Salman Rushdie on His Latest Novel, “Quichotte”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most renowned authors. “Midnights Children” about the partition of India is considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. But it was “The Satanic Verses” that brought him notoriety. Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran called the book blasphemous and put a Fatwa on Rushdie’s head, forcing him into hiding for decade, but his creativity remained undiminished and he’s once again found literary success with his latest novel, “Quichotte”. It’s a modern, very American retelling of Don Quixote. And today, it’s been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. And our Walter Isaacson sat down with Rushdie to talk about it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER ISAACSON: Salman, thank you so much for being with us.

SALMAN RUSHDIE, AUTHOR: Thank you.

ISAACSON: So I want to read your own first sentence to you, because to me it so much echoes Cervantes and the original Don Quixote. “There once lived at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America a traveling man of Indian, advancing years and retreating mental powers, who on account of his love for mindless television had spent far too much of his life in the yellow light of tawdry motel rooms, watching an excess of it and had suffered a peculiar form of brain damage”. It sort of reminds me of Cervantes, but you’re updating him in a way to say, how would Cervantes do our society today.

RUSHDIE: It’s exactly that. I mean, obviously that sentence is — is a deliberate echo of the opening of Don Quixote. You know. And — and I wanted to say, yes, I’m taking the knight of the Dolorous Countenance and bringing him 400 years into the future and putting him in a hotel room in the middle of America and try to say who is he now.

ISAACSON: And Cervantes was making fun of the popular culture of his time —

RUSHDIE: Yes. What Cervantes was doing 400 years ago was kind of sending up the junk culture of his time, you know? And — and saying how all these chivalrous romances were kind of rotting peoples brains and they — you know, rot Don Quixote’s brain. And — and I thought if he was around now, what would his targets be? And who would he go for in the way that he — you know, and I thought — and I mean, the answer to that, I thought, was that we have plenty of junk culture.

ISAACSON: And it was television in some ways —

(CROSSTALK)

RUSHDIE: — it becomes a kind of reality television, you know? And – – and — and its wicked sister, the internet. Which in the case of my character kind of deranges him in the way that these — these earlier fictions deranged Cervantes’s character. And so that was a great starting point for me. And then I thought, OK, but he’s got to have a love — there’s got to be a love in it, you know? And — and I thought in the original novel, Don Quixote, in Cervantes’s novel, when he’s in love with this woman who he doesn’t know and he never met and — you know, and he gives her a full — gives her an invented name, I thought these days if you were to start chasing a woman you’ve never met who’s just somebody you’ve seen on TV, people would not necessarily think of that as romantic. They might think of that as stalking. You know? So — so there’s that double-ness of it, that he’s obsessed with this woman that he doesn’t know. But is she — but her reaction when he starts writing to her is like, you know, let’s call the police.

ISAACSON: One of the things Avante does, is his author’s preface, which is, I think, somewhat unusual, but it sets up the author in relationship to the character and you do that as well.

RUSHDIE: You know, I’ve never done it before. I’ve never written about writing. I think — there are lots of books that do, but I had never really written about a writer before. And he just showed up. I wasn’t — it wasn’t actually part of the original plan of the book. Originally I thought I was just going to write about this old duffer chasing this impossible dream. And then this other character who turns out to be his author, I found appearing, and I thought, is this good or do I need it. And then the two storylines began to, in a way, talk to each other though, and in part it became a book about how the act of creation transforms a writers life into a fictional life. And I found that interesting. And I knew that in some way, as the book progressed, I had to bring these stories closer and closer together until they, in some way, became thee same story. And for a long time I didn’t know how to do that, and I’m going to not say how I did it, because it’s right at the end of the book. But, I felt, in the end, I felt pleased with the fact that I had managed, in some way, to unite the two storylines.

ISAACSON: And you say there’s a wonderful sentence in the book, “How the boundaries between truth and fantasy get smudged,” I think, is your words.

RUSHDIE: Yes.

ISAACSON: Was that part of blending these two strands?

RUSHDIE: Yes, it was, you know, and it — because it’s very difficult anymore for — to be — to be clear about what is the case. If I say potato and you say potato, and we — everybody disagrees with everyone else about the nature of reality right now. And I wanted to sort of look at that, what does it mean when we can’t agree on what’s happening. And so, these two storylines, which kind of echo and mirror each other, but aren’t exactly the same each other, became a way of exploring that.

ISAACSON: It’s a road novel, so it moves and moves and moves, but as it moves it changes genres to some extent.

RUSHDIE: Yes.

ISAACSON: Tell me how much did you plan it in advance and how much of the character just go off on their own.

RUSHDIE: It’s a bit of each, you know. I mean, what I — what I characteristically do, is I have a sort of structure, I mean, I know that I’ve got to get from here to here and I’ve got to go via these different stops, but then I do allow a lot of it to happen in the act of creation. Because I’ve learned that there are things that you come up, just in the moment of writing, that you can’t come up with when you’re just trying to plan things. Your mind is working in a different way.

ISAACSON: Give me an example.

RUSHDIE: Well, I mean, for example, the chapter that Quichotte and his sidekick, Sancho, end up in the imaginary town in New Jersey, in which people are turning into mastodons. And that came about because when I was at college I acted in Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, in which people are turning into rhinoceros,’ and in the case of Ionesco’s play he’s talking about fascism, he’s talking about Nazis, he’s talking about how your neighbors can suddenly turn into monsters that you don’t recognize. And — but it’s written as comedy, as light comedy.

ISAACSON: So, he is writing, Ionesco, about it, fascism in a way?

RUSHDIE: Yes.

ISAACSON: What were you writing about when you were writing that?

RUSHDIE: I was writing about that we, in a way, that we’re living in a moment in which this is happening to us, that our neighbors are turning into things that we don’t recognize, and that we can’t talk to anymore. And so, it became, to me, like a little allegorical moment about the present.

ISAACSON: You say in the book too that the author in the book, (inaudible), reveals himself to a subject. Were you trying to reveal yourself too through the subject?

RUSHDIE: Well, I mean, in certain things though, for example, the subject of old age is quite central to the book. Both Quichotte and his author, they’re both damaged by age in some way. And they’re both thinking about the end of the line. And that subject, the subject of facing the end is something which the — which the book takes on very centrally. And I think — I’m 72 now, I’m not 100, but that — but it’s something you start thinking about. And so, in that sense the book is partly it’s me trying to face up to those things. That you know, just as a writer, when you’re this age that the work ahead of you is much short — is much briefer period than the work behind you. And it concentrates the mind.

ISAACSON: I don’t want to spoil the ending of the book, but there is the sort of bright light and a door something, and that’s what you’re thinking about there to some extent, a little bit?

RUSHDIE: Yes, a little bit. I mean, it’s a — I mean, the book, as I say, adopts — it’s not like a mournful book, I think, but —

ISAACSON: It’s playful.

RUSHDIE: Yes. I wanted it to have that characteristic of playfulness and speed and likeness.

ISAACSON: And humor.

RUSHDIE: And humor. I mean, one of the things I’m really pleased about, that the early readings — readers of the book, is that everybody has found it to be very funny and I’m pleased by that because I wanted it to be funny.

ISAACSON: Your character, or Quichotte, is born in India, born in Bombay, and travels around from England to the United States. That is also true of you.

RUSHDIE: And it’s true also of the — of his author of the book.

ISAACSON: Author. So, you have three characters, yourself, the author in the book, and Quichotte.

RUSHDIE: Yes. And all three of us come from the same tiny neighborhood in Bombay.

ISAACSON: Was that intentional from the beginning and why?

RUSHDIE: Yes. Well, in a way it was a sort of a — in a way it was sort of a farewell to childhood, because both the characters in the book and I have left behind a long time ago, and our lives have become elsewhere. Mine, for a long time, in Britain and now for 20 years here in America. And similar transitions have happened to the characters in the book. So, this memory of childhood is a very distant memory, and yes, I think it’s like a list visit to that.

ISAACSON: You were born in Bombay as a Muslim, in a Hindu city and country.

RUSHDIE: Yes.

ISAACSON: And then go to England and then the United States. You are always have to be aware, of what seemed to me, of an outsider status.

RUSHDIE: Yes. No, and I think — I think I — yes, I’ve been, in a way, an outside all my life, because in a minority in India and then in an ethnic minority in England and then here as well. So, I think that’s not a bad position for a writer.

ISAACSON: Why is that? Writers always seem to be a bit of an outsider. Why is that so good?

RUSHDIE: What I think is you need to be both things. You need to be inside and outside. If you — you need to be inside the world you’re describing, otherwise you can’t feel it. And — but you also need to be able to step outside it and look at it with a kind of beady eye.

ISAACSON: Watching your career, I’ve always thought of you, in some ways, as a condiment (ph) inside, I mean were president of PEN, you were a distinguished when you were in England. But then when I read this book about London and you living there, in a way, it was not your character, you say you’re such an outside, you notice how they discriminate against you.

RUSHDIE: Yes. Well, there have been periods in the U.K., it goes up and down, racial prejudice and so on, and sometimes it’s worse than other times. Right now, it’s thanks to the Brexit nonsense, it’s very bad. But —

ISAACSON: Do you think that may be part of the cause of the Brexit nonsense?

RUSHDIE: Yes. Yes. I mean, it’s all about — it’s the same as white supremacy. It’s all about reinventing a kind of England where there weren’t any inconvenient foreigners. And ignoring the fact that the wealth of England, at that time, was based on looting the countries of the inconvenient foreigners.

ISAACSON: Well, especially India, which is what you talk about when you get to the London part of this book.

RUSHDIE: Yes, exactly. So, I mean, that — that’s, I think, one of the things I wanted to do in this book was to talk a little bit about race. And because if you’re trying to write about two brown people traveling in a Chevy Cruze across America —

ISAACSON: This is Quichotte and his —

RUSHDIE: Quichotte and his Sancho.

ISAACSON: — and his — Sancho, his imaginary black and white son.

RUSHDIE: Yes. But, if you’re going to do that, it’s — you can’t avoid the fact that they’re going to run into some hostility along the way, because that’s the America we live in now. And so, I thought, I’ve got to take that on. And, I mean, it’s not the center of the book, but there are two or three moments in the book when there are some quite racially tense and violent confrontational moments.

ISAACSON: One of the confusing things about the race in the book, is that your characters confuse the small towns they go into, because they’re not black.

RUSHDIE: Yes.

ISAACSON: They’re not exactly — and they’re like, aren’t you — shouldn’t you be wearing a turban type questions they get.

RUSHDIE: Exactly, yes.

ISAACSON: Does that help make it even more complex?

RUSHDIE: Well, I think – yes, I think Indian-Americans occupy an unusual position between – I mean, the classic racial tropes of America are between black and white. And Indian Americans are somewhere muddled up in the middle of that, you know? And then I also wanted to do another thing which was sort of more mischievous in a way. I didn’t want Indian-Americans to be just victims of racism, you know? So one of the most significant Indian-American characters of the book is actually a crook. So I thought, you know, “We have crooks, too.”

ISAACSON: Another one of the themes in the book is painkillers, opioids.

RUSHDIE: Oh, yes.

ISAACSON: So were you looking at the opioid crisis here? And what was that metaphor about?

RUSHDIE: Well, in a way, it’s about the kind of hidden tragedy of America, you know, and that this problem is so widespread. And yet, it’s also, in a way, sort of invisible. And we all talk about it; we know it’s there, but, you know, if you’re walking in the street, you don’t know who is suffering from it. I mean, I’ve had close friends and at least one family member die as a result of opioid addiction. My youngest sister died some years ago. And it – when – you know, if you looked in her bathroom cabinet, it was like a pharmacy, and she obviously was more – much more deeply addicted than any of us knew.

ISAACSON: How much do things like that, personal experiences, make their way into your novels?

RUSHDIE: Oh, I mean, that’s one of the reasons why I became so obsessed with the subject of these drugs, you know? It was – because it started with personal experience, you know? It started with losing a sister, which is a big deal. And that has something to do with, also, the way in which, in this novel, there’s two different brother/sister relationships, you know, which are troubled and difficult, you know? And they don’t – in the same way, you know, one of them ends up better than the other. But all of that comes out of the same very personal experience, you know, of trying to – and trying to turn that into art.

ISAACSON: There’s a line in the book, which is, “Now, you understand what unhappiness is.”

RUSHDIE: Yes.

ISAACSON: What has caused you the most unhappiness?

RUSHDIE: Well, you know, the usual stuff. I mean, there was – there was – there’s obvious fact, which is the 10 years of the my life were quite difficult because of an attack on my work and on me.

ISAACSON: And that was the (inaudible) Iranian Ayatollah because of –

RUSHDIE: Because of the novel of mine.

ISAACSON: The novel, yes – satanic verses. How did you deal with that for 10 years? And how did that affect you?

RUSHDIE: Well, I mean –

ISAACSON: And it was a death threat?

RUSHDIE: Yes, I mean, I’m quite surprised to be in good shape, actually. You know, it was – I mean, it was very difficult, but I think, sometimes, you learn something about yourself when you’re put in a kind of situation of extreme stress. But you learn whether you’re able to handle it or not.

ISAACSON: And you had to be in hiding a lot of the time?

RUSHDIE: Yes, I’ve always worried about that phrase because the thing about maximum security is that it’s unbelievably visible.

ISAACSON: I remember you showing up with your security; I said, “Well, yes, that’s not in hiding.”

RUSHDIE: Yes, because there’s like a little – a little army around you. You know, so it feels like the opposite of hiding.

ISAACSON: So what did you learn?

RUSHDIE: Well, I learned, maybe, that I was tougher than I thought, you know, which – I mean, I wouldn’t have backed myself to survive that experience, but I did. And I think what happens is that you – I learned anyway, to value even more – even more, you know, intensely the things that I valued before, such as – such as the art of literature and the freedom of expression and the right to say things that other people don’t like and so on. And I just thought, OK. Yes, I mean, it may have been an unpleasant decade, but it was the right fight, you know? It was fighting for the things that I most believe in against things I most dislike, which are bigotry and fanaticism and censorship and so on. So yes, I came out of it, in a way, clearer.

ISAACSON: Salman Rushdie, thank you so much for being with us.

RUSHDIE: Thank you. Thank you.