Poured Over: Salman Rushdie on Knife

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                   

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.     

Featured Books (Episode)
Knife by Salman Rushdie
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
Victory City by Salman Rushdie
Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and well Salman Rushdie needs no introduction. So we’re gonna get right to the conversation, Knife is out now. It is his new memoir, it is the story of August 12, 2022. And what happened at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, it is also the story of his subsequent recovery. It is also a story of the love affair he has with his wife, Eliza, and much more and Salman, it is so good to see you. And I mean that on so many different levels, like how are you doing?

Salman Rushdie

I’m gonna, I’m surprisingly, okay. I think surprising to myself. Also, I think, pretty surprising to some of the doctors who had to, to inspect various pieces of my anatomy. They’re all they’re all quite with a kind of air of wonder, told me that things had healed and that they could sign off on the project of looking after me. So, at this point, I don’t really have doctors in my life.

MM

And it’s not quite two years in, you told David Remnick that you always thought your books were more interesting than your life. And of course, the world has disagreed with that. And there is so much of you in this book beyond the subject matter, beyond your marriage, how does it feel now? I mean, Knife has been out now for a week and a little bit, as you and I are taping this, how does it feel to have that book in the world? How does it feel to have done all of these interviews?

SR

Well, I just I’m pleased, it’s out there, you know, it’s another part of the process of understanding what happened. And, and, and also, like, you know, putting it behind me, I mean, I really, I really want everybody to buy the book. So please don’t think I don’t want to do that. But it does feel as if something is being completed by the publication of the book, some story that began, as you say, with an unpleasant attack, is being brought to its conclusion, by its by its expression, in a work of art.

MM

It is a beautiful book, Knife. And you’ve said in the past, and when you’re writing, you sort of convince yourself that it’s a private act. And with a book like this, obviously, privacy becomes a piece of the story and the loss of your privacy, the loss of your bodily autonomy. And to a certain extent, you lost your privacy in 1989, when people started ascribing behavior to you as you were in hiding because of the fatwa, but, you know, lots of people have had feelings about you for a really long time. And it’s not necessarily been about the work.

SR

Oh, and it’s not necessarily be nice. I mean, I think maybe, to some extent, it happens to everybody who gets into the public eye, that there’s a kind of public persona, which is, which is not necessarily created by themselves, which is a character created by others around them. And I think for many people in that situation, they feel the need to fight back with themselves, you know, against the selves that have been made up. And so I don’t think I’m unique in that regard. But there certainly were variations of me that were floating about, many of which were quite hostile. I used to feel I haven’t felt it for a while. I used to feel that when I came into a room, so to speak, I had to work to brush aside those other selves, so that people could see me, right. And it sometimes took a bit of time. I actually, truthfully, in the more than an almost 25 years that I’ve lived in New York City. I really haven’t felt that that much anymore. I think people got used to having me around.

MM

We definitely do. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I’ve seen you bopping around at things and it’s just Oh, hello. Hi. It’s nice to see you. 

SR

That’s one of the nice things about New York is that people recognize that you’re around them, they gotta be respectful of your space, you know. And so I felt actually much less oppressed by those other selves. But of course, one of the most dangerous of the other selves is the other self that was created in the world of Islamic radicalism where I was described as being somebody worth killing, and that I also thought had begun to fade away. And in the mind of this young man, obviously it had not. 

MM

I think I’m not alone in saying that we were all shocked when the news came out in August, and now also having seen footage and photographs from the event. I mean, I was a baby bookseller, when the Satanic Verses paperback was, shall we say, delayed, and then it finally was released. And we had stacks and stacks and stacks and displays in the store that I was working in. And plenty of people came around. And I mean, lots of lots of stores took it, it wasn’t just the store that I was at, technically, the fatwa was lifted in 1998, in some circles, and then yet, not in others. So the idea that this kid who was not even alive on the planet, he’s 24. Yeah, was not even on the planet when Khomeini declared the fatwa. I think there’s a larger conversation we need to have about radicalism and young people.

SR

Yeah, I mean, he was clearly somebody — I do believe that there are people whose character is such that they’re looking to be led, you know, then looking for something, some idea to subscribe to. And maybe because I don’t want to be too judgmental, because I don’t know the man. It may be because of some kind of absences in their life that they feel the need to fill those absences with something which feels like purpose. And ideology can do that. And he has said, even though I’ve seen only, he gave one slightly unwise interview to the New York Post, he did talk about his admiration for Khomeini. So there’s that, you know, but I do feel that there’s a kind of question mark here in him, why would somebody want to murder somebody who was an almost total stranger to them, but about whom they knew almost nothing, knowing that it would also deeply affect their own life. And knowing that the life of a non-criminal young man living in New Jersey is very different from the life of a lifer jailbird. And he must have known that he that was probably going to be his future. And yet, he was prepared to do it.

MM

And he hadn’t read a single page of The Satanic Verses. He hasn’t read a single page of any of your books, actually. And there are 22 now.

SR

Yeah, each with a lot of pages in them, 

MM

Well, Jaguar’s Smile, not so much. But you do ask in the book, whose face he saw, I mean, for 27 seconds. The attack takes 27 seconds, which when you say the words out loud, does not sound like a lot of time, but I was walking around my home, timing 27. And it feels like forever.

SR

It’s a very long time, if you just put a stopwatch on your phone and wait. And if in those 27 seconds, you are defenseless against somebody with a knife. There’s a lot of damage that can be done. And I mean, I had to at the time, I wasn’t counting, but afterwards, I did count. And I think the number of serious injuries is 15. Not all of them are lethal injuries, but some of them are obviously nearly fatal. Some of them are stab wounds. And those are the dangerous things. And some of them are just slashes where I mean, for example, there was a big cut like here. But that’s as you see gone away that’s healed. But the big wounds, there was an enormous slash across and across my neck which by some extraordinary piece of good fortune failed to rupture the artery and there was a stab wound in my neck on the right side. Those were very serious. Obviously, the wound in the eye is very serious. And then there were three stab wounds down the center of my chest. Which again, fortunately, missed the heart. So there are things which could have ended the story right then, which didn’t happen. And my son Milan, who being 26 does what 26 year old kids do, which is he Googled knife attack. At the end, he said to me, he said, Dad, I really all these things and people get stabbed once they die. Then you got stabbed 15 times, and you’re still okay. So, this is my superpower.

MM

Well, it’s a nice superpower. Let’s hold on to it, please. But let’s also not have any more attacks more importantly. But one of the doctors also said to you were very lucky that you were attacked by a man who actually didn’t know how to kill another person with a knife. 

SR

I think that’s what they felt because he failed to do the actually quite simple thing which would have would have ended the story. Lucky me. Lucky you.

MM

I don’t think people are going to expect the humor that we get in life if they are not familiar with your novels. I am going to mention Fran Lebowitz at this point. She’s a writer I’m quite fond of, and you were having a conversation with her after the fact that you thought you’d actually been punched in the face. At first, you were not clear on what was happening. 

SR

So I thought I’d been hit very hard on my jaw on the right side. I didn’t know there was a knife in his in his fist, then there were a lot of cuts. And Fran said, because I put up my hand to defend myself. She said, you’re right handed, right? And I said, Yeah. And she said, But you put up your left hand, why do you do that? And I find a truthful answer was, you know, I wasn’t really thinking about it. But then I said, maybe it’s like a boxing thing that if you’re right handed, you put up your left hand to defend and your right hand to punch? And she said, Yes, among the two things. So the first piece, you’re not a boxer, and the second piece — you weren’t doing any punching?

MM

And if you can imagine this, and Fran Lebowitz is very matter of fact voice saying to you, really? No. And you bring your life into this book, in a way that, you know, I went back to Joseph Anton, as I was prepping for this conversation and reread Joseph Anton, and that was your memoir of the years, it was nine years, nine years, basically, from the publication of Satanic through and some of your background as well, some of your childhood and your schooling and whatnot. And it’s written in the third person, and it’s a very elegant way of telling the story, and it’s a really great device, you get quite a lot. It’s also about 600 pages. Am I remembering correctly? It doesn’t feel like 600 pages. But yes, it takes a minute. But the difference between that, and Knife isn’t to me just the circumstances of the books creation, but also what you’re doing with the art.

SR

Yeah, it’s a very different kind of book. First of all, you know, Joseph Anton takes place over an extended period of time, and goes back, as you say, even further than that and so on. This is a very intense, narrow spectrum book, by comparison. And the other thing is that, at the point at which I wrote Joseph Anton, it was quite a long time after the events being described in the book. And what I felt is that there was a gap between the me writing the book, and the me being written about the me being written about had been in an entirely different place in his life, and much more stressful, much more, you know, much more difficult place in him and under all sorts of stress. Whereas the me writing this book was in a much better place, and much calmer place. And so I thought, there’s this gap. And using the third person was a way of expressing that gap. And say, saying, I’m writing about a person with my name. But who isn’t quite me, it used to be me, isn’t quite me now. Whereas in this book, Knife, there is no distance at all, no distance at all between the person writing the book and the person being written about and so I thought there has to be first person.

MM

You are also needing to rely, though, on your wife’s notes and some film that she took of you and photographs and your family members and doctors and whatnot, because you were on a ventilator. There were lots of conversations in lots of corners of New York, where people were deeply concerned and not having any information to you know, people’s imaginations go where they go. But for you to come back, especially for the footage and you talk about a documentary film that will be coming at some point. But you say I’m so detached when you’re talking about what must have been an extraordinary set of, shall we say notes from other people about? I mean, Eliza wouldn’t let you look in a mirror?

SR

Well, I look, the thing is, there was a period, the first couple of days, it was not clear that I would survive. The doctors had said that to realize that, you know, the first couple of days will tell, or whether he will be able to, you know, for example, that he’ll be able to come off the ventilator. And that was the first big question mark, would I be able to breathe, you know, unaided? I didn’t know any of this, you know, I was in a very heavily medicated state. I was on extremely exciting painkillers. And they were giving me hallucinations. And so I was in, I was not in my perfect mind, to quote Shakespeare. That’s Lear, isn’t it? But around me, there was obviously an enormous amount of anxiety. And this moment of the ventilator being removed. I experienced, firstly, it’s not very pleasant. I mean, it’s not to be recommended, sort of having a ventilator. But the moment it came out, my feeling was a joy because I could speak. And I think the first thing I said was, I can speak. To me, it felt like a huge moment. Very optimistic moment. I think some of the doctors were still pretty kind of reserved, let’s see how this goes. But it went alright, then it turned out that I was able to, to breathe by myself.

MM

When I was reading the sections where you’re recounting your hallucinations, because they were cities built out of words and the alphabet. I started thinking about Victory City, which came out in paperback earlier, about three months ago, actually, which was your novel from February of ‘23. And you had just finished proofing the last set of galleys before basically, the last set of changes before you went to galley. And the book came out in hardcover in February of 23. And obviously, you were not in a position to do anything, there was an interview with David Remnick. But beyond that, there was not a tour or anything else,

SR

I couldn’t do anything.

MM

I love Victory City. I love Pampa. I love this world. But the idea you know, if for folks who have not read Victory City yet, please go to. Especially if Midnight’s Children is a novel that you hold close, this is a book you need to read, but Pampa, who is sort of the main, she’s the heart and soul of this book, she blows on some seeds, and a world is created. And I don’t really want to spoil it. So I’m going to sort of leave it at that for the moment. But I really just thought, oh, you know, someone talks about the free association of his brain quality, if you’ve done it in many, many places you will talk about, you know, I go from movies, to music, to books to everything else. I’m a little more linear, I tend to go straight to books. But Victory City obviously was completed before all of this happened. And there have been some people who said, Oh, no, well look at this overlap. And look at that overlap. And I’m thinking, Well, no, that book was actually finished before all this happened.

SR

It didn’t change anything. 

MM

But Victory City, you’ve talked about. You’re trained as a historian; your college experience was history. Midnight’s Children is a surreal novel, but it’s a history novel. And I feel that way about Victory City. And can we just talk about the creation of that book, because Pampa is one of my favorite characters of yours.

SR

Mine too. Actually. 

MM

She’s amazing.

SR

She might be my favorite character of mine. But she is certainly top three. Anyway, yes, what had happened was that I was very young, before I’d published any kind of novel, in my early 20s, I was traveling in India, in South India. And the thing about me and my family is that we’re very much North Indian so South India is a different world. Different languages, different histories. Very beautiful. And I visited, in the state of Karnataka in South India, there’s this small town called Hampi. And near around Hampi are the ruins of what used to be the Vijayanagara Empire. Vijayanagar, the word which means victory city, Vijay = victory, Nagar = city. I was just stunned by these ruins. They were so spectacular. And I thought, you know, I’m an Indian person growing up in India. Why don’t I know anything about this? And actually, it was quite it continues to be surprising to me how under noticed that that place is even though the empire ruled the whole of South India, which is half the country for a couple hundred years and was basically entering its phase of decline at the moment when in north India, the Mughal Empire was rising, the much better known Mughal empire. And, and you know, for every 1000 people that visit the Taj Mahal, there’s probably one person who visits Hampi. So it felt I felt like this unknown treasure. And I made lots and lots of notes and took pictures. I mean, I was not even 25. 24, I think I was, hadn’t written a book. But I filed it away somewhere deep in my head. And then later, when I was writing, The Enchantress of Florence, a lot of which does take place in the Mughal empire. I remember thinking, but there was that other place in the south, that was pretty amazing, too. And maybe, at some point, you’ve got to think about that. And what I now think, is that these two books, The Enchantress of Florence, and Victory City, if you put them together, they’re a kind of history novel about India. And they say, this is where we came from. This is who we were. And to some degree, this is who we still are. I just fell in love with the story of Vijayanagar. And then I had to ask myself some technical questions like how do you write a book that lasts for two and a half centuries? Unless you want to write a Tolstoian 2000-page book, which I really didn’t? How do you hold together a book that lasts for that long. And also, there is a problem in the problem. But the history being that old back in the, you know, it’s mid 14th century is the beginning of when you’re that long ago, the historical record, is imperfect. There are holes in it. And there are things which are presented as history, which you can see are actually much more like legend than history, which is good for a novelist, it leaves you space. But one of the things that puzzled me was, if you look at the history of that period, if you look even like 15 or 20 years, before the birth of the Vijayanagar Empire, there are all these other kingdoms doing perfectly well. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, comes this thing, boom, and takes over everything. And how does that happen? How does something come out of nowhere? And the answer to these to both questions was Pampa Kampana. I thought, first of all, okay, I’m gonna have a woman touched by a goddess who lives for two and a half centuries. And it’s her story. And she’s going to tell the story, but it’s also going to be the story of her. It’s also a book about a book. Yes, because she’s, she’s writing the book of which my book is a pale imitation.

MM

I liked the structure. I like the way you’ve inserted some notes there. There’s some very funny asides where it’s just very you.

SR

It’s a little bit like thinking of Nabokov and Pale Fire, in which there are footnotes.

MM

I really I do like the structure. I really liked the voices. I like her sort of a wry sensibility, but also when I’m reading you, and this is true of so many of the books that we can’t just have the good stuff or just all of the bad too, you do this tragic comedy thing, in a way that I will basically follow you anywhere because the balance, no, really, I have been reading you for a very long time. The balance and the way you do it, and the way you can I can pick up something like shame or fury years later, and they still speak to this moment. Right, especially, I mean, Fury was published on 9/11 2001. Right. And so it was a little lost in the news cycle, shall we say? And you’ve had moments of saying, Well, that was the moment it became a piece of nostalgia. Yeah. And yet, here we are in 2024. And that, and I’m, I’m not particularly a fan of nostalgia. I think it’s great as a literary device. But human desire for nostalgia doesn’t always work for me to look at it now and hold it and reread it. Can you 20 some odd years after publication, you still hit every single piece of New York in that moment, and some of that stuff is resurfacing. Everything is cyclical.

SR

I just felt that was when I had just come to live in New York City. So it was like the city making its first, I mean, I’ve visited many, many times, but it’s different when you’re living there. To live somewhere is not the same as visiting you. Hmm. However, I mean, I felt I knew I knew New York quite well, because I’d be. I had friends all over the place that I didn’t feel like a stranger in town, you know. But living somewhere is different than what I felt is that the city was at an extraordinary moment of self confidence, maybe even overconfidence and wealth, and arrogance. And, and telling itself that well known myth, which is the myth of the Golden Age, and one of the things, you know, if you’re trained as a historian, first of all, there’s no such thing, right. And secondly, when people believe that it is as, for example, Paris, in the bizarre period, for example, doesn’t last very long. It’s always a brief moment, which feels during a debrief moment, it feels eternal, and the people are, okay, this is forever. This is who we now are. But you always know, there’s going to be an ending. And so I was had that feeling about New York City at the in the year 2000. That’s what I want to just try and capture this before it goes away. It’s like Nabokov, chasing butterflies. We capture it before it goes away. And then, to my shock, it went away on the day the book was published, that that New York, the New York that I had been writing about, where went away and another city was came into being. 

MM

Yet somehow we’ve sort of flipped back on that earlier incarnation, New York, sort of, its haunted by its earlier incarnations, and they keep rolling back up. Yeah, it was just takes a minute to do it. But victory city, you’re doing a similar thing with this idea of the Golden Age, as well. And the fact that they just, we can tell ourselves stories.

SR

Because it was such a long period, Victory City, Golden Ages and the dark ages and then have a bit of a golden age, and then another Dark Age. And that feels to me like the truth. You know, that’s how history goes. It changes all the time. It doesn’t run on tram lines, you know, it has unexpected changes of direction. I wanted to write that the novel, which isn’t just a historical novel, but a novel about history. 

MM

Midnight’s Children isn’t just the creation of India, as we know it, it’s also I mean, if I think about Saleem, and handcuffed to history. And you’ve said this before, like, does our history make us does it unmake us? Are we what, what? How do we sit with history and I look at the body of your work. And if we go, I’m gonna take Grimus out of the equation for a second, because that’s your first novel. And it’s, it’s a first novel, it’s a debut. So we’re going to take that aside but if we start with Midnight’s Children, which I do really think of as the book that kicks off everything, because when you look at how victory city comes back into conversation with Midnight’s Children, or Quichotte, which came out in 2020, just as the world was going in a different direction, and Quichotte. Two, though captures in New York and in America in a moment, I mean, yes, it’s a play off of Don Quixote, but it’s very you.

SR

Yeah, it’s not just don’t close, it’s also conveyed. Yeah. I mean, what I was trying to do in that book was to use almost every literary technique that exists in the same book to throw, throw it at the subject of America. And see what stuck, you know, are the parts of it as a realist parts of it are absurdist. Parts of it are quite realistic. I just thought, have a character out in the way that Voltaire does in Candide have a character who is ludicrously optimistic and throw him against the world, which has no reason for optimism. And that becomes comedy and tragedy at the same time. And also, because I am accused by people who know me, of that, of that fault of excessive optimism. So I thought, well, let me just exaggerate that. Make make the character Quichotte. Like, a satire of myself, if you like. And so it becomes me as the Picarro traveling across. That’s actually the end. It is like a picaresque novel. It’s episodic.

MM

I never get tired of that book. I’ve read it a couple of times. Just every time there’s a new layer, or there’s a detail, there’s a sibling relationship in there that is really satisfying. There are just some wild laugh out loud moments. It is very much America in a moment. It’s also dedicated to your wife, Eliza. And he met at the end of 16. When you walked through into a plate glass door, I’m sorry, I, you put the story in Knife. Early, early 2017, actually, okay, early 2017. 

SR

There was a PEN event that we were both on the same program at the Cooper Union. And immediately after the event, there was an after party, the roof terrace of The Standard Hotel on the Bowery. And as you know, that’s got an inside and an outside and there’s like boards in between. And I thought throughout the summer evening, let’s go out and look at the city at night. And she went ahead of me, and I was following her is a little distracted. But what I didn’t notice was the sliding door on my side was not open, it was shut. And you know, if you walk through a space where you think it’s an empty space, but it’s not you actually hit it very hard. And, and that’s what I did that fell down. My glasses, cut the bridge of my nose. So there was a little bit of blood trickling down my face. That there were all these people gathering ground. They oh my god, Salman has fallen down. Panic, panic. All I was telling myself is do not faint. Do not pass out. Right? And then I got up and sort of Alright, I was a bit shaky. I was mostly embarrassed. And I thought, you know, I actually am really embarrassed. I think I also a bit shaky, I think maybe I should go. Yeah. And so I said, you know, I think I’m gonna get a taxi and go home. And, and she came down with me because she was worried about me, just to make sure it’s okay getting into the taxi. And then we were saying goodbye. And then she said, You know, I’m just, I’m just gonna come with you to make sure you’re okay until you get home. But she got in the taxi. That’s history. 

MM

This is also where I’m going to point out that you include that story in Knife. And you know, some other writers might have left out the I walked into a glass door at full force and landed on the floor. Some people might have left that out.

SR

But I couldn’t leave it out because she enjoys telling the story too much. 

MM

Okay, well, that’s fair. But there’s a sense of play in Quichotte that I wouldn’t say is missing from other books. It’s just it’s a different experience. And I’m wondering how much of that is your relationship with Eliza, which was still pretty new at that, but I mean, the book came out in 2020. So you were writing it, whatever? 17,18 You’re pretty quick when you’re? Yeah,

SR

I mean, I got quicker of late, you know, I mean, the last several books have come out. I almost don’t exactly know, but almost a two year intervals, two and a half year intervals, which is, which is unusual for me to use. I used to be much slower. I don’t know if that is an improvement or not. But anyway, that’s how it is. And yeah, I mean, I think it was a lot to do with happiness, you know? Yeah. If you feel in a really good place in your personal life, it liberates something. In the in the in the imagination, and in your in your working space. That just means there’s something not weighing you down. Not being happy does. Well, there are writers who would make wonderful careers out of not being happy.

MM

I read them too. Part of why I raise that though, is Knife is also very much a love story between you and Eliza. And it’s gorgeous to read. She’s a novelist and a poet and photographer and a videographer and essentially an artist in her own right. But I’m wondering too, when I think about how you write about love in most of your books, but especially Quichotte. Are you have a romantic? Yeah, I mean, do you meet the technical definition? And I don’t mean in the terms of like romance novels, I mean, in the genuine sense of the word.

SR

Believing in love. Yes, I think so. Although I’d almost stopped, you know, those. My previous marriage ended in divorce now. I mean, it’s almost 17 years ago. And so at the time that I met realize that it was more than a decade since I, I hadn’t been married, you know, and for a lot of that decade, I hadn’t actually really been with anyone. They’d been odd moments of relationships, but I hadn’t continuously been with anyone. And I remember discussing it with my sister who’s a year younger than me. was also on her own now. And we thought maybe that’s over, you know, maybe it maybe that part of life is over. And we just have to accept the fact that we’re going to be these old people on their own. And I remember saying to her, you know, I think that’s okay. Because, because a lot of life is fine. You know, I mean, I have work that I love, and I have family that I love and friends that I love and nice place to live and kind of enough money. And nothing wrong with this picture, you know, doesn’t need somebody step into it, in order to complete the picture. And both of us agreed that yeah, it was kind of all right, if that’s if that’s how it was gonna be. That would be okay. And then, I mean, one of my theories about love has been, it always comes up behind you, and whacks you on the back of the head.

MM

Or smack in the face if you walk into a door.

SR

But it never comes in the direction you’re looking. Right? It comes from some unexpected angle. And so at that moment of meeting, Eliza, I was actively not looking for romance, right? No, I sort of made a decision with myself. But it’s alright, this is I’m having my life is fine. And I was I just wasn’t even thinking about it. Then it came up and whacked me on that.

MM

One of the bits of Knife that I’m very appreciative of is when you’re talking about the recovery process to you’re talking about very conscious choices on your part, to not just survive, but to heal in whatever way that means, right? Like, you’re very clear. You knew you were dying. You knew you were dying. You were terribly lonely, as this was happening. And once the recovery process starts, and it’s quite harrowing, the recovery process, but you have your sons, you have Eliza, you have your brain and the way it works. And I feel like you were leaving not a lot out. I mean, we’ve learned all sorts of things about medical miracles, but watching you on the page, and I mean, the Salman Rushdie that you present to us on the page, I’m going to operate off of the fact that there’s still a private Salman somewhat you haven’t given us everything right, that that there is much less to have to tell you. Okay. But now, the writing process has to look different for you. I mean, a novel is one thing to begin with a memoir, like Joseph Anton, is still more novelistic than not, yes. And now we have Knife, which Knife as metaphor Knife as profile of you. I mean, how was this change as a writer?

SR

Well, I mean, one of the things to be, how shall I put this, I’m always trying to look for a thing I haven’t done. Okay. Instead of just simply writing another book, like the last book, I’m always trying to think where can I go that I haven’t been, you know, as a writer. And I mean, for terrible reasons. This book propelled me into a, I’m not talking about my physical self, I’m talking about my writing self. It propelled me into a place I’ve never been. And this forced me to ask questions of myself and face technical literary challenges. Different from anything I’ve written before. And so in that way, paradoxically, it’s quite satisfying. Because it did fulfill my desire to find books that I haven’t written before. And this is certainly a book I hope I never have to write again. 

MM

Yes, no sequels to this one please. Midnight’s Children, is a book that I have walked around with stamped on my DNA for quite some time, I was very, very young the first time I read it, and it’s a book that I’ve gone back to a couple of times, both on the page and as an audiobook. And if you are an audiobook person I highly recommend. It’s really good.

SR

Very well done. I think, you know, it was not done by me, but it’s been it’s very well…

MM

Whoever they found understands what you’re trying to do with the language too, because one of the things I needed from Midnight’s Children, I needed to have something that felt fresh and alive and not. You have a different relationship to Passage to India than I do, and the Forster novel and I probably should revisit it as an adult. I have not read it in quite some time. But I mean, Forster is a man of his time and his language is of his end and I just I need Did that bounce in that kinetic energy and that life that you get when you read Midnight’s Children, and it’s a page turner, but it’s a literary novel, I mean, stuff happens.

SR

I was lucky that I met Forster, I was at King’s College, Cambridge. And he was, he was in residence, if he was 91, I was 19. And we’ve had two or three small meetings in which because of his interest in India, interested in me as having of Indian origin. And, I mean, he was a very, very nice and actually very modest man. But I thought like, Okay, I kind of touched the hem of his garment, you know. But what I felt is that, that Forsterian English doesn’t sound like the place that I knew, you know, the place that I knew was hot, and noisy and loud, and everything at once and too much. I could How do you make that English? English that feels like that. And an English I want an English that doesn’t feel English. And that’s what was the effort of Midnight’s Children is to find that language. And all some of that comes out of street language. Some of it just comes out of the way I remember people speaking around me as I was growing up, finding a literary version of that written down version of that. But it changed my life that book and gave me the ability to live as a writer. And I’ve made my name very fond feelings of it.

MM

I love the fact too, that you turned to Philip Roth for inspiration for that book, The his mix of Yiddish and English and his work and you’re just like, Well, if he can do it, and Joseph Heller Catch 22 and Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the 100 Years of Solitude, the idea that you were pulling from global traditions to create this thing that is so wildly you and so wildly India and you know, unfortunately, it is slightly dated. If you look at where India is going now it doesn’t feel like it quite sings with possibility the way it did when it came out.

SR

It was wonderfully well received. Yeah, but if there was a criticism of it, one or two people made it they said that the ending felt too pessimistic. I think if you compare what actually happened, to Midnight’s Children, the ending feels absurdly optimistic. So that’s what history does, it sort of changes that. But yeah, I mean, I’ve been asked, I don’t know how many times if I would ever write a sequel to it. But I think you know, no, I mean, I’m not a Charles Dickens always had a desire to know what happened to his characters after the end of the story. And he would often write like, postscripts, in which he told you what happened to everybody, including the pets. And I don’t have that. I think once I’ve finished the book, I have no further knowledge of those characters. And actually, no further interest in those characters.

MM

All of that makes sense to me. Because Midnight’s Children, it’s an entire world between two jackets, right? Like, that’s why I read, I read because I need to touch things that aren’t just down the street for me. But you have recently said that Midnight’s Children as a young man’s book, and you don’t particularly write like that anymore. And I was wondering what you meant, because I feel like that energy is still, especially in the newer novels like Victory City and Quichotte that it’s there.

SR

Yeah, it’s harder to get that’s what it is. Okay. I mean, I don’t think I’ve got another 600-page book in me. I mean, the version had been natural, and you’ve got is, I mean, it was longer. I mean, it was longer before I submitted it, I took stuff out. And interestingly, some of the excise material is now in my archives or at Emory University. I remember going to look at the box with manuscripts and Midnight’s Children and I saw all these pages, which were crossed out, you know, quite a lot, that at some point, I had just drawn a line through them. I heard looking at them, I thought, what’s wrong with this? This is pretty good. So there actually is material there, which I don’t know, maybe I was wrong to cut it, but too late now.

MM

I don’t know. Could we do an annotated by your hand version? I don’t think Random House would disagree.

SR

Yeah, I think one of these days when I have a minute that would like to actually go back into the Emory archive and sit with all that material. Hmm, I mean, they have the manuscript. But they also have all this other stuff. earlier, earlier material. And as I say, all these pages crossed out. And I wouldn’t mind having a real careful look through those, there might be some some stuff.

MM

I would really like you to have a look through that manuscript also because one of the things I was looking at as I was prepping for this conversation, Abdulrazak Gurnah edited a Cambridge University companion to you. And did I read it? Yes, I did. Because I love that man. And I was just like, You know what, I just want to see what all this is about. And it was kind of fun to approach your work from a purely academic standpoint.

SR

He did it completely off alone. But you know, went on to win the Nobel Prize. So I’m very happy that he did it. And I’m very happy that it exists. 

MM

It’s a very fun read when you’re doing homework. And I love the idea that you’re canon, your work is canon. Yeah, yes. You’re canon, you are taught in lots and lots of places. And I just I love the idea that you’re the one who’s, you know, you got tapped. 

SR

I don’t have to wait. You know, if you’re my kind of writer, you want to write books that will endure. I mean, that’s it for me, that was always an enormous part of it. Because the books that I love, many of them are books that have endured. I mean, I have got past the point of reading to keep up. You know, I don’t, I don’t read this year’s big thing. I read — The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is fantastic. But I’m more likely to be reading Madame Bovary or Kafka than this year’s big book. All those books have in common that they that they endured. And it struck me that the only reason books endure, is that people love them. It’s the only reason, you know, whatever else, scandal, anything like that all goes away. The survival of a book is always driven by the people who love it. And I thought, if that happens to one or two of my books, I’d be very — I wouldn’t be around to see it, but my ghost will be very happy.

MM

And there’s some younger readers like me who have grown up with you. So we’re pretty excited that they’re sticking around as well. 

SR

I love it when Children, is what it’s 40 odd years old, and still finds readers. That feels, I feel very happy about that, because that means it skipped already gone into maybe two generations, at least onwards. So it’s got a shot.

MM

Well, I mean, you’ve said this multiple times, as well. But you know, not only does art challenge orthodoxy, art is not a luxury. And I think books are kind of the ultimate example of that.

SR

I would absolutely agree. And I think, you know, when I was working in advertising, there was a campaign I remember, for a manufacturer, manufacturer of glass. imagine life without glass, and he just showed photographs of the world with all the glass removed. And it looked like jail. And I thought, Well imagine life without art. Imagine life with no music, with no pictures, with no stories. What would that be like? And, and I think when you think about it like that you realize that we whether we know it or not consciously or not, we all consume art at some level every day. And it’s really an important part of how we are in the world. And, and also, it tells us the story of ourselves. That’s what literature does, better than anything else.

MM

And that seems like the perfect place to end this conversation. Salman Rushdie thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over, Knife is out. Now obviously there is a delightful backlist, but Quichotte and Victory City are definitely out in paperback, Midnight’s Children if somehow you have not. I highly, highly recommend. Thank you so much.

SR

Thank you very much. I really have enjoyed this