Salman Rushdie, "The Golden House"

it's always an honor to host Salman Rushdie tonight especially so and I say this because if you know anything about his new book which is called the golden house you know that he's produced a novel that is the perfect emotional psychological and political barometer of the chaotic confounding it's really hard to come up with enough adjectives unthinkable times in which we currently live the golden house is mr. Rudy's 13th book I'm sure many of you have read all or some of his earlier works and you know that one of the constants in his writing most notably or perhaps most famously in the Satanic Verses but in so many of his books is his willingness to speak truth to power and clearly at some personal cost to him his new novel is no exception it's a mirror for our times perhaps even a window into our times into what feels like so often these days are tortured and fractured and somewhat unsure American soul a reviewer said that this book could only be written by someone who loves America perhaps it's out of that love and fascination for our country that mr. Rashid Rushdie is so able and so willing to take a hard look at our political its cultural underbelly deeply examine the era of Trump when flamboyance and wealth and tragicomic or maybe just tragic political leadership threatens some of our most sacred values and pervert so many of our agreed-to notions about national identity american generosity and our sense of personal and collective security since its publication reviewers have conveyed enormous excitement about the golden house one describing the book as quote part classic immigrants story part on the nose political satire about America today another says that in his fictional take on a character who closely resembles the current American president mr. Rushdie quote finds such a perfect villain that he finds it hard to let him go it's a treat to watch rusty let fly in short like all of mr. Rusty's works this is an important timely and compelling book and hope that you all will find yourselves provoked and challenged and inspired as you read it in conversation with mr. Rushdie tonight will be Aminata Forna herself an award-winning novelist whose themes focus on dictatorship tyranny and civil war she's making this the perfect person to talk to mr. Rushdie tonight she's also a literary critic a professor of creative writing in England and currently the Lannon visiting chair of poetics at Georgetown University please join me in welcoming Salman Rushdie and Amina [Applause] all right you always we always have to live up to these introductions anyway thank you so much and thanks always to politics and prose it's becoming like a habit to be here with with you all you guys thank you for showing up welcome everybody I hope you can enjoy this evening I hope you can enjoy our British accents this is an old British or Commonwealth affair I was chatting to someone in the greenroom about how we were gonna do this and I said to him so this is your 11th isn't it and he said what 11th look and I said no eleventh event and he said no it's my and counted them 17th consecutive event so I think we have to be particular grateful that he's here with us tonight he has covered the country from east to west coast he's been on the cover of Time magazine and interviewed by I would actually really be by the cover of Time bags yes as opposed to as opposed to somebody else [Laughter] Bill Maher shown as well which you enjoyed so yeah I saw you post about that so the way it's gonna go this evening is we're gonna chat so I'm just going to read a little bit we do have a little surprise for you worked out well half worked out and then round about quarter to 22 we'll take a pause and take some questions for you so I want all of you to sit here and think to yourself I will be the person who asks the first question so let's let's talk about the book I reviewed it I reviewed it for a British newspaper very convenient I can do both I can review the book and I can also interview Salman on stage and then when I started the book I thought oh my what if I hate it this is going to be the most socially awkward interview but I am happy to say I absolutely adored it I was riveted by it it is also however a terribly difficult book to stomach and I saw that in the New York Times made this point the reviewer there made the same point it's terribly hard to avoid the spoilers so much happens at such speed so what we're going to try and do this evening because I know that 400 of you good souls have invested in this book so we're gonna try and talk about it without giving away the plot but if we do you'll have to forgive us so a little bit but we're gonna talk a bit first in summary we had a little bit in the introduction this is a book about a family called the goldens patriarch Nero golden who arrived in New York City with his three sons they have come from where we do not know he all of the the narrator is a young man called Renee who lives on the opposite side of a square of the square and watches this family and he in beigel's himself doesn't he into their lives with the purpose the extensible purpose of making a documentary about them I had a conversation with you I don't know if you remember a little while back we were seated together at dinner and we were talking about living in the States where I have lived for the last two years and we were talking about how we felt about it and you said that it took you three minutes of arriving in New York to decide that you wanted to live there yeah can you talk to that a bit and well that's what it is about New York you know well first of all and I first I first went to New York when I was a kid you know and I was like 25 in this in the early 70s and that was a very different city you know it was it was poor and dirty and little bit dangerous and also cheap so that downtown New York was full of young people many of whom were creative university was full of young artists and writers and musicians and wannabe filmmakers and etc and I thought you know how great is this and I that point thought one of these days I just want to come and put my foot myself here and see what happens and then you know what happens is life intervenes you have married you have children you have all sorts of things happen and you don't do that and then at 25 more years passed and then I thought well if I'm ever going to try and do this I you know I'm not getting any younger and I can I came to America with without a plan really I mean not knowing whether it was for six months or the rest of my life and I yeah I put my bags down and thought I'm not leaving and and it's not even I can't even say it's just I get up in the morning and go to the corner and get a cup of coffee and buy the New York Times and feel in a good mood you know and it's just it's just that the New York Times which I have been defending a great deal against charges of fake news I have to say except when they review my books I - you know I haven't had a good review in the New York Times since I moved to New York I thinking what are they trying to tell me anyway you know it still has a kind of New York nurse but still New York City you know anyway I and I when I first move like almost immediately after I came over I roast I wrote my normal fury which was also a New York novel also about somebody arriving in Manhattan trying to get away from a past of which in that case which he was ashamed and but that was very much a novel of new arrival it was a dog it was an old we just arriving and trying to find his balance in a new place and now it's today so I was almost two decades later and at this point I actually do feel like part of the furniture you know and I mean I'm even I'm even a citizen now so so I actually have the rights as it were to this sound off and so I thought I would no I mean I just thought they were toothed though I wanted to do this thing that you're not supposed to do which is to write right up against the present moment you know to try to try to write a novel about the moment in which the novel is being written and and try and do something less less transient than today's newspapers because if you do that wrong then the book is valueless the next day the way that yesterday's papers you know and and if you do it right then hopefully you capture the moment you know hopefully for a long time and and and you it seems to me the ideal is that there are two kinds of pleasure for the readers one is the immediate pleasure of contemporary readers which is the pleasure of recognition the pleasure say yeah this is this is what it's like you know I and then hopefully you know somewhere down the road people pick up the book and say oh yes I see this is what it was like you know so so you could if you do it right you could achieve both those things and if you do it wrong then we won't know you for 10 years I mean that the sense that I had which you seem to be speaking to when I read the book was you know there's a Chinese proverb a cow can tell you what it feels like to stand in a field eating grass but it can't tell you what it looks like to look at account standing in a field eating grass but this book to me accomplishes both things it seems to be written from a perspective that at once encapsulate the insider and the outsider it is both what New York feels like as an insider and looks like as an outs I'm so glad you said that because it's been one of my ideas about writing from the earliest times is that a writer whoever he is wherever he's writing about needs to be simultaneously inside and outside that you need to have that kind of double vision where you can be you have to be inside otherwise you can't create the world with any kind of effect and you have to be outside so that you could look at it with a with a beady eye you know and I think that's that's true of any writer anywhere I think actually but but in this case because so much of my life has been defined by migration and Here I am in New York both both inside and outside and I think it's a useful you like double vision useful way of seeing yeah because what happened in this book is at a part of this book the actual story the story of nero golden and his family i had thought of maybe eight or nine years ago without knowing that it would have anything to do with america you know and it really came out of india it came because what the it's only Chapter three it's like page ten so I could tell you it's not a big spoiler that the place they're trying to hide that they came from is actually my old hometown of Bombay and where it's clear that they have been involved in very shady business and and the book began for me before I knew that they would be in New York with that with that shady business and and I thought this is an interesting story but then I realized that because it's not in the other business other part of my head I wanted to write this social novel about New York I'd realized that they were kind of the same story because it was natural that New York would be the place they would come to try and achieve this colossal act of reinvention and so it went click so one part to it really is in some ways you know A Tale of Two Cities it really because although a lot of it happens in New York the kind of crucial backstory which explains everything happens on the other side of the world so because when I was reading it I was thinking where did the spark of fire come from you know I mean I think a novel is such a huge undertaking a short story or a poem so there are many themes in this novel above any you know above so many others and I did think that it did he actually sit there and start in the moment what was the first spark of fire so you've said the first spark of fire actually you had the idea of the goldens from before and then you've got your next spark of fire and then at some point you get your furnace going yeah but that's of the original idea with the goldens where did that come from well it was interesting because see this whoops the the setting of the novel in New York is there's this little place in Greenwich Village there's a secret garden there's that those kind of it actually exists a communal garden in Greenwich Village between MacDougall and Sullivan streets but about a dozen houses on each side and you can only access the garden if you live in one of those houses and as it happens I had actually the people to whom the novel is dedicated that the painter Francesco Clemente and his wife our bar have one of those houses and so through them I got to know this place they actually live in the house that Bob Dylan used to live in you know that's the old story about in the 70s the guy who was going through Dylan's garbage to try and find out stuff about him anyway that was the house whose garbage he was going through and I suddenly thought that this space was like like a theater was like you know like like an open-air theater and this enclosed space with people with windows houses all around able to watch you know it's sort of like Hitchcock's rear window which which Renee the narrator who is a filmmaker points out so if we'd like an amphitheater where the actors could the characters could act out their stories at then I thought because it's this secluded space it allows me to say here's the private story of these people you know the private tragedy of this family but all around it is the public tragedy of America you know so it just gave me the physical separation so I just had in my mind always this circle inside a circle you know this tragedy inside the tragedy that that's that's what really told me how to write it I love the structure because in a very writerly way I love the structure you think I wish I thought of that so Renee is essentially considering making a documentary about these people a duck you we're sort of shocked I was almost a docudrama then becomes equal to the mockumentary yes and like spinal tap he he he imagined and there's a there's a point at the book where you're not certain what's being imagined by Renee and what's actually taking place because of course really all Renee has is their the visuals of them until he manages to get into the house and become involved in their lives but at the beginning he really just has the visuals and I thought two things I very clever two very cleverly right early trick because it allows you to go beyond Renee's perspective but the other thing I thought was so brilliant about it is that that's how we look at our neighbors that's what we're all doing we watch our neighbors we see them come in and come out of their house we see them getting the car maybe we see the end of a remark or an argument or a car door slam and we imagine the lives of our neighbors yeah you know I had this I had this awful idea about grenade when I first made about which was that he would be a novelist yeah I thought you might have thought that that's really awful idea but it's one of the few times in my life that I literally woke it up in the night sat out in a cold sweat I thought this idea sucks it really it would be should be anything except a novelist it could be a dentist it that would be better I thought I went to sleep the next day I but I thought okay so if he's not a novelist who is he and and then it occurred to me that I actually knew this group of young filmmakers in in downtown New York who were all kind of people young men and women recently out of NYU grad school trying to make their way trying to make their films you know and and I thought well how about if he is one of those and the moment I thought that the whole book like opened up it was like just the moment at which they got a door opened and I could see how to find your way I could see how to write the book you know when when he was because it allowed me to play games like there's moments in the novel which where it kind of briefly slides into what looks like screenplay yeah the uses film technique just allowed me also I've had this lifetime love affair with the movies and and so I have a head full of film nerdery and I was able to give it to him so so he was able to let into the novel all this all this stuff but I've been carrying around what I thought I just read you the beginning this is when Nero golden arrives in what are called the gardens and and Renee narrate the narrator first first encounters him so and this again as you'll see it has the date is rather precise on which he arrives which is the date of the inauguration of the 44th president and I wasn't originally planning to do that but maybe we'll talk about that in a bit but eventually given what happened during the course of writing the novel it seemed to me that I needed to be to make that arc from from that moment to this moment you know and make that more make that more evident you know so I so I should reshaped it it that way anyway it begins like this on the day of the new president's inauguration when we worried that he might be murdered as he walked hand in hand with his exceptional wife among the cheering crowds and when so many of us were close to economic ruin in the aftermath of the bursting of the mortgage bubble and when Isis was still in Egyptian mother goddess and uncrowned 70-something King from a faraway country arrived in New York City with his three motherless sons to take possession of the palace of his exile behaving as if nothing was wrong with the country or the world or his own story he began to rule over the neighborhood like a benevolent Emperor although in spite of his charming smile and his skill at playing his 1745 Guarani violin he exude a heavy chief odo the unmistakable smell of crass despotic danger the kind of scent that warned us look out for this guy because he could order your execution at any moment if you're wearing a displeasing shirt for example or if he wants to sleep with your wife the next eight years the years of the 44th president were also the years of the increasingly erratic and alarming reign over us of the man who called himself Nero golden who wasn't really a king and at the end of his crime there was a large and metaphorically speaking apocalyptic fire I mean that's so he's somebody who granade when he meets him presents him as being pretty frightening there's a it says how he makes clumsy efforts to be friendly inviting people over for cocktails kind of at the wrong time of day at trying to ruffle their children's hair and pat their dogs and the children and dogs recoil its touch and he is I have to say in the real estate business some overlaps and he acquires as we will see a beautiful Eastern European wife but in every other way he's quite unlike anybody you might be thinking of because there is of course another character called the Joker who is more like you see what I thought is he was a presidential candidate I think we should say well there's a line in the novel Rene says that what seems to have happened in America is the DC meaning Comics is taking over DC and so the candidate running for the presidency of the United States is the Joker who has very very very white skin white skin red lips and green hair likes the white skin and has unusually coloured hair yeah you you've been quoted as saying I presume accurately that you expected Trump to win well my book expected him to win I didn't that was a strange thing but and it's really as I mean I think it's a thing that all of us who do this strange job know that sometimes your work could be wiser than you are you know and the logic of the book just inexorably went in that direction you know and so I wrote it that way thinking what if the other thing happens I'm which I would prefer to happen I'll have to do some reshaping you know but I didn't I didn't really know I didn't know I mean you know my I went along on election day and and cast my vote and thought okay maybe tonight we'll have a woman president you know and was excited by it and I think subconsciously you must have seen the signs because one of the things I really noticed about who called it and who didn't on Trump was that anybody who came from a country that was know a new democracy or developing or had that their democratic institutions threatened had a much clearer idea of how this life I mean there's a level of the subconscious there's a guy who actually he makes it into the book at one point but I the moment at which I began to sort of smell a rat really it was was I was in a yellow cab in New York with a sick taxi taxi driver and he said to me that he was going to vote for Trump and I said really I said his name was like ger in there saying you know and I said just let me just take a wild guess that you come for the but job and he said yes sir city of Jericho and and I said well and I I'm from Bombay this gentleman doesn't like immigrants like you and me so why would you vote fair and he said Oh sir mr. Trump straight-shooter says what he thinks doesn't give a and I thought I thought he's going to win yeah you know because nobody ever accused Hillary of being a straight shooter this is a remarkable idea that it doesn't matter what somebody says even if they say the most terrible thing to you that somehow even if it were the truth that that is what you would choose horrifying but against your own interests yes well it's one of the things that one of the many ways in which Karl Marx has been proven wrong by history because your Marxism says people voted in their own interest and what we see over and over again is people voting against their own economics about the self-interest you know because of whatever ideological or whatever whatever other passion is exercising their thoughts I mean it was shocking to watch for all of us you know and except for those people in the room who may be hiding their allegiance you never know you know that's the scary bit about America now you never know who did the young thing I think that's the thing that is shifted is actually there's some people not looking very comfortable in their seats you know who that's talking about the election and moving on to Russian interference you're going to read us a little bit to introduce that Nero gets snared at a certain point by this beautiful Russian gold digger and much to the consternation of his other children and before I read I just want to say this very weird thing has happened since the book came out I think of her there's this she's called vassilisa which is the name taken from the legend of Baba Yaga the witch who eats children you know and since it became a really quite a significant number of people have said to me how much they like her [Laughter] straight-shooter way with Vasily so it's like well someone's just getting on with it I thought I've been so surprised very odd but you're genuinely surprised by how people are reading your book that but I think here's the character who is the most self-seeking a moral person in the book and everybody likes her you stand with Vasily sir I think that's well it just goes to show that sometimes bad girls are born interesting the good girls do I just read you a couple of little bits about her here is vassilisa the Russian go she is striking what might say she is astonishing she has long dark hair her body is also long at exceptional she runs marathons and is a fine gymnast specializing in the ribbon element of remnant of rhythmic gymnastics he says but in her youth she came close to the Russian Olympic team she is 28 years old her youth was when she was 15 vassilisa arsenie ava is her full name her region of origin is siberia and she claims descent from the great Explorer vladimir are saying F himself who wrote many books about the region including the one that became a Kurosawa film their Suez Allah but this line of descent is not confirmed because vassilisa as we will see is a brilliant liar accomplished in the arts of deceit she says that she was raised in the heart of the forest the immense taiga forest that covers much of Siberia and her heroine as she grew up was the great gymnast Nelly Kim half Korean half Tatar she was far away from politics though she did hear about the fall of the Berlin Wall when she was nine years old she was happy because she had begun to look at a few magazines and wanted to go to America and be adored and send US dollars back to her family at home this is what she has done she has flown the coop here she is in America in New York City and also now and often in Florida and she is much admired and making money doing the work the beautiful do many men desire her but she's not looking for a mere man she wants a protector Azhar this is vassilisa in Miami she's blonde now she is about to meet his are well just skip so it's New Year's Eve right and in Florida and there's dancing and vassilisa ends up dancing with Nero golden and that works New Year's is for dancing and when the music stops she commands him go home and sleep I want you rested for when we really begin and he obediently walks back to his bed like a good boy with his sons looking on in astonishment the next night he empties the apartment and orders dinner alone on the seventh floor looking down at the tops of the palm trees the half swore half moon of Beach and the bright water beyond dinner has been delivered by motor launched from a fine dining establishment on the south side of the Miami River and has been set out on the dining table there is ISAT caviar and vodka and wine at precisely the appointed time she comes to his door gift wrapped in gold with a bow at the back of a dress so he can easily unwrap her they agreed that they do not want to eat here is vassilisa the fare giving herself to her czar skip a little bit and she asks him what he what he likes what he wants he is the king he knows what he wants and everything you want she says when you want it it's yours and then on the third night she discussed his business this is not a shock to him this makes things easier business is his comfort zone she produces a printed card the size of a postcard with boxes to take let's go through the details she says obviously I should not stay in the house on MacDougal that's it that is your family home for yourself at your son's and I am NOT your wife so I am NOT your family so you can choose a a residence at the West Village for convenience for ease of access or be on the Upper East Side for a little distance a little more discretion very well be this is my preference also and then the size of the apartment two bedrooms minimum no and maybe one more as art studio space good and will I own it or is it a rental and if so for how many years okay think about it we proceed to the car and I leave this to you completely a Mercedes convertible B BMW 6-series C Lexus SUV Oh a so nice I love you the question arises of where I will have accounts a Bergdorf B Barney's C both of the above Fendi Gucci Prada this goes without saying Equinox Soho House you are that you have the checklist the subject of a monthly allowance I must comport myself in a manner that befits you you see the categories are 10 15 20 I recommend generosity yes in thousands of dollars dalek perfect you will not regret I will be perfect for you I speak English French German Italian Japanese Mandarin and Russian I ski water ski surf run and swim the flexibility of my gymnastic youth this I retain in the coming days I will know better how to satisfy you that you know yourself and if equipment is needed to assist this if a room must be constructed a room for us let us call it a playroom I will make sure it is done immaculately it with the greatest discretion I will never look at another man no other man will touch me nor will I tolerate any inappropriate advances or remarks this is all for now but there is one more matter for later this is the matter of marriage she says lowering her voice to its husky as the most alluring level as your wife I will have honor and standing only as your wife when I truly and fully have this until then yes I am happy I am the most loyal of women that my honor is important to me you understand of course you are the most understanding man I have ever met relationship and if you could do the deal you capture well something that you capture there which is it would have been very easy to make the relationship utterly one of mutual exploitation but in fact that isn't what happens there is tenderness in the relationship and he does grow to rely on her I think both of them you know are presented initially as these kind of comic monsters you know and I think in both cases as the novel progresses you begin to feel fonder of them and more compassionate for them you know at least I hope you do because that was my intention to kind of shift the readers perception of them from from being one-dimensional to being complicated yeah I think that works really well and the sons let's talk a bit about the sons cuz I'm keen to get to our that'll surprise and then there's some questions from you but they're that the three sons Lucius a police yes who becomes a well first of all the father changes all the names before they leave Bombay they take all these different new identity names from classical antiquity and then as each son stays longer in New York as the family stay longer in New York another shift changes so they kind of shift their external identity don't Lee and then their internal identity starts to shift along with the names so Petronius becomes petia Dionysus becomes D now I'll just tell you briefly that Abu is the the artist and he's the one who gets this desperate yearning to go back to Bombay petia has brain freeze if it's not Asperger's anyway yeah and he also is terrified of leaving his own ideas sometimes a consequence of HIV and then there's Dionysus who is D and he begins to question issues of his own sexual identity doesn't he yeah so just we'll talk about identity in a second but just talk briefly about Abu and his yearning to go back to Bombay is that the migrants curse do you think that yes yeah I mean to some extent even if you know that the place isn't there to go back to in the novel before this the character of mr. Geronimo the guard knows living in New York he understands that the tragedy is not that you can't go back because you can go back you can buy a plane ticket it go back but it's that the the the thing that you want to go back to isn't like that anymore you know so so the there isn't there anymore you know and I think I think for migrants that's particularly sharp and poignant but I think it's out to be true for most human beings yes time yes memory and change yeah because you know home is an idea not only of place but of time and theirs and as time marches on that particular sense of home isn't there to go back to and I think for him he's of the three sons the one who who is most distressed by the act of migration and and most anxious to see if he can reverse it and the others have different problems but that's his problem and so D Dionysius actually finds a new self in New York and so we're going to read this is our surprise we're going to do a double score idea well there's just from the British edition by the way but I think it's the page numbers of the same yes that's the British edition she says jingoistic Lee page one one five no we haven't rehearsed this so you're just gonna have to take it as it comes also we're not doing accents but basically what happened is that the youngest son of course who goes by the name of Dee is genuinely very torn and conflicted about gender identity and so these are two women that he's becomes involved with one is his girlfriend Rhea who works at a place I'm rather proud to have invented which is the Museum of identity I like that so I think if it doesn't exist now it will any minute anyways and then there's a friend of theirs who is a singer called Ivy Manuel and they are basically talking to him about about the issue of gender identity size talk yeah you're still object doesn't matter which other was talking it's a dialogue don't think about surgery the women say don't even let it cross your mind we are nowhere near that point yet when this scene is filmed the women actors can decide who says which line but for now let's say this is Riyaz speaking and then IV and so on you need to work out who you are for this there professional help right now you could be TG TS TV CD whatever feels right you transgender transsexual transvestite crossdresser no need to go one step further that what feels right for this there is professional help it used to be people got labels in front of their names like TS IV or CD RIA and then also there was sex change look here comes sex J Sally the whole trans world has grown up now now she's just Sally or whoever no compartmentalization you should think about pronouns however words are important if you're giving up he who steps in you should you could choose they if you decided in identify as either female or male they equals unknown gender identity very private there's also Z there's also a there's also here C n v nei per fond and I'm glad you did that back certainly I could really you see there's a lot fun for example is a mixture of that and one mix is instead of miss and is pronounce it pronounced mix this is one I personally like it's it's more than pronouns naturally some of this I told you at the museum that first time words are important you need to be certain of your identity unless your certainty is that you're uncertain in which case maybe your gender fluid or maybe trans feminine because you're born male identify with many aspects of femaleness but don't feel you actually are a woman the word woman is being detached from biology also the word man or if you don't identify with women miss or madness maybe your non-binary so there's no rush there's a lot to think about and a lot to learn transition is like translation you're moving across from one language into another some people pick up languages easily but others it's hard but for this there is professional help think about the Navajo they recognize four genders as well as male and female there are Bernard Lee he the two spirits born as male but functioning in the role of a woman or vice versa obviously you can be what you choose to be sexual identity is not a given it's a choice D has remained silent up to now finally he speaks then the argument used to be the other way around being gay wasn't a choice it was a biological necessity so now we're saying it's a choice after all choosing an identity IV Manuel says is not like choosing cereal at the supermarket to say choosing can also be a way of saying being chosen but it's a choice now for this there is professional help Oh with help your choice will become clear to you it will become necessary say then it won't be a choice this is just a word why are you getting so hung up on this it's just a word black out [Applause] [Music] I mean I had to you know what are the interesting things about writing this character was that I had to really learn this language you know and it's really that's a kind of slightly satirical version of the language but it is a very complicated language that people use now I mean in colleges you know students come into class and and they have their pronouns and you have to use those I I wonder I mean like a lot of people in our generation little bit baffled by the detail of gender identity just generally the discussion about identity now I'm I grew up you know and one of the wonderful things I think that this book says is I I grew up with many identities and I never really found that that confusing and you you say in the book where should it doesn't me tell you something I do with my students first I teach at Georgetown University and my students come from all over the world and one of the things we do when we're talking about identity is I say there's a little tricker a therapist that I just used a dog walk with taught me and to get people to think about who they were in their own eyes as opposed to who they were in anybody else's eyes and he said I'm gonna ask you ten questions and you are gonna answer these questions without hesitation without repetition and as fast as you can right and you're going to make your you're gonna remember no repetitions we make the arts are different each time now you didn't have to do it you just have to think about it first question who are you second question who are you third question who are you who are you with my students the really interesting thing is out of 18 students only three identified race or nationality in the top four answers right only three and I don't think any gender either they all talked about their relationships their occupations their aspirations you know they talked about their who they were in their family they talked about what they did I'm a student I'm a medical student I'm going to be but they never talked about themselves the way that they were probably perceived from the outside one of the things I there's been a bee in my bonnet for a long time that and I think it's one of the things that the art of the novel has always been really good at knowing and communicating is that we are all an enormous bag of different identities we are not one thing we are many things you know in the way that famously Walt Whitman said do I contradict myself very well then I contradict myself you know the the idea that that identity is not homogeneous or heterogeneous and that we behave and are completely different in different circumstances so the way in which we are with our children is not the way in which we are with our employers and the way we are with our employers is not the way we are with our lovers you know and so on so and we all know this and and we all know also that we can define ourselves we can say about ourselves maybe 20 things that would all be equally true we can say we are overweight yeah or that we are short or that we are Yankee fans or that we six people in the room voted Republican you know what I get that all these things are equally good definitions of ourselves and we are all those things together you know and and the novel has always known that human beings are like this you know and that this narrowing this this idea of having to define ourselves more and more narrowly is just a great mistake and it may be one of the few remaining reasons to read novels is to remind ourselves that human beings are actually like this they're actually complicated contradictory and many things at once yeah that the discussion is and but not either/or yeah I'm going to go to questions in a minute I just my favorite line in the novel is to be plural to be multiform is a singular thing thank you that's microphones over there which you need to be taking over yes we'll take questions now there's a microphone here and a microphone on the other aisle yeah all right I'm sure you're all good people but we have a strong preference for questions over statements in terms of the writing process what is the most nourishing aspect of your process what most feeds your creative process storytelling what most feeds it goodness I wish I knew because I'd have written a lot more books if I do the correct diet [Laughter] what I think I look for when I'm trying to find a book to write I try them I'm looking for two things I'm looking for a kind of conversation inside myself whatever is whatever is bugging me at the moment and I'm also looking for a larger conversation you know outside myself what is bugging everybody else at the moment and I try to find intersection points I try and find a point where the conversation inside me in some way connects to the conversation outside me you know and I try and put the book from that crossroads you know that's that's a that's certainly what I did in this book that it seems to me there were these these two narratives one of which was personal and the other which was public you know and and I tried to find the intersection point in which I was able to tell both those stories yes sir he said ago that some people are like a comic monster and one-dimensional and then later we find out more about them fonder in the same spirit is what you were talking about a second ago about how people are all multi-dimensional do you see multi dimensions in our current president Morris or is he this comic monster and what will we find out about him later that will make us grow fonder I the great question I do have a excellent question I do find it very hard to see mr. Trump is three-dimensional he does seem flat rather than round to use the old an old idea of character but he's in fact a caricature that he himself has invented and now his obliged do it have it and and he does it pretty well he is good at one thing which is which is you know getting a crowd to cheer and and follow him what he's not good at is everything else and we were saved before backstage that it's as if you know two people apply for a job one of them is really bad at the job interview but could probably do the job the other one is pretty good at the job interview but is completely incompetent at doing the job and unfortunately that's the person who won I don't think one of the reasons why the the only moment of this book which means or the only bit of this book which somewhat departs from from conventional realism is the character of the Joker because he's a comic book character you know and and and it's because I thought that that was the only way I could write about him I also thought you know that in in a deck of cards the two cards that misbehave are the Joker at the Trump they're the two cards that don't behave like the other the other cards so I thought well I don't want the Trump so I've got to have the joke and yeah comic book villains you know one of the things I thought was here is a story about as real as I can make it but real people in a real place in time facing the real problems of their lives some of which we've been talking about you know but then if you rise up to the level of power suddenly you find grotesques and cartoon figures and how difficult it is for us in this moment to be real people facing our real problems but being governed by cartoons being governed by comic-book grotesques and if the book has a political message I guess that's it caricature Indira Gandhi's emergency very well in Midnight's Children this book I have not read it yet and one thing one sentence stays in my head is Laviolette son of the widow for sanjay gandhi so do you have any such metaphors here and the next part concern I have is we are all struggling how to not get into the narrative in a in a case in a situation like where we are in the United States today would you like to bring back Gopi and Ibaka from suchithra movies to narrate United States well I don't know how to answer that rarely every goofy and by our comic characters who I love in a wonderful children's film but I don't know that they're capable of running the country any better except that they speak it rhyme that's a skill everything they say is in rhyme I like them but no look I in my books have sometimes taken on public figures you're right you know and in there Gandhi was the first of those Indira Gandhi is a much more impressive figure than Donald Trump and she actually had some I mean she actually had some weight to her as a person she did a very bad thing in the mid-70s when she tried to suspend democracy and the country punished her for it but she was an impressive figure and I don't find that to be possible to say about the 45th President of the United States whose name by the way does not occur in this novel which was a deliberate act I don't take well let's take these last three they talk to me they talk to each other each other you know sometimes there's two things to say about that one is that I've never thought I've always thought when I finish a book that I'm completely done with it I have no further interest in that group of people etc but what has happened to me more than once is that when much later writing a different book a character from an earlier book reappears so so for instance in Midnight's Children there's only really one white man there's the the the Englishman from whom the main family buy their house in Bombay and where the narrator grows up called William meThe world and he's there for a very brief moment of time in the in Midnight's Children many years later like eighteen years later when I was writing the ground beneath her feet I was writing about the Parsi community in Bombay the Zoroastrian community which was always very we just always been very angular feel and and the old patriarch of the family in that book was like that and he and I wanted him to have a close English friend and I suddenly thought well I've got one and and Sir William meThe Walt reappears in the ground and he's actually a much bigger character in the ground beneath her feet than in the novel in which I originally made him up and that was completely unexpected you know and there have been one or two other cases of characters jumping from book to book so it does it does happen yeah always to by surprise because I genuinely think when I've done with the book that I'm done with all that you know I mean I don't know what happens to the characters the day after the novel ends unlike you know Dickens used to be obsessed with knowing all that and so at the end of his novels he would tell you what happened to all the characters including the dogs but I I don't I usually don't think like that but as I say or two or three occasions people have jumped from one book to another vassilisa might come back you know yeah the city's a two-pointer maybe she'll get her own series enough to thank you both most about this latitude that you create between the contemporary pieces that are pulled from today's headlines that is true just so thinly veiled and the novel capacity the fictionalization that you bring to things I'm curious about the tools or the mechanism or the the calculus you used to sort out how much of which and where you know the answer is there's the answer is instinct but that's really the only answer there is you you have to just judge whether what you're doing is of only passing interest only ephemeral or if there's some way of making it mean more than that you know and and it's just it's my instinct against the readers you know in a way you have to judge whether I did it right or wrong you know I mean when you're doing it you think you know what you're doing but it doesn't mean you actually know what you're doing because it means you fool yourself that you know what you're doing I mean books I've often thought with books that you begin at the stupid end of the book well you don't know anything you know and you try and get to the smart end of the book where you at least could give the illusion that you knew what you were doing but but there's nothing there's no guiding principle other than your then your instinct you know having way had this wonderful line which in his in his Paris review interview where he said that what a writer needs to have is a very good detector because because what he meant was if you don't know when it's bad you don't know when it's good you know and and I think that ability to say to yourself no this is not good you know it's very very important because without that you can't judge what it is okay and so but it's just that it's some kind of inner private critic that tells you whether you're doing the right thing or the wrong thing and you have to in the end trust it thank you for sure yeah it's a very good question I mean it's a I think it's a very good question that it's a question that I that I that actually affected the way in which this book is written because you know the the the novel before this one is very very fabulous you know two years eight months 28 nights which if you do the math is a thousand and one nights is a kind of Thousand and One Nights fantasy of New York and it's it's got it has genies and you know flying urns genies riding on flying urns and almost immediately that I finished it and all this nonsense was starting you know I thought maybe maybe no more of that I thought I thought maybe that but that in that book I'd push that kind of writing as far as I wanted to take it and and maybe it was time to do something opposite you know and and that and that paradoxically exactly as you say paradox a at the time when there is so much falsehood falsification fakery out there maybe it's time for the novel to do some which the novel has always been very good at doing which is to try and reestablish between the writer and the reader some agreement about what the truth actually is and and it if you if you do it properly this is one of the great virtues of the novel you read the novel and you see what the world that the writer is giving you and you think yes that is the world you know and and that at that agreement you know is one of the profoundest gifts of literature that it can recreate our sense of the real and I think maybe we need that sense of the real to be recreated and maybe it's a thing that writers can offer maybe it's one reason for writing novels these days wonderful mitigate the fighters if I take the fight over bar can I just say thank you so much to politics and CROs for bringing Salman here again thank you very much - you've been fabulous and let's give mr. Rushdie one more round of applause sir Rushdie one more round of applause [Applause] you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 8,459

Rating: 4.8677688 out of 5

Keywords: P&P TV, Washington DC, Politics and Prose, Authors, Books, Events, Literature, Salman Rushdie, Aminatta Forna, The Golden House, The Joker, The Satanic Verse

Id: XtxfsPpF4Nc

Length: 62min 19sec (3739 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2017