Wed, Jul 16, 2008 page14

• ‘I wasn’t in favor of the fatwa, you see’

  Readers have voted Salman Rushdie’s novel ‘Midnight’s Children’their favorite Booker prize-winner of all time.
  He talks about ‘The Satanic Verses’ and surviving a call for his murder issued by Iran’s supreme ruler
  

  • By Stuart Jeffries / THE GUARDIAN
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  Salman Rushdie is sitting at the desk of Rabbi Judith Lazarus Siegal sipping Grey Goose vodka. This seems the wrong thing to do in a Jewish temple, but apparently it isn’t: another rabbi drops by to suggest that he gets his juicer and we make daiquiris. The author politely declines: he takes his vodka neat. It’s a literary thing. “Vikram Seth apparently likes a clear drink in his glass too when he gives readings,” says Rushdie, “though in his case I believe it’s gin.”

  Rushdie is waiting in Rabbi Siegal’s office at the Temple Judea in suburban Miami to give a reading. It’s the 25th date of a 29-city US book tour to promote his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. The original bookshop venue was too small for the crowd they are expecting. “After J.K. Rowling, I guess I’m the biggest literary turn from the UK,” he says. Tomorrow night he will be in Milwaukee, then Chicago then Madison, Wisconsin. Each night, it is the same deal: a 20-minute reading and then some Q and A. “It used to be an hour of reading, but there isn’t the patience for that anymore.”

  Questions, he says, recur. Any tips for young writers? Does he consider himself, as an Anglo-Indian novelist, to be subverting the Eurocentric literary canon? What’s the deal with that whole fatwa thing? Rushdie will be glad when it’s over. “I have always thought,” he says, “the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he’s written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.”

  

  PHOTO: AFP

  That secret purpose is working on Rushdie. Later this month, he will start writing a new novel. “I’m thinking of writing a children’s book. My younger son is 11, which is the age my older son was when I wrote a book for him, so now Milan is saying: ‘Where’s my book?’”

  I don’t believe Rushdie hates book tours. He gets a buzz from all this. He likes how, on the way to the reading, a Costa Rican bellhop called George shakes his hand firmly and says it’s a great honor to meet a “real, live genius.” Who wouldn’t? He loves doing the jokey warm-up routine before the reading. He probably isn’t disappointed that in the front row are lots of women clutching copies of his book that they yearn to get signed later. Why shouldn’t Rushdie revel in this approval after spending the best part of his literary career under a very real threat of being murdered?

  He even seems to get a weird kick from signing books. “You know what,” he told me earlier as we rode the lift down from his hotel suite on the 32nd floor, “I beat Jimmy Carter in his home state.” How so? “I signed 475 copies in an hour when I was in Atlanta. But that was nothing. In Nashville, I signed 1,000 copies in an hour, which I think is a record.”

  

  PHOTO: AFP

  And there is more to celebrate. He has just won an award called the Best of the Booker to mark the 40th year of the Booker prize. Confusingly, it is the third time he and his novel Midnight’s Children have been honored with a Booker-related gong.

  In 1981, the post-colonial, postmodern magical-realist novel about the birth of India and the death of the British Raj won the Booker prize, catapulting Rushdie to fame and enabling him to quit his job in an ad agency.

  The book became a global bestseller. “I got a £1,500 advance.” That’s rubbish, I suggest. “I know. I fired my agent.”

  In 1993, to celebrate the Booker prize’s 25th year, Midnight’s Children was chosen as the “Booker of Bookers” by a jury of three former chairs of judges. “They included Bill Webb (the former literary editor of the Guardian in London) and Malcolm Bradbury. Malcolm, when he was chair of judges in 1981, had not voted for Midnight’s Children, so go figure.” Go figure: now a resident of New York, Rushdie the cultural chameleon is really mastering those Americanisms.

  For the Best of Booker, three judges selected a shortlist of six previous Booker winners — Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988), J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974) and Midnight’s Children — and then the public voted on their favorite. Rushdie won by a huge margin.

  Some critics (including Neel Mukherjee in a Guardian blog) poured scorn on this award, suggesting it is worthless and typifies the British tendency to rank every last little thing by means of increasingly fatuous democratic votes. But Rushdie is pleased to win it. He will not collect the award in person but has deputed his sons Zafar and Milan to do so. “What’s especially gratifying is that more than 50 percent of those who voted for Midnight’s Children are under 35,” he says. “The book has leaped the generations, which is wonderful for me. I feared it might just be a topical book about the birth of India and that it wouldn’t endure. The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.”

  But, reading the novel for the first time in a quarter of a century as I crossed the Atlantic, I was struck by the confidence of the then 33-year-old Rushdie’s writing and the virtuosic handling of narrative switchbacks and subversions. That said, I do not tell Rushdie that I also watched an in-flight episode of Peep Show in which Mark Corrigan seems to sum up many people’s misgivings about the book when he tells a date: “Good luck with Midnight’s Children. Nobody ever finishes it.”

  “I wasn’t confident at all when I wrote Midnight’s Children,” counters Rushdie. “It was all just a trick. My first novel [Grimus, from 1975] had done less than zero and had been trashed. I had four or five other unpublishable novels too, so I felt like a failed writer. At the time, Ian [McEwan], Martin [Amis] and Julian [Barnes] had had great successes. All my contemporaries were like Ferraris, leaving me at the starting grid.”

  But something good did come out of his failure of a literary debut. Rushdie spent the £700 advance from that book on leaving London and touring the country of his birth. The trip catalyzed his imagination. There he realized that the cool prose that “Indian writers such as R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai and others” had appropriated from E.M. Forster was not enough to capture the country. More importantly, he realized he could write something that would “presumptuously and self-defeatingly” try to capture India’s polymorphous spirit in a single book.

  “Don’t get me wrong — I love Forster. In fact I knew him at King’s [College, Cambridge] when I was there. He served me tea and I recognized him as someone brave enough to have been anti-imperialist in A Passage to India. But the Forsterian way of writing coolly and classically did not match the India I saw. It wasn’t cool, it was hot. It’s a country where, even if you’re in a rural area, you’re never alone. I wanted to write the literary equivalent of a crowd. So it was a trick, a deliberate attempt to have too much incident so that you feel pushed this way and that, as if you’re in a crowd.”

  Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on June 19, 1947; his book dramatizes the simultaneous births of India and his novel’s hero Saleem Sinai at midnight on Aug. 15 of that year. Midnight’s Children has had an afterlife: younger Indian novelists such as Booker-winner Kiran Desai and Rana Dasgupta have been profoundly influenced by his novel, he argues. “And then there’s Amit Chaudhari. Barely a week goes by without Amit taking a swipe at Midnight’s Children. So it has been influential even among those who hate it.”

  For all that, it is hardly his best-known novel. It was his fourth, The Satanic Verses, that made him the world’s most celebrated, if beleaguered, novelist. The novel was deemed to be so hostile to Islam that it provoked Iran’s supreme ruler Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa in 1988 calling for Rushdie to be killed. There was a failed attempt on his life, and others linked to the book were attacked, among them his Japanese translator, who was stabbed to death by, Rushdie believes, Iranian terrorists who entered Japan from China.

  Rushdie jokes about the fatwa with the audience at Temple Judea during his warm-up routine. “I don’t want to dispute with Ayatollah Khomeini, but I will point out that only one of us is dead. That thing they say about the pen being mightier than the sword? Don’t mess with novelists.”

  How can Rushdie joke about the fatwa, I ask him? “Well, because what happened to me was not funny it was assumed that I’m not funny. From some of the circumstances of the attack, it was assumed that because the criticisms of my book were arcane and theological, my work must be arcane and theological. So there is a point to joking: to show that I was misrepresented during the fatwa period. I am funny, and so are my books!”

  It is perhaps trite, though true, to point out that since 1999’s operation on a tendon condition that had made his eyelids hang heavily, Rushdie no longer looks severe or supercilious, no more are his eyes sternly hooded. Instead, he looks puckishly young as he tells the audience of his pleasure in no longer being in the papers for the wrong reasons. “Martin Amis once said to me, ‘You have vanished on to the front page.’ Well, it’s been a long journey from the front pages back to the book pages, but I’m very glad to be there.”

  Rushdie speaks of the fatwa period as though it were over. And, indeed, in 1998 at the UN, the then Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi told Robin Cook, the UK foreign secretary, that Iran would restrain itself from threatening Rushdie’s life. But many clerics, Iranian legislators and others have subsequently renewed calls for his murder. When Rushdie was knighted last year, there were huge demonstrations in Pakistan and Malaysia calling for his death, while al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri is quoted as saying it was planning “a very precise response” to the honor, which he considered an “insult to Islam.”

  At Temple Judea, one of the talk’s organizers recalls that when Rushdie visited Miami to promote The Moor’s Last Sigh in the mid-1990s, the event was a word-of-mouth affair for security reasons. Tonight the reading has been well publicized. But the light security arrangements are a surprise: three police cruisers are parked outside the temple. Maybe — just maybe — the opprobrium for Rushdie is diminishing. Rushdie was heartened that when, six months ago, a German theater company staged a version of The Satanic Verses, “people came, saw the play, liked it or hated it and went home. Nothing happened. I liked that.

  “I wasn’t in favor of the fatwa, you see,” he says, with mordant understatement. “In general, writers shouldn’t be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions. It is horrible and frightening and unexpected, and because you wrote the book, you feel responsible for the fear the fatwa created for people I cared about. My mother was living in Pakistan at the time. Several people who I counted close colleagues were killed. This was a very, very serious assault not just on principles but on individual human lives.”

  Rushdie recalls the 1989 assassination attempt on his Norwegian publisher William Nygaard, who was shot outside his flat and left for dead. “I rang him in his hospital in Oslo. Had he not been very fit — he had been an Olympic skier for Norway — he would have died. I felt I needed to apologize because, as I told him, I think those bullets were meant for me. What did he say? This was a man on the edge of death, with three bullets in his spine. He said: ‘I’m a grown-up person and I knew what I was doing in publishing this book.’ And then he said something wonderful: ‘By the way, I’ve just ordered a reprint.’ So I have been able to witness the amazing courage of other people.”

  What does he think of the stance of his good friends Martin Amis and Ian McEwan on Islam? Amis described moderate Islam as “supine and inaudible” in the face of what he called “Islamism.” He was also quoted in a newspaper interview as saying that he felt an “urge” to favor “discriminatory stuff” against Muslims living in the UK “until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.” Last month, McEwan joined the fray, telling a newspaper interviewer: “I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on.”

  Does he agree there should be discrimination against Muslims? “I don’t think there should be discrimination against anyone. Nor do I think Martin was advocating that. The point is this: I don’t have to agree with what you or anybody says to defend their right to say it. To have Martin articulating a public fear in this rather knockabout way was justified. If we don’t say what we think or articulate what is being generally thought, then we are self-censoring, which is wimpish.”

  “What pleases me, though, is that at least in Britain there is still the possibility of literary people writing on current affairs. Here [in the US], that’s much less true. Who wouldn’t have wanted to read Joan Didion’s take on Hillary Clinton, or Don DeLillo writing about the US election? In the past, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal could be public intellectuals, but there is much less scope for that now.”

  But Rushdie has been one of those public intellectuals in the US. In 2005, he wrote a piece for the Washington Post, arguing: “What is needed is a move beyond tradition, nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.”

  In his new novel, there is a barely concealed yearning among many of its characters for free expression, tolerance and sexual freedom and hedonism — ideas that he considers to be as much of the East as of the West. He even allows the emperor Akbar to muse, Lennon-like, on a world without religion. “If there hadn’t been a god,” says Akbar, “it might have been easier to work out what goodness is.”

  The book flits between Mughal India and Renaissance Florence. “It’s about the moment the East and West first engage. It’s about what Spielberg would call close encounters of the third kind. Each was the other’s alien,” he explains. But Rushdie has taken liberties:

  “This is at the time when Vasco da Gama was in Kerala, when the Portuguese were establishing a foothold in Goa. The thing that interested me was that there was no one going from India to the West. That pricked my novelistic sense of perversity.”

  But it is not the novelistic perversity that is attracting attention. It is the sex. Four-times married, Rushdie has written a 10th novel that teems with raunchy scenes, much of it based on exhaustive research of Indian manuals. The book’s eponymous heroine is a woman variously known as Qara Koz and Lady Black Eyes. She is expert in seven types of unguiculation which is — as Rushdie puts it — “the use of the nails to enhance the act of love.” “I spent a lot of time doing the research, not just on Florentine history, Mughal history and not just into the Kama Sutra, but studying other texts about the erotic arts. It’s not all about gymnastic positions. There’s stuff in the novel based on research about brews and potions formulated to help one have 97 successive ejaculations.” I know what you’re thinking: only 97?

  One reviewer described Lady Black Eyes as a precursor to Carla Bruni, but surely there is a better comparison — namely with the model and actor Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie’s fourth wife, from whom he was divorced while he was writing The Enchantress of Florence.

  Last October, she published the couple’s first post-divorce book, a cookery text enticingly entitled Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet. Rushdie denies that his book, which dramatizes the travails of seductive beautiful women who break hearts and mastermind multiple orgasms across different continents, is a roman a clef. “It’s not at all,” he replies, “but you’re free to read it otherwise.”
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