was visited on them by jean-claude juncker deliberate closed down charity shops in well I mean that's what's gonna happen now this country is gonna become an old toaster with dodgy wiring and the fact that there is this dream England that is and it is England yes because it's certainly not Scotland but there is this this dream of England that has been foisted on people about this this idyllic moment when there weren't any inconvenient brown people around and when everything was good it's not unlike make America great again you know and it made me want to ask the question exactly when was that when is that Golden Age you know to which we wish to return and secondly are you are aware that the pleasant life of that country was based on the rape pillage and exploitation of a quarter of the world yeah who's next we've got a few more minutes hand over there and over there yeah and over there Mike over there good far away thank you um given that you said that in America the Democrats have a tendency to shoot themselves yeah who do you think should be their candidate next year oh well look I think it's down to three and a half I mean the 24 I think we can forget about yes I think it's down to two old men and two women its Biden Sanders Warren and hey Warren and Harris it's gonna be one of them and I think it's not gonna be Bernie Sanders the one that Trump dreams of surely is Elizabeth Warren she'd be Pocahontas from yes I think it might have the best chance of meeting him do you think so I think she right because she's got she's been very interesting the way she's fought this so far is that she has not done any kind of personal attack so she is concentrated entirely on policy issues you know she has her slogan is Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that you know and and actually but isn't she the epitome yes but that might be the sloth I think there's here's my theory I was wrong last time so so so so you know pay no attention but that in a way we live in a moment of opposites so Trump wins because he's the anti Obama is the opposite of Obama so maybe what we need is the opposite of Trump and the closest to the opposite of Trump that I can see is Warren I mean I think it might be Warren I think she has a strong chance of being the candidate I know that there's a very very strong argument that you can't elect as president somebody who's going to be 82 at the end of the first term uncle Uncle Joe but America is a pretty great country Biden quite a good song to sing which is I represent the America used to know where there was a political discourse that was civilized where when I was a senator for 32 years we did deals on Capitol Hill to make things work where president's talked eloquently yeah when and he was famously he was the deal and I think if you're going to take on if that's your political position if you're gonna take on Trump having somebody who can deal with them by saying you have single-handed handedly attacked the very culture the the sort of bits that are glued together in America that at its good moments made it what I just sensed that it a lot of people are definitely a job for you in the Biden campaign well making upon the truth is I like them all you know I like I like Biden and Sanders and Harris and Warren I think they're all terrific people and goodness knows people of integrity in reply to a president probably more lacking in integrity than any president in my lifetime and I would vote for any of them you know the question is you know I would actually really like Carla Harris I think she's formidable you know and and and she could make mincemeat of him on debates you know and that's what they said about the previous Democrats face it Hillary was a bad candidate yes a bad candidate who ran a back didn't know what to do when Donald Trump accused her husband of being a rapist in a debate in front of not just her I mean how do you respond you know respond what are the answers to it is look who's talking well and she was criticized for not saying that yeah but you can understand I was saying well what happens if I say that well I mean she was just the wrong person and she ran a bad campaign that doesn't have that shows how beatable he is because facing the wrong candidate who ran a bad campaign he lost the popular vote by three million votes that doesn't mean he's in undefeatable I like Harris the question is whether America is ready for a black woman from California that's right I think you know the answer is we don't know we don't any longer not none of the old rules apply exactly because according to the old rules Trump was unelectable yeah unelectable except he got elected Obama was unelectable than so so we have to old thinking just doesn't work anymore you know and and that's why I think someone like Warren could actually be more effective than Biden a last word you're you're very funny in this you full of vim and vigor and of course there's anger underneath but there's also a love of life yeah are you in a good state of mind I'm not doing so badly thank you but but it's that was what I wanted maybe the love of life increases as you near the wrong end of it that's a very good moment in which to end ladies and gentlemen I just want to remind you that Salman of course will be signing his new book which I commend

Channel: edbookfest

Views: 1,636

Rating: 4.6923075 out of 5

Keywords: Edinburgh, International, Book, Festival, salman, rushdie, Quichotte, Don Quixote, james, naughtie

Id: yP_tKxsZDTc

Length: 59min 38sec (3578 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019