Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

by Salman Rushdie

Overview

Newly collected, revised, and expanded nonfiction from the first two decades of the twenty-first century—including many texts never previously in print—by the Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author

Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as “a master of perpetual storytelling” (The New Yorker), illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.

Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a human need, and what emerges is, in myriad ways, a love letter to literature itself. Rushdie explores what the work of authors from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison mean to him, whether on the page or in person. He delves deep into the nature of “truth,” revels in the vibrant malleability of language and the creative lines that can join art and life, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism, and censorship.

Enlivened on every page by Rushdie’s signature wit and dazzling voice, Languages of Truth offers the author’s most piercingly analytical views yet on the evolution of literature and culture even as he takes us on an exhilarating tour of his own exuberant and fearless imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593133194
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/12/2022
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	452,692
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America. His books have been translated into over forty languages.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

June 19, 1947

Place of Birth:

Bombay, Maharashtra, India

Education:

M.A. in History, King's College, University of Cambridge

Read an Excerpt

Wonder Tales

1

Before there were books, there were stories. At first the stories weren’t written down. Sometimes they were even sung. Children were born, and before they could speak, their parents sang them songs, a song about an egg that fell off a wall, perhaps, or about a boy and a girl who went up a hill and fell down it. As the children grew older, they asked for stories almost as often as they asked for food. Now there was a goose that laid golden eggs, or a boy who sold the family cow for a handful of magic beans, or a naughty rabbit trespassing on a dangerous farmer’s land. The children fell in love with these stories and wanted to hear them over and over again. Then they grew older and found those stories in books. And other stories that they had never heard before, about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole, or a silly old bear and an easily scared piglet and a gloomy donkey, or a phantom tollbooth, or a place where wild things were. They heard and read stories and they fell in love with them, Mickey in the night kitchen with magic bakers who all looked like Oliver Hardy, and Peter Pan, who thought death would be an awfully big adventure, and Bilbo Baggins under a mountain winning a riddle contest against a strange creature who had lost his precious, and the act of falling in love with stories awakened something in the children that would nourish them all their lives: their imagination.

The children fell in love with stories easily and lived in stories too; they made up play stories every day, they stormed castles and conquered nations and sailed the ocean blue, and at night their dreams were full of dragons. They were all storytellers now, makers of stories as well as receivers of stories. But they went on growing up and slowly the stories fell away from them, the stories were packed away in boxes in the attic, and it became harder for the former children to tell and receive stories, harder for them, sadly, to fall in love. For some of them, stories began to seem irrelevant, unnecessary: kids’ stuff. These were sad people, and we must pity them and try not to think of them as stupid boring philistine losers.

I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, that the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. As adults, falling in love less easily, we may end up with only a handful of books that we can truly say we love. Maybe this is why we make so many bad judgments.

Nor is this love unconditional or eternal. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song. When, as a college student, I first read Günter Grass’s great novel The Tin Drum, I was unable to finish it. It languished on a shelf for fully ten years before I gave it a second chance, whereupon it became one of my favorite novels of all time: one of the books I would say that I love. It is an interesting question to ask oneself: Which are the books that you truly love? Try it. The answer will tell you a lot about who you presently are.

I grew up in Bombay, India, a city that is no longer, today, at all like the city it once was and has even changed its name to the much less euphonious Mumbai, in a time so unlike the present that it feels impossibly remote, even fantastic: a real-life version of the mythic golden age. Childhood, as A. E. Housman reminds us in “The Land of Lost Content,” often also called “Blue Remembered Hills,” is the country to which we all once belonged and will all eventually lose:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

In that far-off Bombay, the stories and books that reached me from the West seemed like true tales of wonder. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” with its splinters of magic mirror that entered people’s bloodstreams and turned their hearts to ice, was even more terrifying to a boy from the tropics, where the only ice was in the refrigerator. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” felt especially enjoyable to a boy growing up in the immediate aftermath of the British Empire. And there was Huckleberry Finn, irresistible to a Bombay boy because of its hero’s extraordinary freedom of action, though I was puzzled about why, if the runaway slave Jim was trying to escape the world of slavery and get to the non-slave-owning North, did he get onto a raft on the Mississippi, which flows south?

Perhaps tales of elsewhere always feel like fairy tales, and certainly it is one of the great wonders of literature that it opens up many “elsewheres” to us, from the Little Mermaid’s underwater world to Dorothy’s Oz, and makes them ours. But for me, the real wonder tales were closer to home, and I have always thought it my great good fortune as a writer to have grown up steeped in them.

Some of these stories were sacred in origin, but because I grew up in a nonreligious household, I was able to receive them simply as beautiful stories. This did not mean I did not believe them. When I heard about the samudra manthan, the tale of how the great god Indra churned the Milky Way, using the fabled Mount Mandara as his churning stick, to force the giant ocean of milk in the sky to give up its nectar, amrita, the nectar of immortality, I began to see the stars in a new way. In that impossibly ancient time, my childhood, a time before light pollution made most of the stars invisible to city dwellers, a boy in a garden in Bombay could still look up at the night sky and hear the music of the spheres and see with humble joy the thick stripe of the galaxy there. I imagined it dripping with magic nectar. Maybe if I opened my mouth, a drop might fall in and then I would be immortal too.

This is the beauty of the wonder tale and its descendant, fiction: that one can simultaneously know that the story is a work of imagination, which is to say untrue, and believe it to contain profound truth. The boundary between the magical and the real, at such moments, ceases to exist.

We were not Hindus, my family, but we believed the great stories of Hinduism to be available to us also. On the day of the annual Ganpati festival, when huge crowds carried effigies of the elephant-headed deity Ganesh to the water’s edge at Chowpatty Beach to immerse the god in the sea, Ganesh felt as if he belonged to me too; he felt like a symbol of the collective joy and, yes, unity of the city rather than a member of the pantheon of a “rival” faith. When I learned that Ganesh’s love of literature was so great that he sat at the feet of India’s Homer, the sage Vyasa, and became the scribe who wrote down the great Mahabharata epic, he belonged to me even more deeply; and when I grew up and wrote a novel about a boy called Saleem with an unusually big nose, it seemed natural, even though Saleem came from a Muslim family, to associate the narrator of Midnight’s Children with the most literary of gods, who just happened to have a big trunk of a nose as well. The blurring of boundaries between religious cultures in that old, truly secularist Bombay now feels like one more thing that divides the past from India’s bitter, stifled, censorious, sectarian present.

The Mahabharata and its sidekick, the Ramayana, two of the longest wonder tales of all, are still alive in India, alive in the minds of Indians and relevant to their daily lives, in the way the gods of the Greeks and Romans were once alive in Western imaginations. Once, and not so long ago, it was possible in the lands of the West to allude to the story of the shirt of Nessus, and people would have known that the dying centaur Nessus tricked Deianira, the wife of Heracles or Hercules, into giving her husband his shirt, knowing it was poisoned and would kill him. Once, everyone knew that after the death of Orpheus, greatest of poets and singers, his severed head continued to sing. These images and many others were available, as metaphors, to help people understand the world. Art does not die when the artist dies, said Orpheus’s head. The song survives the singer. And the shirt of Nessus warned us that even a very special gift may be dangerous. Another such gift, of course, was the Trojan horse, which taught us all to fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts. Some metaphors of the wonder tales of the West have managed to survive.

But in India, as I grew up, the wonder tales all lived, and they still do. Nowadays it isn’t even necessary to read the full Ramayana or Mahabharata; some may be grateful for this news, because the Mahabharata is the longest poem in world literature, over two hundred thousand lines long, which is to say ten times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey put together, while the Ramayana runs to around fifty thousand lines, merely two and a half times as long as the combined works of Homer. Fortunately for younger readers, the immensely popular comic-book series Amar Chitra Katha, “immortal picture stories,” offers adept renderings of tales from both.

Table of Contents

Part 1

Wonder Tales 3

Proteus 30

Heraclitus 47

Another Writer's Beginnings 62

Part 2

Philip Roth 85

Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five 101

Samuel Beckett's Novels 111

Cervantes and Shakespeare 117

Gabo and I 120

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) 133

Introduction to the Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV 143

Autobiography and the Novel 148

Adaptation 166

Notes on Sloth: From Saligia to Oblomov 183

Hans Christian Andersen 195

King of the World by David Remnick 199

Very Well Then I Contradict Myself 205

Truth 211

Courage 215

Texts for Pen 220

1 The Pen and the Sword 220

2 The Birth of Pen World Voices 224

3 The Arthur Miller Lecture, 2012 226

4 Pen World Voices Opening Night 2014 230

5 Pen World Voices Opening Night 2017 234

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) 237

The Liberty Instinct 243

Osama Bin Laden 257

Ai Weiwei and Others 261

The Half-Woman God 265

Nova Southeastern University Commencement Address, 2006 274

Emory University Commencement Address, 2015 279

Part 4

The Composite Artist: The Emperor Akbar and the Making of the Hamzanama 285

Amrita Sher-Gil: Letters 302

Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003) 309

Being Francesco Clemente: Self-Portraits, Gagosian Gallery, London, 2005 312

Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Whitney Museum, New York, 2007 319

Kara Walker at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2009 325

Sebastiao Salgado 328

The Unbeliever's Christmas 331

Carrie Fisher 335

Pandemic: A Personal Engagement with the Coronavirus 339

The Proust Questionnaire: Vanity Fair 351

About these Texts 353

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Languages of Truth

“Mesmerizing . . . Rushdie’s writing is erudite and full of sympathy, brimming with insight and wit: ‘Literature has never lost sight of what our quarrelsome world is trying to force us to forget. Literature rejoices in contradiction.’ Rushdie’s fans will be delighted.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Wide-ranging nonfiction pieces by the distinguished novelist, unified by his commitment to artistic freedom and his adamant opposition to censorship in any form. . . . This collection . . . showcases his generous spirit, dedicated to illuminating the work of fellow artists and defending their right to unfettered creativity. . . . Engagingly passionate, and endlessly informative: a literary treat.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Praise for Salman Rushdie

“He is a legend. . . . His is not only an enviable talent, it’s a revelatory mind [displaying] a profound knowledge of history, culture, human frailty, and triumph.”—Toni Morrison

“One of the greatest writers of our age . . . a giant of literature.”—Neil Gaiman

“Rushdie is our Scheherazade.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian

“A master of metamorphosis—transforming life, art and language in the subterranean maze of his imagination.”—Don DeLillo

“A storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up whole geographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air.”—The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

★ 02/01/2021

“Before there were books, there were stories,” writes Rushdie (Quichotte) in this mesmerizing collection. In the first of four sections, Rushdie explores how the “stories we fall in love with make us who we are”: “Wonder Tales” sees him praising fiction for containing “profound truths.” The second section focuses on writers: both Cervantes and Shakespeare, Rushdie writes, showed that fiction could be “many things at the same time.” A piece about playwright Harold Pinter, a staunch friend of Rushdie’s who stood up for him during the furor over his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, highlights Pinter’s notorious disdain for explaining his work. The third recounts Rushdie’s work as president of PEN America: in “Courage,” he challenges the notion that “writers, scholars, and artists who stand against orthodoxy or bigotry are to blame for upsetting people.” The final section assembles Rushdie’s writing on the visual arts, as in an essay on painter Amrita Sher-Gil’s “ferocity of mind.” (Rushdie’s answers to the famous Proust questionnaire caps things off.) Rushdie’s writing is erudite and full of sympathy, brimming with insight and wit: “Literature has never lost sight of what our quarrelsome world is trying to force us to forget. Literature rejoices in contradiction.” Rushdie’s fans will be delighted. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2020

Collecting pieces he wrote in the first two decades of the 21st century, some never before published, Booker Prize winner Rushdie surveys issues of migration, multiculturalism, and censorship in a tumultuous time. He also peers at favorite writers, from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison, and considers the very nature of truth.

Library Journal

The narration of these essays, revised speeches, reviews, and ephemera begins with Rushdie himself, who perhaps wanted his own voice—British inflected and cultured—to tell the stories of the “wonder books” of his Bombay youth that influenced his “fabulist” fiction. His finely honed narration style allows him to move smoothly from wit to wisdom. British actor Raj Ghatak then takes over in a magisterial tone, giving a thoughtful performance and capturing Rushdie’s varied preoccupations and passions: literature, art, friends, and a rich helping of literary soul mates, such as Harold Pinter, Philip Roth, and Samuel Beckett. He writes movingly about his experience with the COVID-19 virus. This collection, written between 2003 and 2020, reveals a keen observer and an eloquent writer. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

JULY 2021 - AudioFile

The narration of these essays, revised speeches, reviews, and ephemera begins with Rushdie himself, who perhaps wanted his own voice—British inflected and cultured—to tell the stories of the “wonder books” of his Bombay youth that influenced his “fabulist” fiction. His finely honed narration style allows him to move smoothly from wit to wisdom. British actor Raj Ghatak then takes over in a magisterial tone, giving a thoughtful performance and capturing Rushdie’s varied preoccupations and passions: literature, art, friends, and a rich helping of literary soul mates, such as Harold Pinter, Philip Roth, and Samuel Beckett. He writes movingly about his experience with the COVID-19 virus. This collection, written between 2003 and 2020, reveals a keen observer and an eloquent writer. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

JULY 2021 - AudioFile

★ 2021-02-08
Wide-ranging nonfiction pieces by the distinguished novelist, unified by his commitment to artistic freedom and his adamant opposition to censorship in any form.

Rushdie sets the tone in the opening essay of this stimulating collection, culled from various lectures, journalism, and introductions to books and exhibition catalogs (all “thoroughly revised”). “Before there were books, there were stories,” writes the author: Fiction was born from folktales, fables, and mythology, and the modern works Rushdie most admires share with those “wonder tales” an understanding that “injecting the fabulous into the real [makes] it more vivid and strangely, more truthful.” In Parts 1 and 2, the author ranges across world mythology; the two great progenitors of modern literature, Cervantes and Shakespeare; and their 20th-century successors, including Vonnegut, Roth, Márquez, Beckett, and Pinter. All underscore Rushdie’s point that conventional realism is insufficient to capture life’s endless variety and strangeness. Part 3 engages with the political and social battles of our day, “when reality itself seems everywhere under attack.” As the victim of attacks over allegedly blasphemous content inThe Satanic Verses, Rushdie notes the essential similarity of Islamic and right-wing Christian fundamentalism, eloquently affirming the democratic values of pluralism, secularism, and tolerance. In several pieces about his work with PEN, where he established and served for a decade as chairman of the World Voices International Literary Festival, the author once again draws connections among artistic, political, and civil liberties and celebrates the international solidarity of artists. Part 4 spotlights the visual arts, from the 16th-century series of hundreds of paintings chronicling the “Adventures of Hamza,” a pinnacle of Mughal art, to Hungarian Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil and African American artist Kara Walker. Moving tributes to departed friends Christopher Hitchens and Carrie Fisher capture the warmth underlying their famed acerbity, wit, and rage—qualities Rushdie has been known to exhibit himself. This collection, however, showcases his generous spirit, dedicated to illuminating the work of fellow artists and defending their right to unfettered creativity.

Formidably erudite, engagingly passionate, and endlessly informative: a literary treat.

Kirkus Reviews