The Enchantress of Florence | Salman Rushdie 2008 | Talks at Google

Salman Rushdie is the author of such books as Midnight's Children Harun in the sea of stories The Satanic Verses and he is currently the distinguished professor of literature at Emory University and was recently knighted for his service to literature I think that probably suffice is you seem to all know who he is so without further ado Salman Rushdie all right all right you can all hear okay yes yeah yeah okay well it's getting to be a habit this Google thing hello Google people I was I was just in in England this novel just came out in England a few weeks before it came out here and and one of the things I did was go to this big Google seminar up in the Grove Watford just north of London and and talked to another bunch of you and I think in a couple of in a week or so I'm gonna be in Mountain View so I'm googling across the world right now but you know I would like everybody else I'm a big fan of Google and and actually in this book I've discovered as the Internet has got more and more sophisticated that it's become more and more useful to people like me I mean it used to be you know the problem of the web used to be that it had enormous breadth and very little depth so that if you actually wanted to go deeply into something you often found that the material wasn't easily available but that's beginning to change and certainly actually now that I have as was mentioned other I've got an academic affiliation so that I can penetrate the academic web through you know JSTOR and sites like that with my Emory password that transforms it because that suddenly means there actually is incredible there are incredible resources available I mean for instance here's a novel set you know entirely in the 15th and 16th centuries and and the 16th century in India the reign of the Emperor Akbar which takes up basically the whole of the second half of the 16th century in India but there are three primary sources for it written by contemporary historians very very long books so it almost day-by-day is of the rain but their ittin first of all they're written in persian and secondly as i say they're enormous ly long and so you know in the old days one would have had to go to the university library and sit in a you know in a book stack somewhere with heaps of these very complex texts and waiting your way through such translations as were available in making endless notes which you would afterwards have to try and make sense of but now thanks to the web there's this extreme there's an excellent site called Persian texts and translation which you could go to and gives you full text translations of all these sixteenth century works and it means that you know you could have on your laptop your the page your writing and side-by-side with it you know that the text that you need to refer to to check things and it was just it saved me I don't know what I mean months and months and months of work to be able to do that and they were there were other such instances and there's a scene in the novel in the Italian part of the novel which takes place at the home of the famous Admiral and Condotti Eric you know military leader and Admiral Andrea Doria who is perhaps better known for a ship that sank later on but you know back in the day he was this legendary genuine genuine Admiral who fought the Barbary Corsairs and so on and he had he had it was still there he had he built a bought and then extended a beautiful villa right on the Seacoast in outside Genoa and I wanted to set a couple of scenes in the book there and you go on the web and you can find that G I found very easily by very simple piece of search a very scholarly article about the building of the villa who owned it before him what editions he made floor plans of the villa and kind of stories about when he was living there and that's to say 20 tiled 20 times as much as I needed for the two or three pages that I was going to set in this place and so you know this is this is one of the ways I would at the end of this book there actually is a an ordinary bibliography book bibliography but there's also a web bibliography and it's the first time I've ever felt the need to do such a thing and and it's it's it is extraordinary that there were these please these books which or these these sites without which the book would have taken maybe twice as long to research and certainly much longer to write so that's so that's a you know a very pleasant way in which the present has allowed the study of the past to improve I mean it's it's kind of I'm aware of the fact that here I had to talk to you about the past with all of you have fixated on the future but you know the two are not as disconnected as you think because the one thing the thing that I found when I was studying history at university is that first of all history is not a fixed thing I mean the way in which the past is seen is very much a function of the way in which the way of the things we are concerned about in the present you know we look if you look at for instance the history of the Renaissance the contemporary history is written in the sixteenth century and then you look at the way in which it was seen by historians in the 17th century the 18th century the 19th century and now it's completely different because we bring our present concerns to bear on the past and we see in the past those things which seem to connect with with the world in which we now live you know so it becomes a way of shining a light on the present just to show us that actually we've always been up to this stuff you know and frankly you know the constant the great constant is human nature and if we are brutal now we were brutal then you know if we're you know treacherous and untrustworthy now we were treacherous and untrustworthy then and and you know good things too but but the point is that that since the species that we belong to has always acted in substantially the same way when you look back at this period at the in Italy of the high Renaissance of the Medicis and Borges and so on moving a little east the Ottoman Empire the fall of Constantinople the establishment of the Ottoman Empire East that the Safavid Persian Empire then is now a kind of powerful Shia Muslim world beyond that an area which was in those days called chorus on which we would nowadays called Afghanistan Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan but then as now composed of savage bloodthirsty warlords busily chopping each other up and Easter that the growing and enormously important Mughal Empire which brought India into to the status of a world power for the first time again something which you might say is again happening now four hundred years later for different reasons so that's the world of of the of the of that period and we have to in a way exclude China and Japan which were leading such sealed-off lives that it's difficult to join them in through that common story but the rest of this world shows us something which I find I have been finding increasingly important to write about which is that even though we may think of our culture's as being very separate from each other they are not you know that then as now all these little boxes that we think we live in opened up into all the other little boxes and that you can't understand any of them without reference to the others you can't understand what it was like to be an ottoman turk without understanding the presence on your eastern frontier of the Persian Empire and on your western frontier of Renaissance Europe you cut all of these things affect each other there was great trade over the this the European Renaissance this extraordinary peak of Western culture was in large part made possible by the interactions with the Muslim world you know Venice was receiving commissions from Turkey and from the Middle East and and those those you're the Sultan in in in in became Istanbul and the the various Pasha's and so on in the Levant as it was then called they would Commission Venetians to make their rugs and their furniture and their glassware because they knew that actually the quality of craftsmanship was very high in in Venice at the time but the patterns and designs and so one were often stipulated by their own their own cultural and artistic traditions so you find the way in which if you look at Renaissance rugs and plates and glasses and things like that these are often closely based on Islamic designs because of the connections deep there was identify any of you saw last year there was a show at the Metropolitan Museum here which which was about Venice his interaction with the Muslim world and it was very clearly physically demonstrated there by showing you the objects and the way in which the patterning and designs were closely influenced by their connections with the east so it's very interesting to study this period because it shows us that the the kind of feeling that has often developed in in not just in Western culture in Eastern culture too of of if you like mutual distrust and the sense of being each other's other you know that that was true then I mean it was true the Crusades it's getting to be true now but if you really look at the way in which human history as in fact really worked it's not true what is true is that these worlds have been profoundly interpenetrated always and that each of their achievements is in part the result of their interaction with the other side so so you have to see it in that way and I think to look at the world that way whether we're talking about the 16th century or the 21st is I think a useful antidote to a lot of the other stuff that we are fed I'm not trying to say that it's a didactic book because actually I don't like books that wag fingers at the reader and say here's how to think well not novels anyway I think you know that the art of the novel is to tell a story and to draw the reader in and to allow the reader to draw their own conclusions about from the story that they're told so that you won't find in this book you know any kind of neon signs saying here's the contemporary relevance but if you find it I mean it's almost certainly there because after all I'm writing from a position now you know so my concerns also are the concerns of people living now and and in a way the book wouldn't have been written if it hadn't been for that fact because why do it why go back to the 15th and 16th centuries to find a novel and I mean my answer to that is that it's partly that you know I'm a historian by background I mean that's to say when I was at college I did not study literature which is great blessing because otherwise I would probably have ended up being a critic lowest form of life somewhere slightly below the amoeba it's a very interested a wonderful passage in in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot when when Vladimir and Estragon are insulting each other and their insults get increasingly vicious you know and the ultimate insult the one that ends the argument is critic this is a view held by some writers I don't know why anyway sorry how did I get there like talking about talking about history yeah not yeah exactly not literature not literature but and the thing about the study of history I mean of course you you forget a lot of the history that you study at university but but certain things remained with me and one of them was another wonderful thing that my one of my history professors once said to me he said we said you should never write history until you can hear the people talk and because he said if you can't hear them speak you don't know enough about them and you can't tell their story which is actually by the way excellent advice for novelist too but when I what he means about the study of history is that it's you know getting the the dry facts is not very difficult in finding out what happened here or there and you know what were the principal exports of Florence and who went to war with whom and who was Pope and why and so on I mean all that stuff is it's relatively easy to get that what is much harder to to do is to enter the mindset of people who lived it in another age and who really did not think as we think you know and this is I mean it's not just a pre Freudian Age it's it's a it's a it's an age in which for instance the shape of the world was only just coming to be known you know I mean this is the period of the discovery of the new world and and and if you think about how strange that would be I mean for instance Christopher Columbus lived and died without ever realizing that he'd come across a new place you know I mean he thought that he had reached the Indies and he and he never was disabused of that idea the idea that this was a new continent eluded him and this is one of the reasons I mean I'm gonna make a little speech in defense of Amerigo Vespucci Amerigo Vespucci gets a very very bad press and a certain amount of this is entirely justified because he was you know is it fair to call him a liar yes it is it is fair to call him a liar certainly in terms of the first voyage which he on which he claimed to be the pilot of the of the ship and to tell everybody where to go that's almost certainly not true I mean he probably was on the ship but in in a much more menial capacity in no sense one of the leaders of the voyage but just went home and wrote the book and managed by through the power of literature to inveigle himself into a leadership role however the thing that Vespucci did see if he was not the first person to see it he was one of the very first people to see it was that something different it happened that this was not where they thought they were going that this was what what was what he called mundos Novus the new world it was it was and you had to just take it as that you could not assume that the world was the shape it had been I mean if you think about the explosion this would have made in the 16th century mind you know 50 years before Columbus the view of the world was the following but if you sailed west from Europe across what was then called the ocean see first the first thing that would happen is that giant monsters would rise up from the deep and each your boat very very big boat boat eating sized monsters would rise up from the deep and swallow you right so that would be a problem and if if you could get past the boat eating monsters which by the way you couldn't but if you could you would discover a point at which the ocean would turn to mud and your boat would then be stuck in the mud and would be unable to proceed now if your boat could proceed past the boat eating monsters which it couldn't and then go through the mud which it couldn't your prize for that would be to fall off the end of the world okay so that is how people thought of the world just a generation or two before Columbus his first voyage and then they discovered all these spectacular things I mean by the time Columbus sailed there was a pretty good assumption that the world was round so it's it's not true that he that he discovered that fact I mean he sailed in the expectation that the world was round he just thought it was a much smaller globe and imagined the discovery that the world at which you live is twice the size that you think it is and that it's not the shape you think it is that there's a whole landmass there's there's this giant continent that use existence you've never suspect you this is the the radical it's an existential change that is taking place in the minds of people in Europe in the 16th century and re-enter that caste of mind you know it's it's a it's a revolutionary cast of mind and in many ways you could say that we are living in a revolutionary time to when we are beginning to see new shapes of things and the world you know and and there's there's a parallel there perhaps you know in the way in which the the really dramatic change in worldview that is happening now you know is is not so unlike what must have been happening in the minds of Western Europeans when they discovered the existence of the new world I mean actually there's an interesting story about this the first map the first time the word America has ever used was on a map bill which is known as the vowel similar map it was made by a monk called martin waldseemüller who was teaching teaching they was living in a minnow in a monastery in this in southern france and he gathered together all the best contemporary knowledge about the voyages to the west and he drew this extraordinary map the thing that's extraordinary about it is it's really very accurate and it's not only accurate about the east coast of the Americas it's actually one of the first times that the west coast of the Americas is really accurately depicted so it becomes quite clear that these are continents and that there's water on both sides of them and at the top of this map as figures dominating creation are the figures of Ptolemy and Amerigo Vespucci and and the and on them it's interesting lean not on North America but on basically the northwest quadrant of South America so Brazil over towards Peru the word America appears for the first time and the anvil similar asked about this said that surely a man who had made such a colossal world-changing discovery deserved to have his name on a piece of the world so hence America now interestingly as time went by and people became more and more suspicious of Amerigo Vespucci van similar became less convinced of the grandeur of West poochie's but she and in a later edition of the map he took America off the map and and replaced it simply with the words Mundus Novus the New World but you know the genie was out of the bottle and you could once you've called something America you can't uncool it Americans but that's how it happened that's how it happened and and as I say I would defend Vespucci only because he really did was one of the two or three people who first popularized the idea that the world was this new shape you know and and so I'm saying is you live in this world where the world is changing at enormous speed and that is true now and it was true then and to examine how people looked at that world then might give us some clues about what we're doing now you know for me I'm gonna talk about five or ten minutes then we'll talk about whatever you guys want to talk about you have these two cultures at a kind of pinnacle that's to say that the Europe of the high Renaissance and the India of the high Mughal Empire these are pinnacles of philosophy of art of architecture of music in all kinds of ways and also of power and and actually the subject of power itself is is very important in both places and that you know Machiavelli did not write the prince in this period by accident that the point is that you have in Italy at this period these these princes the princely houses like the Borgias or the Medici and so on so ruthless so powerful and yet at the same time patrons of the Arts and so on so powerful that even the papacy becomes if you like a battleground between the great families of of Italy and sometimes there's a Medici Pope and sometimes there's a Borgia Pope you don't and so on and the papacy by the way itself is a major military power so you so you have religion militant in those days again maybe one could see some similarity with the present day the Pope riding into battle at the head of his armies in an extraordinary sight the armored Pope can't see it with this one really but but you know maybe the one before you could you could see at the head of an army interestingly at this exact moment that the moment at which the book is said there was in fact very little direct contact between Western Europe and India there's very little very little in the record suggests there was much going on the Portuguese had established their small colony in Goa so that was there Vasco da Gama had arrived in South India at the end of the 15th century and so the spice trade had begun with with what was then called the malabar coast of India now called Kerala but in the huge land mass of North India the indo-gangetic plain where where the Mughal Empire was there was almost nil contact there is there is evidence of one or two merchants one or two travelers coming from the West into into the Mughal kingdoms but no evidence of much journeying in the other direction the best evidence there is is that actually one or two of the queens of the Mughal Court were quite considerable entrepreneurs and in fact that the main queen of the Emperor Akbar Mariam Zamani who was there actually the mother of his heir Prince Salim which took the name of the Emperor Jahangir she was she had a whole fleet of trading vessels and and they would trade as far as the Red Sea in her own name not not in the name of of the king so she was in her own right and so powerfully merchants and so when you think of that the women of the of the East has been shrinking violets this is not entirely true for instance there was one of the arts of the Emperor Akbar gulbadan Begum decided suddenly that she wished to go on a pilgrimage to Makkah unheard of for a woman just to set off you know and and to make it difficult for the Emperor to refuse her she managed to persuade kind of half the ladies of the Mughal Court that they wanted to go to uh-huh and so he had to give in gracefully or ungracefully is not revealed and and they went off on this two-year journey now for you know for a bunch of noble women in the sixteenth century to spend two years journeying from India to Makkah and back it's an extraordinary act but but it but it shows the adventuresome Ness of many of the of the women of this period and so I thought that if I could come up with an adventuresome woman it would give me a way fictionally of doing the thing that didn't happen in fact which is to join these two worlds and see what happened and so I have this story of this this princess of the of the Mughal house who partly by accident partly by becoming a spoil of war and then partly by making choices not to go home again but to stick around with the Shah of Persia because she finds him attractive and then dump him when she finds somebody better and you know so on it would give me a way of sending her across the world and and having a story at the heart of which was this intrepid female character who becomes the bridge between the worlds and there's I had a couple of clues about which gave me permission to do it if you like that if you read Orlando Furioso the great narrative poem by my Ariosto which was written in Ferrara in Italy at more or less exactly the time I'm writing about it's set earlier it's set in the time of Charlemagne and so on so it set several hundred years earlier but it's being written at exactly this moment and and the plot of Orlando Furioso is amazingly about an Indian princess showing up in Europe and creating havoc and being accused of being a witch enchantress etc and being improbably called Angelika great Indian name and and she's of course the geography is all screwed up because Ariosto really doesn't understand anything about so she's called the princess of India and cafe you know wherever that is but never mind there she is is it that to my amazement here's there I am trying to invent an Indian princess arriving arriving in Europe and he's done it 400 years ahead of me which was comforting because it showed me you know he can do it so can I always good to be second a lot safer in fast food to you a second and Columbus was first etc and meanwhile over in the Mogul side of the story there's a true story about the first Mughal emperor babur the grandfather of awkward when he was still being essentially a warlord before he'd established the kingdom in India there was a point where he was besieged in in summer current by one of his rival warlords man called Shabana Khan and Shabana fan told him that if he wanted to save his neck if he wanted to have safe conduct how much of Samarkand he had to surrender his famously beautiful sister cansada Begum and so he did and actually in his autobiography he's rather embarrassed about this when he writes about the retreat from sarcone he says unfortunately as we left summer cont my sister Khan's other was lost he doesn't say I had dinner over to save my own neck because that would perhaps not have been entirely manly of him and she actually stayed with Shabana Khan for the next 10 years actually had a child by him and then he in his turn was defeated by the Shah of Persia and the Shah of Persia of shy smile the first wanted to have good relations with the Mughals and so he sent her home and she actually came back in you know it was had a respected old age of the Mughal Court is one of the grand old ladies the course and that's what really happened but I thought well doesn't have to happen does it and so it gave me a clue I thought here's a woman beginning to move west and here's another woman in arias toast poem arriving in the West and so it's as if you have I found myself with two ends of a bridge and I thought if I could build the bridge somehow then I've got a story and so that's the story that's the story and it's full of witchcraft because I guess this is the last thing I want to say before opening up to questions the interesting for the other really interesting thing about the difference of worldview between then and now is that the thing people most profoundly trusted and believed in was magic I think you could even argue that they trusted and believed in it more than Roman Catholicism or Islam or Hinduism or whatever big magic was seen as an everyday useful thing in the way perhaps that we would now see I don't know science or medicine but for them it was the occult world the occult world was seen to interpenetrate the everyday world in a completely everyday way so that you know if you if you fell in love with somebody and you want her to fall in love with you you got a love potion obviously um and if there was somebody you didn't like who you wanted to to do down you went to somebody for to put a hex on them and so people would use magic in in in this very commonplace way in the way that you'd go and get yourself you know a pill if you needed to cure some ailment and interestingly very often in the Renaissance magic was believed to reside in women more than men that's to say that the figure of the the witch is much more in the imagination of the Renaissance than the figure of the wizard the figure of the enchantress more than that of the enchanter if you look at the paintings of the Renaissance period they returned over and over and over again to the subject of the enchantress there's dozens of paintings of different supposed sorceresses and witches and the thing that's most remarkable about these paintings is that if you go 50 years back from that in European history the which is always depicted as being ugly the which is always depicted as being hunchbacked hook-nosed warty Boyle ridden kind of like you know like Snow White Snow White's horrible stepmother when she disguises herself and shows up with the Apple you know and that if you look in the you know in the early part of the 15th century that is a standard portrayal of the witch and what happens at this moment in the high Renaissance is that that image is replaced by the image of the witch as beautiful young girl suddenly The Enchantress is being portrayed as voluptuous naked loose head to depict her loose morals it's on in in settings you know silver nor urban but very very very gorgeous suddenly the gorgeous which the seductress the temptress The Enchantress enters the mindset of of medieval Europe the erotic power of women is joined with this other secret power if you like and and creates an image of womanhood which is on the one hand if you like potent but on the other hand of course very dangerous for women because the point about the seductive enchantress is that your people's attitude to such a person can spin on a coin and turn into a hatred of the witch and of course did this this I this did lead often in the history of Europe to witch burnings to you know to witch hunts and so on and I mean Marina Warner English writer once writing about this pointed out that if you think about the the apparatus that witches are supposed to have you know that the witch's hat the the the familiar like a cat that the broomstick often the witch's tit you know the third nipple as she says almost all women of the period would have had in their kitchen a broomstick very many of them would have had a cat the pointed hat was a perfectly normal piece of fashion where for the period and so basically by saying that the defining characteristics of the which are the hat the broomstick and the cat you're basically making all women potentially into witches and the only thing that remains is the accusation somebody pointing and saying witch and then you know that the Witchfinder general for instance in England in the 17th century used to test which is by weighing them down with stones and throwing them into a water into a pond and if they drowned they were innocent and if they floated they were guilty and so they needed to be burned so it was a you know tough one to get out of that it's fun so so here is this this sort of knife edge on which many women stood in this period on the one hand the the sexual allure and the kind of almost fearful admiration of the enchantress and the flipside of that coin is the destructive force of male power unleashed through the accusation of witchcraft so so that's the knife edge on which the story of this girl who travels from the east to the Witch of the West stands and to find out any more about it you will have to read the book so let me stop there because there's a lot of you here and there's more people are they gone there there were some people there I've obviously chased them away um but okay let's let's have some questions and you know there are microphones somebody said and please go to them and ask me stuff did you find when you're doing research you had a big problem with just getting distracted and sort of chasing off down useless little rabbit holes and having to actually drag yourself away and go that's fascinating but I don't need it this is one of my problems yes yes I mean one of the things about one of the things about research is that its enormous fun and you do find out all kinds of stuff that you can't quite believe that it's true and yes it is and so you do go off as you say down these down these rabbit holes and and you do have to be very disciplined there was a you know given the amount that I read it would have been very easy for this book to be nine hundred pages long you know there's there's loads of stuff but I I had to keep telling myself discipline myself into thinking only include what serves the story you know if it serves the story it's in if it doesn't if it's a distraction no matter how interesting a distraction it must go out there were some things however that I discovered that were too good to leave out I mean for example there I am Charles this woman's journey across the world and at the point at which she gets into Turkey on her you know it falls in love with this Italian soldier of fortune who is at that point working as a mercenary for the Turks they fall in love and that's how she ends up he brings her back to Italy and that's what completes her journey but at this moment she's actually in Turkey Ottoman Turkey and I discovered reading about that period 1453 is when is when the Turks conquer distante no poet established the Ottoman empires at the second half of the 15th century the Ottoman Empire was consolidating itself and in this period probably their last great enemy was was was Hungary and one of the allies of Hungary was Romania and in particular the Prince of the southern province of Romania were lakeya who was in fact Dracula now it's one of the things that is wrong about Dracula is Dracula was not the Prince of Transylvania Transylvania is the northern province of Romania that's Bram Stoker's fault he did that Dracula was the Prince of Wallachia in the south which is the province which had a common frontier with the Ottomans this is Vlad Vlad the second tape Esch the Impaler Vlad Dracul the dragon no evidence that he was ever a vampire but given how bloodthirsty he was I think you know vampirism would have been a relief I did this once there's one surviving Journal of the Ottoman campaign against Dracula which was written by a Serbian Janissary Janissaries were kind of like the Marines of the Ottoman army Serbia and many of them were were from other countries either either captured and retrained or else serving as mercenaries anyway this Serbian Janissary called Constantine wrote a wrote a diary of the campaign against Dracula which has survived and there's a passage in the novel which is drawn more or less directly from it he talks about a moment when the when the Ottomans had besieged Dracula in this small town east-southeast in romania called terekhova state they thought okay we've got him now you know we can go and reason with him and so they said a very big army against him in this town and when they got there they discovered that he had planted around the town a stockade of 20,000 sharpened stakes on each of which a human being had been impaled not because they'd done anything wrong just to scare the approaching army just just to say this this is what I do with people I don't like so come over here and have some of that and this extraordinary sight 20,000 dead people impaled on stakes surrounding the town of tear gas they faced the Ottoman army when it arrived and it worked it scared the pants off them and they said we're all going over there that dude is mad they retreated so you know you come across a story like that you think look you know okay it's a slightly aside Ali but it's going forgive me my extremes freezing I'm extremely nervous talking to you so so after you wrote The Satanic Verses and the personal implications that it had do you feel that your writing style has changed in that you're like subconsciously like censoring yourself or do you feel that it I mean sort of life has been the same and your writing has continued and how it was that like really quite well expressed my point of view no no I mean I think I don't think I think if you read any of the stuff I've written whether fictional or nonfiction since that time I don't think you'll I mean I hope you don't see any evidence of self-censorship in there because I think you know actually for me that's a terrible thing to do to yourself as an artist you know and and and if you take if you take your work seriously I would sooner not write than to feel that I was in some way circumscribed in what I could write well I could imagine an express so no it actually made me more obstinate it's what it did you know I think if even if somebody's trying to shut you up you know the best thing to do is not be shut up you know and if possible speak louder you know and better if possible maybe that was really I discovered in myself a capacity for obstinacy which I had not previously suspected and it's it kept me going you know thanks later later mister rusty rushed it's a pleasure to have you here I think you have more people here than when Petaling was here a couple days ago nicely done Midnight's Children I read in college fascinating book they said English Patient can be made into movie have you been approached about making that into a song I've been approached a number of times and we've got very very close once but it never happened I mean the closest we ever got was that in I guess might must be 10 years ago around 10 years ago the BBC wanted to make a kind of miniseries they wanted to make like a five hour miniseries of it I thought actually that was maybe even better than a movie because the problem with the novel is it's very very very long and it's also it's a novel that takes place over 65 years and movies are not good at allowing talking about the elapsing of long periods of time you know whereas a where's a television series that comes out once a week or something there is a kind of time lapse automatically built in you know so it so it allows us so I thought anyway that would be a good way of doing it and they had a script written which which nobody liked it in the end I wrote a script for it which people did accept and it was going ahead and actually we had it fully cast we were going to film in Sri Lanka we had a full crew in place and we were one week away from principal photography and at this point a whole series of terrorist attacks broke out in Sri Lanka I mean you know Tamil Tiger attacks and it became clear that a major English television production in Sri Lanka could become target and so there was a real concern about that and and in the end because of that you know tragically the plug was pulled I mean literally it felt like having a Concorde on the runway and had to take off and just crash at the end of the runway you know and the problem with that is they there there is this thing which you may or may not be aware of called political insurance which film which films can take it's quite expensive to get but it's ensures of film production against you know acts of war or terrorism or you know political upheaval which make it unwise to continue and so they were able to claim the political insurance and therefore they didn't lose money but it kind of makes the project uninsurable you know once you've claimed the political insurers they go to another insurance company and say could we please reinsure they kind of look at you strangely because the insurance company had to pay up I don't know what you know two three million dollars you know for the work that had been done up to that point so that's I mean that's what happened I mean it's it's kind of sad because it really was ready to go and and in many ways the worst thing that can happen to you as a writer is wasted work but you do all this work and nothing in the end it wasn't quite wasted because a couple of years after that the Royal Shakespeare Company in England expressed a desire to do it on stage with nine children and so we actually used the scripts that I'd written for TV and reworked them in like 3 our stage show and that did go on in England and actually part of the money for it was put up by Columbia University and so it actually came here and was at the Apollo Theater amazingly I never thought I'd get to play the Apollo you know but there actually was one night when they wanted me to go and have an on stage conversation about the play after the show with somebody so I actually did get on the stage I did play the Apollo same thing and it's a it's was great for them they said afterwards because they had had a I mean the reason for the Apollo is that Columbia Lee Bollinger felt that it was a way of for columbia to have some sort out reach into the local community and that was a good thing I think but there was a problem which we overcame which is that there was a great fear that you know the Apollo had never done straight theatre and and the the problem was would the theater audience go up go that far uptown and there was a genuine concern that it wouldn't and since the thing played to sold-out houses it's actually told the management of the theater that if they actually have the right show in there they can do it and the audience will come uptown and so they were actually very pleased with that discovery and the hard thing is that because it's not a theater built for plays with scenery and props the backstage almost doesn't exist you know you go off stage and there's about this much you know if there's nowhere to put anything and if you've got props to rush on an off stage where do you put them you know so we actually had to have trucks outside the theater on both sides opening into stage side stage doors which rushed furniture on and off the stage into the trucks so if they're really gonna have to do more fear - there they are gonna have to think about that but so that's that's as close as it came yeah I saw the show at the Apollo it was great you saw it yeah he also did the preview at the Guggenheim works in process know the Guggenheim thing was a different thing the Guggenheim was that the Charles Warren and the composer made an opera out of Haroon in the sea of stories oh that's right and and it was shown at the Guggenheim in the works in progress series there were ten brothers yeah that's right and then they did the opera at at the City Opera yeah listen it's going back to the beginning it was great when you were talking about how useful the stuff we do is I certainly certainly hope it's more useful than the very useful magic that you were talking about later I have some ancestors who were burned as witches and I'm hoping that my end of the family working in this particular user business does better than they did but I wonder if you could tell me what could we as Google do to be even more useful to you than we are now what could we no book we fix any problem could we solve that that we haven't already addressed how can we serve you better well I think we see one of the one of the problems that does exist is that a lot of this scholarly material which is the stuff that was was particularly useful is protected and let's say it's it's better in the ways that in the way that as we're in the old in the old print world not everybody gets to go into university library and study I mean it's there for the use of scholars doing serious work and using that same picture of the world most most university scholars scholarship scholarly texts are you know password-protected and they're behind kind of screens which are difficult to get access to now I mean I I think this is it's a big question and probably too big to go into it much depth here because I have a great on the one hand it's clearly a good thing that there should be better access to this kind of scholarship and that requires making sure that people are properly compensated protected you know etc and that and I do have great worries about some of what google has been proposing in terms of putting making available online all in copyright work because the work I'm talking about is long out of copyright you know that these these Persian texts and so on I mean they're common property anyway but but when you start talking about works in translation and again the issue of compensation arises this could this could in theory destroy the publishing industry and I don't want to sound alarmist but it actually could if it's not properly worked out I mean the answer is that you know you need to can't say that we don't want this technology what you have to do is find a way that's fair of doing it and the thing that worries me about putting in copyright work on the net is that I mean I know that stuff can get hacked into it's well it's one thing it's one thing to say of course we'll have everybody's copyrights guaranteed and protected and and people will be properly compensated but everything gets hacked into you know and if and if you suddenly find popular books being made available in pirate editions on the web which happens already in in the book world I mean in India all my books are pirated you know you go if you're driving around in Indian city and that your car stops at a traffic light little children come up with heaps of books saying please interesting book wish thee grisham Dan Brown students and I mean I have not been paid the ultimate compliment where your name is put on books you don't write that that does happen they buy some cheap thriller and they put down brown's name on it and you know and it said it's better than his real books but but the problem Midnight's Children for instance was so extensively pirated in India at the time that it came I mean I have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of copies were sold in illegal editions it got to the point where the Pirates were so thrilled that they started sending me greetings cards I would get these cards and happy birthday side the Pirates so so I mean I just think that the that's a problem how do you safeguard legitimate publishing from being stolen and made available for free around the corner you know I mean right now I find approximately once a week I find whole text editions of the Satanic Verses Midnight's Children and other books available on various internet websites and and you know my agents have to go and try and take them down you know but it's already happening before everything's being digitized you know that there are people putting this stuff scanning the pages putting this stuff online illegally for free and so I think we just need to work this out I mean I think you know what one can't deny the future I'm not a kind of Luddite figure I'm in favor of all this new stuff you know but if it ends up being done wrong it will do enormous damage to the world of books and and if it's done right it can exist very happily side-by-side you know so that's that's what I think there's just that it's not quite the question you asked but it's the kind of being my monitor right now Thanks my question is more related to your writing process hmm so when researching you must come across many details and little bits of color that you hope to put into or weave into your book when writing been historical fiction how do you add in those details or yes you just have it in your head I mean a lot of the architecture is just in your head you know I mean I do have all kinds of notes and stuff but the truth is that when you are deeply inside a book there's this enormous kind of matrix like construction of connections that you really just have to hold in your head because there's no other there's I mean your heads the best computer available you know what I mean that's it's it's the thing which can make the connections and links so on and hold them in in the most complex way you know so so a lot of it is just there again it's a it's the local color and all that I mean that's that's relatively easy as I say the difficult thing is to stay inside an alien way of thought you know because really you're talking to you're trying to bring to life human beings from them rather than transplant into the past people who feel like human beings from now you know and that that would feel kind of dumb you know if you have people there thinking and acting like contemporary people it would feel fake you know and and so that so that that's the greatest problem is how to create characters who are engaging and involving and that you want to know their story you know but who actually have a cast of mind which is not yours which is which is which belongs to another period I mean for instance there's some wonderful stuff I mean for instance in Florence in this period I'm not making the following thing up okay male homosexuality rose to so high that both the state authority and the church began to fear for the population the birthrate was in danger and their solution to it was brothels so what you had was that was this that city the city authorities with the full support of the Catholic Church the Vatican setting up state-sponsored brothels very large ones in downtown Florence the purpose of which was to persuade boys that girl's were cool okay that was it and and if you if you look at the court records of Florence in this period there are almost no prosecutions for prostitution I mean almost zero the only ones the two or three that you will find in the court record prosecutions of prostitutes who as the court says agreed to have sex in the male fashion that was not okay because that's what they tried to tell people not to do so but apart from these two or three per prosecutions for sodomy there essentially is nothing nothing it was completely accepted and actually thought to be a social good to build houses now you can't make that stuff up it's I mean I mean if I've made that up people would have a go at me but actually it happens to be true so the world is a much stranger place that's the great thing of discovery the world is ten times a straight thousand times as strange as you can believe it to be and that's the fun stuff to find you know and and but you know you you end up using a tiny fraction of the material you discover a bit really is like tip of the iceberg because otherwise otherwise you're writing a history book you know and and and my interest was was to tell a story so that that's really that's the difference people ask me quite a lot already about what's the difference between writing a history of the period and writing a novel about it no and and and I think the difference is that what history doesn't let you do is to get inside human beings you know what a novel with the art of the novel is the thing which allows you to feel from the inside the lived experience of people whose lives are not like yours you know whose lives are in a different place or a different time and completely different class or world you know and yet you can feel like them you can you can feel what Anna Karenina felt you know you can feel what Madame Bovary felt you know and you could feel it not from not because you're told but because you experience it from inside the character you know and I think that's if you if you do it right that's what literature can do it could give you the world you know you can read a book about Latin America I mean when I read Garcia Marquez I had never been to mass in America you know but but reading those Latin American writers I felt like I had been you know reading Gogol and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy I felt like I knew something about Russia you know and this is that the art of the thing is that if it's done right it gives you access to worlds which are not your world and that's it's a great thing speaking as a reader that's a great thing Thanks so we're about out of time but Salman is graciously offered to sign some books afterwards so let's all thank him for coming thank you anak never they didn't disappear they're still there hello people

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 19,971

Rating: 4.7264957 out of 5

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, the enchantress of florence, salman rushdie, author talks, writing books, novels, fiction, fantasy

Id: RBPwUYsrIqE

Length: 56min 45sec (3405 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 16 2008