Novelist Salman Rushdie at ‘The Eleventh Hour’

For more than three decades, author Salman Rushdie has lived under threat. In 1989, a fatwa forced him into hiding. In 2022, he was stabbed more than a dozen times while speaking on stage—and nearly killed. Less than two years later, he recounted the attack (and remarkable recovery) in his memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/738826/knife-by-salman-rushdie/. Now, at seventy-eight, Rushdie returns to fiction with The Eleventh Hour https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803572/the-eleventh-hour-by-salman-rushdie/, a collection of five interlinked stories that explore anger, peace, mortality, and legacy. We begin with the inspirations behind the new quintet (5:52), Rushdie’s formative, bookish years in Bombay (14:20), and the tumultuous family life that shaped his early writing (21:20). Then, he reflects on his time at Cambridge (29:30), his stint as a copywriter (35:32), and the lightbulb moment that led to his breakout novel, Midnight’s Children https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/158932/midnights-children-by-salman-rushdie/ (39:40). On the back half, we discuss the fatwa (50:15) and book burning of The Satanic Verses https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/323746/the-satanic-verses-by-salman-rushdie/ (53:30), threats to free speech (56:36), and the slippery slope of political censorship (1:04:30). We also talk about Rushdie’s recovery and return to the page (1:14:10), his meta Curb Your Enthusiasm appearance (1:08:37), and the lasting power of literature (1:24:00). Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, author Salman Rushdie. He broke through in 1981 with Midnight's Children, the Booker Prize-winning novel that reimagined India's independence through a blend of history, myth, and magical realism. The novel established Rushdie as an exciting new voice in the world of literature. He would then go on to write a series of other exceptional books, fiction and nonfiction alike, including Shame, Joseph Anton, Languages of Truth, and Victory City. But Rushdie's story has never existed solely on the page. On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, issued

• 1:20Sam Fragoso?

  a fatwa calling for his assassination. The decree condemned his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, as blasphemous, forcing the renowned author into hiding for nearly a decade. Eventually, Rushdie found freedom again, first in London, then in New York City, where for over 20 years he lived and worked freely, undimmed by the specter of violence. That was until the morning of August 12, 2022, when a radicalized 24-year-old man attacked Rushdie onstage at a literary festival in upstate New York. The assailant repeatedly stabbed the author, causing him to lose sight in one eye and the use of one of his hands, and nearly killing him in the process.

• 2:05Sam Fragoso?

  Less than two years later, the celebrated author took to the page and recounted the attack and remarkable recovery in a 2024 memoir entitled Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder. It's a chilling, clear-eyed account of what Rushdie endured and has since attempted to overcome alongside his wife, the writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths. But we begin today's episode with the writing itself, because his latest book, The Eleventh Hour, is his first work of fiction since the attack. It's also a remarkable collection of five interlinked stories, each exploring these ideas around anger, peace, mortality, and

• 2:46Sam Fragoso?

  legacy. As Rushdie says, there are two ways to write a good book. They can either be what he calls everything books, where the writer tries to put as much of the world as possible into the pages, a kind of kitchen sink approach, or you can make the almost nothing book, in which the writer takes one tiny, little, beautiful strand and turns it in the light to tell that story. So, well, this is, in the spirit of Rushdie's work itself, an everything episode. From his early memories of reading, how he found his footing as a young writer, and then, of course, the front-page controversies that followed. We also discussed the long shadow of the Satanic verses, the battles, new and old,

• 3:29Sam Fragoso?

  being fought over books and free expression, and why, at 78, after everything he's gone through, he believes a sense of humor is a key to his and, hell, maybe our, survival. So with that, I've been waiting to say this sentence for a long, long time on this show. Here is Salman Rushdie.

• 4:08Sam Fragoso?

  Salman, thank you for being here.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:12Sam Fragoso?

  I feel like the only place to start, especially given what's happened in the last few years for you, is how are you doing?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  I'm not so bad, you know?

• 4:21Sam Fragoso?

  You look sprightly.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Better than I should be, probably.

• 4:23Sam Fragoso?

  You walked in here and I thought, I think he has more energy than I do.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  It's a lie, but I pretend to. I think when you're young, you have to fake wisdom and when you're old, you have to fake energy.

• 4:38Sam Fragoso?

  In your second year of reading history at Cambridge, in 1966, the year you first learned of the Satanic Verses, you had a professor by the name of Arthur Hibbert, who said to you once, "You must never write history until you can hear the people speak." Is the same true of the novel?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  It's kind of the best advice I was ever given, although I never became a historian, as it turned out, although it was my university subject. But I thought it applied very well to writing fiction. Because, and actually even now, when I'm beginning to develop something, I ask myself, how do the people speak? You know, do they have a big vocabulary or do they have a limited vocabulary? Do they use bad language? Do they speak quickly or slowly? Are they articulate or are they inarticulate? There's a whole range of questions you can ask about how somebody speaks. What's their accent? Because, you know, in the UK, accent very often reveals social class. In America, it very often reveals race or region.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Just by making these choices, by the time you've made those choices, you really know who the character is.

• 5:48Sam Fragoso?

  So tell me, the people of the 11th hour, when did you begin to hear them speak?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Well, the books written over a period of time, I mean, the two short stories with which it begins and ends are older than the three long stories in the middle.

• 6:01Sam Fragoso?

  So the first story, which is a prologue, appeared in The New Yorker in 2009, and the last story, a kind of epilogue, appeared, I think, at the end of 2020.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you about that first story. What happened is that I was in South India. I was in the city that I still call Madras, but is now officially called Chennai. And I just, I met through friends. This very charming old gentleman, very old and very grumpy, but sort of deliciously grouchy. And I just kind of fell in love with him, but emphatic.

• 6:35Sam Fragoso?

  A little cantankerous.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Very enjoyably cantankerous. And so what I did in the end, when I was thinking about this story, is that I sliced him in half. I just thought, let's have two of him. And let's have them really quarreling with each other all the time, but actually secretly in love with each other. And so it became one, one person that I met became two people that I wrote about.

• 6:58Sam Fragoso?

  One of the book's recurring preoccupations is this idea of the shadow self. How would you describe what a shadow self is to people who are unfamiliar?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  If you're at all in the public eye, there's usually a self that's created for you by the media, by public response, et cetera. And then there's a private self, which is very often not really like that. I mean, Borges has this famous little text called Borges and I, in which he makes a distinction between the public and the private self. And a lot of writers have said, have done that. You know, I remember I used to know quite well the German writer Gunter Grass. And he said to me, he often, he often has the feeling that there was somebody called Gunter, who he knew and who is, who was married to his wife and who was the father of his children and the friend of his friends. And then there was somebody called Grass, who was out there in the world making trouble.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  And he said, you know, sometimes I send Grass out there to make a noise so I can stay home and do my work.

• 7:59Sam Fragoso?

  And, and is that how you see yourself? Who do you send out into the world?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Well, I'm trying not to anymore. But certainly what happened to me at the noisy part of my life, after the publication of The Satanic Verses. At that point, there were not just one, there were various versions of me being propagated by this or that interest group.

• 8:20Sam Fragoso?

  Right. When, when, when that happened in 1989.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:24Sam Fragoso?

  There was this decree. And your friend, the late Martin Amis famously said that you disappeared into the front page.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, vanished into the front page. Well, I've been spending a lot of my life since that day trying to get back onto the book pages. Get off the front page.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  I think I had made it quite well until a couple of, three years ago when this attack happened and I was shoved back onto the front pages. I hope for briefly, because one of the things I really hope that this book can do is to make people think about me as a writer again and not as somebody in the news for being stabbed.

• 9:02Sam Fragoso?

  Well, let's talk about you as a writer. In your last book Knife, there is a reference to The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:11Sam Fragoso?

  And I wondered if that was, to bring it back to the page here, if that was on your mind in writing The Eleventh Hour?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  That's all, ever since I read that story a very long time ago, because you know, people think of Hans Christian Andersen as a fable writer for younger readers, you know? But there's some of his stuff which isn't at all for younger readers. It's quite dark. And I think this story, The Shadow, is very, it's not at all a children's story. It's about, it's about a man who, whose shadow comes detached from him and leaves. The shadow leaves him and wanders off into the world. So the shadow leaves and the man, shadowless man, finds a girl, he's getting married, et cetera. The shadow returns a year later, having traveled the world, become very cosmopolitan and sophisticated. And the, the woman decides that she prefers the shadow to the man.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  And actually, they, they managed to arrange for the real man to be executed. And as he's waiting in, in his death cell, he can hear the wedding bells of his girl, his, his lover and the shadow. I just thought that's such an amazing story about how you, versions of yourself can succeed where you failed or fail where you succeeded.

• 10:24Sam Fragoso?

  And I think it's that text that inspires a page at the end of the prologue here from your new book, The Eleventh Hour. And I thought as we get started, we'd read from that a little bit.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Yes, well, this is where these two old gents, who I told you I, I split one character into two, they're both 81. And once a week, they walk to the post office to cash their pension slips. And that's what they're doing. And they're very cantankerous about that because young, young people in the family say, well, we'll go get, get it for you. You don't have to go all that way. But they take pride in the fact that they take this weekly walk. After that, a left turn, and then another hundred yards of walking. And then they would be at the post office. A five-minute journey for the young, half an hour each way, minimum for the two old men. The sun was behind them, and both men, inching slowly forward,

• 11:19Speaker 01

  were looking down at their shadows, which lay side by side upon the dusty pavement. Like lovers, they both thought. But neither of them spoke, their habit of opposition being too ingrained to permit them to express so fond an idea. Afterwards, Senior regretted that he had not spoken. "He was my shadow," he said to the woman with the wooden leg. That's his wife. "And I am his, two shadows, each shadowing the other. To that we were reduced, that is so. The old move through the world of the young like shades, unseen, of no concern. But the shadows see each other and know who they are. So it was with us.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  We knew, let me say this, who we were. And now I am a shadow without a shadow to shadow. He who knew me knows nothing now, and therefore I am not known. What else, woman, is death?" It's a kind of declaration of love. It's what he never felt able to say while the other was alive. And it allows the older, seventeen days older one who survived, to express a kind of love that he's never expressed while they were both alive.

• 12:39Sam Fragoso?

  The old and the young, these various versions of you on the page, they're reflected and refracted in so much of your writing, in which autobiography is often...

• 12:52Sam Fragoso?

  Almost reconstituted as fairy tale. And so I want to try to understand, to quote Midnight's Children, "The pell mell tumble of a brain in which everything ran into everything else." And to do that, I feel like we have to start in Bombay, back at Windsor Villa, right as the partition of British India begins in 1947. What does Lewis Carroll's Alice do for a young you?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  As a young person, I was very early on addicted to books. And I was a very bookish kid, unlike my sister, who was naughtier than me, had more fun, but I loved to read books. And now retrospectively, it's interesting to see what children's books made it into Bombay and what didn't. So Alice showed up, but Winnie the Pooh really didn't, you know? So there were these odd differences. And I read Winnie the Pooh, and I was grown up, much too old for it.

• 13:52Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think there was an expiration date on Winnie the Pooh?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  You know, I'm very fond of Winnie the Pooh, but not in the same way as of Alice.

• 13:59Sam Fragoso?

  This is gonna be the clip people take. They're gonna be like, that's

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Pooh Bear.

• 14:02Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. Something about the way you're saying Winnie the Pooh as well.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Well.

• 14:07Sam Fragoso?

  Coming from you.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Also, you know, all those little verses, halfway up the stairs is the step where I sit. There isn't another step quite like it. Years ago, when I finished a book and got a deal for it as a present to myself, I bought and I own an original Winnie the Pooh drawing.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Here's Pooh Bear with a little jar of honey, sitting on the branch of a tree with Piglet.

• 14:32Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  What could be funnier?

• 14:33Sam Fragoso?

  And so Alice?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Well, the thing I like about Alice is that she's very ornery. She's not actually a particularly sweet child. She's always telling people off. Yeah, she's in Wonderland, you know, she doesn't know the rules of where she is. She doesn't even know what size she is. She's either too big for everybody or too small. And yet, she's constantly scolding people. And I thought, that's somebody who knows her mind.

• 14:59Sam Fragoso?

  And as a young boy, that appealed to you.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  I loved it. I thought she's so sure of herself. Alice's certainty. There was another set of children's books by a writer called, I don't know he's very well-known in America, Arthur Ransom. Who wrote about children's books set in the Lake District of England, about two families who had little boats. And the thing that really impressed me, as with Alice, was how much personal freedom they had. They could go off without adults sailing on the lake. They could camp on an island in the middle of the lake. They had almost no adult supervision. And growing up in India, in a world which was much more supervised, I thought that was a fairy tale.

• 15:39Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  The freedom these children had. And same true of Alice, you know, as she wanders through Wonderland.

• 15:45Sam Fragoso?

  You mentioned your sister. When asked to describe a young you, she said, he's very straight and he's very honest. I think it's the honesty that has led him to do the things that he does.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  You know, I think writing requires great honesty. The reader can tell if the writer is faking it. All writing, I think, whatever technique it uses, whatever manner or style, et cetera, is a way of approaching the truth. And if that's not your plan, probably what you write isn't worth reading.

• 16:20Sam Fragoso?

  I heard you say once, honesty, not always the best policy in life, but in art, required.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, in life, we see all around us the enormous power of dishonesty. Dishonesty combined with the other great quality, which is shamelessness.

• 16:38Sam Fragoso?

  And how much of either do you have?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  None. I mean, for example, I'm unable to lie about a book. If I read a book and I don't like it. I mean, my family would all say, we can all tell when you're lying, because it shows on your face.

• 16:53Sam Fragoso?

  You, as a boy, did you kiss a book before you kissed a girl?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Yes, no question. I mean, because we were taught two things, that if you drop them on the ground, you have to kiss them when you pick them up. And they were books and bread, you know, food for the body and food for the soul, I guess. Those things were to be treasured. You know, you didn't treat these things lightly. There are some families in which the only book you would kiss, if it fell on the ground, would be a holy book. But in my family, it was drop any book on the ground, ask it to forgive you.

• 17:24Sam Fragoso?

  And would it?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, it's when the books are very kind.

• 17:28Sam Fragoso?

  In the past, you've described your childhood as, quote, "very untypically Indian." Well, what does that mean?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Well, for a start, that there was really not that much religion in it. You know, and that's pretty untypical in India. My father was lacking entirely in religious belief, although he was quite a scholar of it. I mean, he, unlike me, he knew and had studied Arabic and Farsi. And so he could read these texts in the original. My mother was maybe a little bit more religious than my father, but it really didn't extend much further than not eating the flesh of the swine. You know, no pigs was her religion.

• 18:07Sam Fragoso?

  That's where she drew the line.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:09Sam Fragoso?

  Did people from Bombay, did they think of themselves as being unlike people from elsewhere?

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think it's a quality of the metropolis, you know, and I think it's true of many metropolises. New York doesn't feel like America. Paris doesn't feel like France. Bombay doesn't feel like India. And one of the reasons is natures of the metropolis is how plural it is, how many different kinds of people are there. And in India, for example, if you are in Delhi, the people who are there are mostly from that region. And if you're in Calcutta, mostly Bengali speaking. If you're in Chennai, mostly Tamil speaking. If you're in Bombay, everybody's there. Everything north of Bombay is North India, everything south of Bombay is South India. And it becomes, because it's the great, the great engine of the economy, it attracts

• 19:01Speaker 01

  people from everywhere. So like in New York, you hear every language, you see people from, from all over the country, which even in other Indian cities you don't. So it feels special.

• 19:14Sam Fragoso?

  Part of you becoming a writer was not just that you loved reading, that your father loved reading to you and your sister.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Yes. My father had, amongst other things, in his library, a multi-volume edition of The Thousand and One Nights in the, in the notorious Richard Burton translation. Which is full of footnotes about sex. So he was very well versed in this storehouse of wonder tales that, that is available if you're growing up in that part of the world. The Thousand and One Nights, yes, but. But also the Indian versions, you know, there's a collection called The Ocean of the Streams of Story, Katha Sarath's Saga from Kashmir. There's the Panchatantra, animal fables. There are the great epics, you know, the Ramayan and the Mahabharata. And all of that is the seed for the kind of writer that I became.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And my first encounter with all of that was in my father's versions as bedtime stories.

• 20:11Sam Fragoso?

  You know, but it's funny, like the version of the writer you became, even now, you're describing only one half of it. Because there is another half. And I say that because even to this day, you and your sister have a blow up photo that your father took with his Rolodex.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:29Sam Fragoso?

  And it features you.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  And my two sisters.

• 20:32Sam Fragoso?

  Reading Peter Pan to them.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:34Sam Fragoso?

  And in knife, you write, "The photograph, a childhood ideal that masks the truth." So you've described the ideal. What was the truth?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Well, the truth was that my parents had a pretty difficult marriage and it was largely difficult because of my father's drinking problem. And my mother did her best when we were little to shield us from it. And, you know, even when we were in our bedroom at night, we could hear shouting and were aware of the fact that there was something dangerous about my father's anger. And it just got worse, you know, as we grew up. He was actually quite a good parent of little children. He was very entertaining and enjoyable and fun to be around in the daytime, not at night.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  As he got older, as we got older, that ceased to be so. He didn't know how to deal with us as grownups.

• 21:31Sam Fragoso?

  You know, as you got older, was the truth made clear to you or perhaps felt most acutely in those couple of weeks before you are sent to rugby school?

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:43Sam Fragoso?

  Because as a teenager, your father takes you up to England and the two of you check in to a double room at the Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch. Was it there that you saw what you had only heard behind the walls?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, it was a very. Shocking moment for me because we were sharing a room, as you say. And we were also sharing a room with Johnny Walker. And my father and Johnny Walker had a close relationship most evenings.

• 22:09Sam Fragoso?

  Was he closer to Johnny than than you?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, he was entirely locked into his private world in the evening. And then it would get bad because I would go to sleep. But he would have whiskey induced rages. And you'd shake me awake and and you and abuse me.

• 22:29Sam Fragoso?

  And say what?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Just use terrible language. I didn't even know that my father knew words like that.

• 22:35Sam Fragoso?

  Did he know that he was doing that?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Not then. I mean, he only knew when he sobered up the next day. But then he did it again.

• 22:41Sam Fragoso?

  So it was a kind of blackout?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was really a red rage.

• 22:45Sam Fragoso?

  And you had not seen that before?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  I'd never seen it. And I'd never seen it aimed at me. I mean, when I'd heard it, it was always aimed at my mother.

• 22:51Sam Fragoso?

  And how did she handle that?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it was very hard for her. I think, you know, she had quite a hard life because of that. I mean, she lived a long, he died not that old. He died at the age of seventy seven in back in nineteen eighty seven. And she lived another fifteen or sixteen years. But I think her life with him was hard.

• 23:12Sam Fragoso?

  When when he woke you up in the middle of the night, did you understand why he was doing?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 23:17Sam Fragoso?

  Did it make any sense to you?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  No, I was absolutely bewildered. And I guess what the word we would now use is traumatized. People didn't say that in those days. And I remember the day that he took me to the boarding school to send me to school. I couldn't wait for him to leave. There's a photograph of me looking pretty unhappy, which wearing my school uniform. And if you see the photograph, you think here's somebody who's unhappy about going to school. But no, I'm unhappy about the person taking the photograph and can't wait for him to leave. And that went on, I mean, a lot of our, a lot of my adult life, that attitude of alienation continued.

• 23:58Sam Fragoso?

  One of the things I assume you're most frustrated by in the aftermath of the Satanic Verses is that people didn't read the book.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  They didn't read the book. All the people who hated the book did so without troubling to open it.

• 24:10Sam Fragoso?

  Well, as someone who has read the book, there's a passage set in a hotel that I have not been able to stop thinking about since I read it. And in the interest of holding the text on this show, I'd love for you to read it, if you could.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Okay. Oh, I see, yes. Well, this is, the character is the father of the main character, which Chongge's Chamchawala is talking about. The father, Chongge's Chamchawala became very still in those days, seeming not to care if he ate or drank or did any damn thing. He was happy sitting in the hotel room watching television, especially when the Flintstones were on, because he told his son that Wilma Bibi reminded him of Nasrin, was his wife. Salaudin tried to prove he was a man by fasting right along with his father, trying to outlast him, but he never managed it. And when the pangs got too strong, he went out of the hotel to the cheap joint nearby

• 25:09Speaker 01

  where you could buy takeaway roast chickens that hung greasily in the window, turning slowly on their spits. When he brought the chicken into the hotel lobby, he became embarrassed, not wanting the staff to see. So he stuffed it inside double-breasted surge and went up in the lift reeking of spit roast, his macintosh bulging, his face turning red. Chicken-breasted beneath the gaze of dowagers and liftwallas, he felt the birth of that implacable rage which would burn within him, undiminished, for over a quarter of a century, which would boil away his childhood father-worship and make him a secular man, who would do his best thereafter to live without a god of any type,

• 25:52Speaker 01

  which would fuel perhaps his determination to become the thing his father was not, could never be. That is, a good and proper Englishman.

• 26:04Sam Fragoso?

  I found that very hard to read, and I neither lived it nor wrote it.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Well, you know, one of the things writing can do is to get to the pain. And all of us in life have pain. You know, you can't, you can't live a human life without it. And much of that pain is very deep and much of it comes from places where there should be love. And if you're any good, that's where you go. You know, you have, writing has to go for the blood. And when you get there... You know you're there, you know, and there are, there are moments. I mean, writing is not very easy. It's the hardest thing I know how to do. It's the only thing I know how to do. But when you get to that moment of

• 26:56Speaker 01

  human truth, that's where you want to be.

• 27:00Sam Fragoso?

  And the blood drawn in that scene? It reads and, and looks like what to you now?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  You know, that book is long ago now. So it, it feels a little bit long ago to me. When I finished that book, I was just forty. Now I'm

• 27:17Sam Fragoso?

  Forty one.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, now I'm forty one.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Uh, but I do think that it feels like a younger man's book. And I think that about Midnight Children too. I mean, I, you know, when, when I finished Midnight Children, I was thirty three. Uh, it's more than half my life ago. So I look at it, I think, oh, that's how you were then. That's, that's what was on your mind and that's what was eating you up. And that's what needed to get out of you then. But having done it, I don't need to do it anymore because I expressed it.

• 27:48Sam Fragoso?

  But as, as, as a young man, did you have that desire to become a good and proper Englishman?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  No, never. That's one way in which the character, which many people equate with the author, is not the author. Because one of the things I learned from my not very happy English boarding school experience was the, the experience of being the other. They were the English people. I was the not English person.

• 28:14Sam Fragoso?

  Right, so let me give some context. You go to this boarding school and when you're done, you have about, I think it's six months before you're off to Cambridge. And of course, you go to the page and you write your first short novel called Terminal Report. Now, this book cannot be found.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  It's lost.

• 28:35Sam Fragoso?

  It's lost.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Mercifully.

• 28:36Sam Fragoso?

  I tried. But if it were not lost, if it was to be excavated, what would some of the pages have sounded like?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Well, it was it was about it was written when I was eighteen years old. It's painfully autobiographical. There's no attempt to disguise anything. And it was about my last term at school, when I was just turning eighteen before I left. And so it was a report of that term. And all I remember about it, I mean, I'm sure it was absolutely terrible. Even in my brief memory of it, my very partial memory of it, I'm actually very grateful that it's lost.

• 29:17Sam Fragoso?

  But did it get anything right?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yes, what it got right was racial prejudice towards the me character from the other boys, my contemporaries.

• 29:27Sam Fragoso?

  Your time at school?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Time at rugby school.

• 29:29Sam Fragoso?

  And what did that look like?

• 29:31Speaker 01

  It looked like racism. It looked like racial abuse. And and I would find racist words written up on the wall of my little room. I would find on more than one occasion that somebody had come into my room when I wasn't there and torn up the work I'd been doing, had torn up my English essay. And one thing that I remember about that young person is that, you know, I came from a fairly conservative family, politically conservative, socially conservative.

• 29:59Sam Fragoso?

  And financially well off.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Financially well off. I mean, later my father lost all his money, but at that at that time, he had plenty. Yeah, he inherited a lot of money from my grandfather and basically lost it and then died. Anyway, at that time, yes, a quite well off family, but very culturally and socially conservative. And I had those attitudes. So there's a bit of me that feels very unlike that young self. But the thing that that young person knew everything about was racism, knew as much as I know now. But it was just, you know, it was very difficult being, I think things would be different now, but there were relatively few not white people there. I remember one or two other boys of Indian Pakistani.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Parentage. I remember one Palestinian boy, maybe one black. This is the school of a thousand children, thousand boys.

• 30:58Sam Fragoso?

  You said that the only thing Terminal Report got right, the only thing it understood, was that feeling of otherness.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:06Sam Fragoso?

  Did you begin then to figure out how to go about combating that?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  No, my initial response was when I left school and went back to see my family, was that I didn't want to go back to England. So you let me go to university here. I mean, I already had my place at Cambridge, but I didn't want to go.

• 31:25Sam Fragoso?

  Four years was enough.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and another bunch of years, I thought, no, thank you. And actually, my father persuaded me that I should give it a try.

• 31:34Sam Fragoso?

  How did he do that?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  We just talked to each other, you know, sometimes we, when we weren't fighting, we got on quite well.

• 31:42Sam Fragoso?

  When he wasn't the man taking the photograph that you were upset about?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Before he got into the evenings.

• 31:47Sam Fragoso?

  Before Johnny entered the.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Before Johnny entered the story. And Cambridge was very healing for me because it was the exact opposite of what rugby had been like. There were people from everywhere, literally everywhere, and everybody was smart. Many of them were smarter than me. I mean, I was used to doing very well in class at school, which was my revenge.

• 32:10Sam Fragoso?

  Revenge on whom?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  All of them.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but when I got to Cambridge, of course, everybody's smart. Everybody's really brilliant.

• 32:20Sam Fragoso?

  Right. How do you exact revenge then?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  No, you don't need to, because suddenly people are behaving differently.

• 32:25Sam Fragoso?

  Oh.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  I didn't experience a moment of racism at Cambridge.

• 32:30Sam Fragoso?

  Were people encouraging of your writing?

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yes, I was fortunate. I mean, I didn't do a degree in English.

• 32:37Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, it was history.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  I did a degree in history, but, but I had a kind of fluency. So, you know, my essays were well regarded. That was the, I mean, history essays. And that was the first writing I did.

• 32:50Sam Fragoso?

  Was your father encouraging of your work?

• 32:52Speaker 01

  No, I mean, he wasn't there at all, really, because he was not in England. He visited me, I think about once when I was at Cambridge. He never thought that writing was a real job. That's a hobby. Later, when I had, when I graduated and I told him that I would like to try my hand at being a writer. His response was, what will I tell my friends? It was kind of almost shameful that this only son would have been given all the privileges of a fancy education. Instead of doing something useful, wanted to do something useless.

• 33:31Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  And what will I tell my friends? And, and what was fortunate for me is that he lived long enough for the success of Midnight's Children to mean that his friends started telling him how to feel about it.

• 33:45Sam Fragoso?

  In college, much has been made about how you stumbled upon the Satanic verses and how it was there that you became interested in the history of, of India, the United States and Islam. But it was really your personal history that you had to revisit in order to write Midnight's Children. So after a post-college decade of, of writing and stumbling about, tell me about this trip you take back to India to immerse yourself in the world you had left behind.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was in the early seventies, I guess. And I was living in London, working as an advertising copywriter.

• 34:22Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Writing felt like a kind of dream rather than a reality.

• 34:26Sam Fragoso?

  You wrote about chocolates.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  I wrote about chocolates and I had to write a travel campaign encouraging British people to take their vacation in America.

• 34:35Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm. Are there any clever bits of ad copy that, that you still hold on to?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yes, but I don't think, I don't want to go there.

• 34:43Sam Fragoso?

  Look, I mean, I, I have it here, but.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  I know you have it there. You, uh, well, there were two campaigns that became very successful. One was a campaign for cream cakes, which, to encourage people to eat fresh cream cakes, like eclairs and stuff.

• 34:59Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  And the slogan I came up with was naughty but nice.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  And I remember when we were pitching it, that the cream cakes clired for there is such a person.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Said but complained and he said, but you're telling people that cream cakes make them fat.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  And I said, well, you know, they know that.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  You should focus on the butt nice. Anyway, in the end, they did run with this. It had run for a long time. The other campaign, I had the idea because the writer I was working with had a stammer and it was for a chocolate bar called Arrow, which has bubbles in the chocolate.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  And we were trying to come up with a campaign idea and it was very urgent because the client was coming in that afternoon and we didn't have anything to tell him.

• 35:46Sam Fragoso?

  You were winging it.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  And my friend, David, who was actually, it was his account. When he got very nervous, he began to sweat and he began to stammer. And so the phone in his office rang and he answered it and he stammered. He said, that's impossible. And I had this kind of light bulb moment. And so I started writing words that ended in bubble. So you know, adora bubble. Incredibubble, delectibubble, you know, shop window saying availabubble here, bus sides saying transporter bubble.

• 36:16Sam Fragoso?

  Did ad man Salman know that one day a Booker Prize was in his future?

• 36:21Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I just wanted to, like every, like a lot of people working as advertising people, they're all dreaming of the way out. Many people working in creative departments and ad agencies have a kind of pilot for a television series in their bottom drawer.

• 36:38Sam Fragoso?

  And so your way out was to return back home.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a point at which I gave up the job because I thought I have to reconnect with where I come from. And so with my then girlfriend, who became the mother of my first son. We went to India with whatever money we'd saved up. And our plan was to be there, go there as cheaply as possible and make the money stretch as far as possible. And so we were there for, I don't know, four or five months, living in, you know, kind of basically flop houses and traveling on long distance buses. We were young, you know, and I was, I was what, in my mid twenties.

• 37:15Sam Fragoso?

  Reimmersing yourself.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And some of it was going back to places that I had known well. And some of it was going to places I'd never been, but that I want, I had an instinct that I wanted to. So I'd, I'd never been to Calcutta, but we went. I'd never seen the river Ganges. So, so we went to see that in Benares.

• 37:35Sam Fragoso?

  And the lightbulb moment came when?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  I came away very happy to have rejoined myself, if you like. And I thought I wanted to write a novel out of my childhood. That I, I didn't have a bigger plan for it than that, just to write a novel about childhood. And then, because you know, I was born exactly eight weeks to the day before the end of the British Empire in India. And at some point, I just thought, supposing it wasn't eight weeks, supposing it was the same day, what would that mean? And I realized at that point, A, that I thought it was probably a very good idea, and B, that it enormously expanded the book because it meant history

• 38:20Speaker 01

  poured into it. And I was a historian by training. I thought, oh, okay, that's what it is.

• 38:25Sam Fragoso?

  The twin selves, the birth of a young boy and the birth of a new nation, inextricably linked.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:32Sam Fragoso?

  And from that lightbulb moment comes, I think, the first page of Midnight's Children.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:38Sam Fragoso?

  Shall we give it a read?

• 38:39Speaker 01

  I can almost do it by heart, but there we are. "I was born in the city of Bombay, once upon a time. No, that won't do. There's no getting away from the date. I was born in Dr. Narlikar's nursing home on August the 15th, 1947. And the time, the time matters too. Well, then at night. No, it's important to be more. On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact, clock hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out. At the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps, and outside the window, fireworks and crowds."

• 39:23Speaker 01

  A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe. But his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment. Because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks, I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldi, Sniffer, Buddha, and even

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Piece of the Moon, had become heavily embroiled in fate. At the best of times, a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time. Yeah, that happened because when I started writing Midnight Children, I didn't write it in the first person. I wrote some of it in the third person and it really didn't work. It just wasn't alive. And then at one point, I thought, just let me see what happens if I let him tell the story. And that paragraph came out of me. And I remember that day vividly. And I feel it as the moment I became a writer. Because it was clearly the best page I'd ever written in my life, by a long way.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  And I thought, where'd that come from? That's the question. Where did that come from? Came from the magic place where stories live. And if you're lucky, you find the door. And that was the day I found the door. And then I just thought, just let him go, you know? Let him run and hang on to his coattails and see where he goes. And so I always felt that he wrote the book. I just typed it out. Do you believe that? I do believe it because it felt like that. I mean, of course, there's a sense in which I don't believe it because he doesn't exist. But he existed for me vividly during the writing of that book.

• 41:28Sam Fragoso?

  Have you seen those musical biopics, like about Queen?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:34Sam Fragoso?

  And they're horrible movies.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:36Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, maybe you feel differently. I think they're not very good. And one of the reasons they're kind of horrible is because every song is reduced to the silliest, most inane moment, where a song is created out of like a sound in the room, the

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:53Sam Fragoso?

  And then they do, "We will, we will rock you."

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:56Sam Fragoso?

  If this was in a movie about your life, they would say, "This, this is too obvious."

• 42:05Speaker 01

  You know, I tell you what reminded me. I saw this, this enormous documentary that Peter Jackson made about the Beatles.

• 42:12Sam Fragoso?

  Amazing. Get Back.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's, there's a moment in it where Paul McCartney is sitting there with his guitar fooling around. Just, just fooling around, not doing anything. And then suddenly starts finding something. And, and then by a kind of miracle, what comes out of the guitar is the, is the, is Get Back.

• 42:35Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  That everybody recognize, everybody in the world recognizes.

• 42:38Sam Fragoso?

  It's an amazing moment.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  You see, you see the act of creation in real time.

• 42:42Sam Fragoso?

  It's a funny bit of dramatic irony too, because you know the song.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:46Sam Fragoso?

  And you're just going, "If only that man, Paul McCartney."

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Let him find it.

• 42:50Sam Fragoso?

  Could just figure it out.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:52Sam Fragoso?

  "If we could help him."

• 42:53Speaker 01

  And then he figures it out. But it's just, the only thing I have ever seen, something which looks like the act of, the creative act being captured in its moment of happening.

• 43:06Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Very, very beautiful.

• 43:08Sam Fragoso?

  It's an amazing moment.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's good. It's, you know, musically, it's great.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  And that reminded me of writing that page.

• 44:08Sam Fragoso?

  Of that day.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:10Sam Fragoso?

  Was Midnight's Children an act of reclamation?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:14Sam Fragoso?

  And if so, what were you trying to reclaim?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  My childhood, my race, my culture, India.

• 44:22Sam Fragoso?

  Quite a lot.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Everything. You know, my view is that you can write good books in two ways. They can either be everything books, in which you try and put as much of the world as you could possibly get into the book.

• 44:34Sam Fragoso?

  Kitchen sink?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, just everything. Or you can write almost nothing books, which take one tiny little beautiful strand and turn it in the light and tell that story. It can be, that can be enormously beautiful. Books don't have to be, one of the great things about novels is how capacious they are, you know, how they can be about many, many things without becoming things that the reader gets lost in. Because also, I had no idea how that book would be received. You know, now there's a whole body of work of Indian writing in English, which many of those writers have highly admired. You just had Arundhati Roy on your program, that's one of them. But there's a whole range.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  I mean, there's Kiran Desai's great book coming out this year, which I think, you know, she's already won the Booker once, she might win it again. But then, Indian writing in English was at, I felt it was at a kind of at a crossroads. Maybe in this sort of post-colonial moment, that kind of writing would just dwindle away and there are plenty of Indian languages to write in. So I didn't know if I was at the end of something, you know, at the end of a tradition. What I didn't understand is what was going to happen.

• 45:46Sam Fragoso?

  In terms of what happened, I feel like there's a whole lot of ground for us to cover there, which we'll do right after the break.

• 46:15Sam Fragoso?

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• 46:59Sam Fragoso?

  It's a world-expanding, genre-bending movie from one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. You can try MUBI-free for 30 days at MUBI.com/talkeasy. That's MUBI, M-U-B-I dot com slash talkeasy for a whole month of great cinema for free.

• 47:23Sam Fragoso?

  I think a lot of us are gonna spend the next few weeks looking for gifts online. And while I like finding something thoughtful for the people in my life, the process can get a little ridiculous. You've got a dozen tabs open, you're comparing prices, and you're trying to remember which store had that one thing you saw that has a deal, and you flagged it, and you saved it, and now you can't find it. Anyway, that's what I like about Shop. Shop brings all kinds of stores together in one place, so you can search for what you're looking for across different brands while discovering new ones along the way, plus tracking all your orders without jumping in-between websites. And just in time for the holidays, they're celebrating the all-new shop.com with a pretty extraordinary giveaway.

• 48:04Sam Fragoso?

  1,000 shoppers will win $1,000 in Shop Cash. That's $1 million in total, which you can put towards gifts for other people, or maybe something you've had an eye on for yourself. And you don't have to buy anything to enter the giveaway. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win, and that's shop.com, shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 48:49Sam Fragoso?

  The 80s were pretty good for you.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  The 80s were pretty good, living in London, in the world of books. It was a pretty good time for the world of books. There were a lot of young writers arriving, all at the same time, who were all pretty good. And we all got, we got called a generation, which at the time, we all kind of resisted because it wasn't like we were a bunch, we were a team. It wasn't like we were surrealists.

• 49:16Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, it wasn't the dream team.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  No, but, but you know, the fact that Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Bruce Chatwin, Timothy Moe, Kazuo Ishiguro. I mean, it's a long list.

• 49:31Sam Fragoso?

  It's a good bunch.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  And all, more or less all at the same time. And at the time, we all said, no, but you know, I don't know him and I don't like her. And we all resisted the idea of being a generation. Now, I think we're all pretty pleased about it because that, that decade, the 80s, yes, it was very good for me, ended badly.

• 49:52Sam Fragoso?

  Feels like an understatement.

• 49:56Sam Fragoso?

  September 1988. Let me ask you, as a little callback to your, your ad writing days. Imagine that you meet a Martian who speaks English, but doesn't know what the satanic verse is. And you have 100 words to explain the book to him. Where do you begin?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Well, I begin by saying it's a novel about London. I think that's what it primarily is. And it's a novel about London in that moment, London of that time, the 1980s, London, the London of Margaret Thatcher. And particularly focused on the

• 50:34Speaker 01

  South Asian community. I had done a lot of work, volunteer work in, in race relations in, in the seventies and early eighties. So I knew very well where the community was and what were its, what were its struggles and tensions and et cetera, you know, so I wanted to write a book arising out of that knowledge. So that's one thing, one way of describing it. Another way of describing it is to say it's about two actors. One, a big movie star and one, a kind of voiceover guy with accents. And they become representatives, if you like, of a kind of force in the world which is angelic and demonic. Although it's at various points in the book, it's unclear which one is which. So it's about an angel and a devil falling into London.

• 51:19Sam Fragoso?

  And at the time of writing it, did you see it as a chapter turn in your relationship to India?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  I thought, I thought I'd written to my previous two novels, Midnight Shonen and Shame, had dealt with India and Pakistan. And I thought I should write a novel about where I came to, not only about where I came from. And, and that was the driving force in it. And, you know, there are these two chapters which are dream sequences because one of the characters is A, going mad and B, losing his faith. And he has these dreams about the birth of a religion. And those were the chapters that some people didn't like.

• 51:55Sam Fragoso?

  And when people talk about the book, they of course focus on Valentine's Day of the next year in 1989, when a fatwa is issued and the Ayatollah condemns you to death for what you've written in the Satanic verses. But I was curious about what happened a month earlier. Protests that saw people crucifying your book and then once crucified on the post, setting it aflame.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:22Sam Fragoso?

  Do you remember that?

• 52:23Speaker 01

  You, of course I remember it. You will have seen the photo, the many photographs of it. I mean, that was exactly one month before the Iranian threats. It was January the 14th of 1989 was the date of the book burning in the town of Bradford in the north of England. Bradford, the town with one of the largest Muslim communities.

• 52:45Sam Fragoso?

  Here are a couple of the photos.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I've seen those pictures.

• 52:48Sam Fragoso?

  When you look at that, what is it producing you?

• 52:52Speaker 01

  I try not to let it produce the kind of rage that I felt at the time. You know, book burning has a history, not a very impressive history. And if you're a person in the world of books and you were brought up kissing books, burning books is like sacrilege.

• 53:10Sam Fragoso?

  And the rage felt like what?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  That. It felt like watching Kristallnacht, it felt like watching Nazi book burnings. I thought, in England now, people are burning books. There's the famous line, Heinrich Hannah, where he says, where they burn books, they will afterwards burn people. And interestingly, that line comes from a play that he wrote, in which the book that's being burned is the Quran. And he's defending, objecting to that. So oddly, that line, which was written to defend a sacred text from being burned, has now become a kind of famous line about the danger of burning books. And we're not quite there yet in this country, getting there.

• 53:54Sam Fragoso?

  That's also one of the reasons I brought it back up. Looking at those photos, it's hard not to think of this moment.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  My books were always unpopular with people of formal religious belief. And I thought, well, they probably won't like this one either. But they don't have to read a 600-page novel in order to dislike it. You can just not read it.

• 54:17Sam Fragoso?

  A Muslim MP at the time said, yes, I have not read the Satanic verses, nor do I intend to. I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  And I used to get very worked up about the fact that the people attacking the book were not reading it. If you think about the history of the persecution of books, it's almost always the case that the persecutors don't read the book. When James Joyce was accused of pornography, it was quite clear that nobody had read Ulysses, because although Joyce had much genius, arousing sexual desire was probably not one of his gifts. When people accused Nabokov for Lolita of defending Pederas, they cannot have read a book that is unbelievably moral. So then I thought, oh, maybe it's always the case that you have to not read the book in order to attack it.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Because reading a book must give you a more complicated relationship with it. Hard to burn a book that you've read.

• 55:17Sam Fragoso?

  We're in a moment right now where there's hatred and disdain for things they have not waded into. They have not read the books being banned across this country.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:27Sam Fragoso?

  It's sight unseen. They're not even, they're not even judging a book on its cover. They're judging it on the explanation of the cover from someone else.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, we live in a moment in which, for some people, culture and education have become the enemy, you know? So, and look at the books that are being banned. They're some of the greatest things created in this country. Beloved, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird. These are the books that we're being told are bad for you. Whereas actually, they're incredibly good for you.

• 55:59Sam Fragoso?

  When The Satanic Verses was burned, and yes, the fatwa was issued, the thing that stayed with me is the, um, the real world consequences beyond you having to go into hiding, which in and of itself is, is severe. The book is pulled from shelves.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:16Sam Fragoso?

  Two bookstores in Berkeley were firebombed. An Arab terrorist accidentally blew himself up in a Paddington Hotel before he was able to attack you. And then finally, the Japanese translator of the book was murdered. Your Italian translator was injured by a knife wielding assistant. And your Norwegian publisher, a close friend of yours, barely survived a shooting. You've said that this moment in time showed you the worst of people, but it also showed you the best of them. What did that look like?

• 56:47Speaker 01

  First of all, in the publishing community, to put it simply, everybody held the line. Yes, briefly, it was withdrawn from. The chains of the time, you know, B. Dalton, Walden Books. But quite soon it was replaced largely, well, not largely, but in part because of pressure from from writers.

• 57:07Sam Fragoso?

  What what did Stephen King do to help out?

• 57:10Speaker 01

  I owe him a vote of thanks. Stephen King, as it happened by chance, completely random chance, had read the Satanic Verses when it came out, well ahead of the attack against it and really liked it. So when this happened, he had the reaction of somebody who had really liked the book. So he called these these chiefs of the chains and said that they better put it back on the shelves or they could take all his books off. And then, I believe this is true, said that he was going to call a number of other kind of super selling writers and encourage them to take the same position. And so the book went back on the shelves, thanks to Stephen King.

• 57:46Sam Fragoso?

  Why did you think these strangers, these people who worked at bookstores, or even your collaborators, the publishers, translators, why do you think they held the line?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Because they believed in the world of the book.

• 57:57Sam Fragoso?

  Even at the risk of their own safety?

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Even at the risk of their own safety, isn't that extraordinary? Books are things that people who love books, love books. Also, you know, freedom of speech is not only the ability to write what you want, it's also the ability to read what you want. It's also the ability not to have what you read determined for you by the tyrant of a foreign country. It was different in different countries. You know, in France, for example, writers are still held in such high regard that the reaction there was, how can you do that to a serious writer? I think in this country, the First Amendment was held in such high regard that this was a crime against the First Amendment and people reacted in in that way. You know, so there were different motivations in different places.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  But what happened is that, yeah, the book, you know, was published all over the world and has remained in print ever since. So it was a very bad moment when those attacks happened, very bad for me personally, of course, much worse for the people involved. I feel that it was a battle that we won that was worth winning.

• 59:01Sam Fragoso?

  And the responsibility, did you feel responsible for those people being injured?

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Yes, of course.

• 59:07Sam Fragoso?

  How do how does someone hold something like that?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I remember calling my friend, my Norwegian publisher, William Nigard, who had been shot, to apologize to him, and he told me to stop. He said, you know, I'm a publisher. I'm grown up. I publish books that I want to publish. And I wanted to publish your book. And then, you know, comic pause. And then he said, I've just ordered a very large refit. I thought, that's a brave man. When you're lying in hospital with three bullet wounds in your back.

• 59:36Sam Fragoso?

  You said in the past, the biggest damage that the attack on the Satanic verses did to me was not physical danger. It was the damage to people's thinking about my writing.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 59:46Sam Fragoso?

  Was that damage and that thinking? Was that all renewed come August 12th of 2022?

• 59:54Speaker 01

  To some degree, yes. And I think, you know, I've written 23 books and a lot of them disappear. And I think it is just inevitable that something which becomes such a big news story overpowers everything else. I see myself really as a storyteller of making things up. That's my job. I've written memoirs, yes, and essays and so on, but I think of myself as a fiction writer.

• 1:00:19Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  So it's just very nice to be able to say to people, here's what I actually do.

• 1:00:24Sam Fragoso?

  And one of the things you actually do in this new book that I wasn't surprised by, but it was nice to see again, was write jokes. I laughed a lot.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 1:00:34Sam Fragoso?

  Reading this new book. And I heard you say on the Ezra Klein Show that after the Satanic verses, and then with Knife, nobody wrote about me as a funny writer. It was as if because the thing that had happened to me was not funny, I must be dark and obscurely theological.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that happened.

• 1:00:52Sam Fragoso?

  So when you're attacked on that stage and you're brought to the hospital, I have so many questions, but like, are you, how do you keep a sense of humor when your life is at such great danger?

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not sure exactly, but I'm happy that my sense of humor didn't get murdered.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  I mean, for a long time, I wasn't thinking about anything other than staying alive.

• 1:01:15Sam Fragoso?

  Right. Do you think the reason you were able to stay alive was because of your wife?

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  I think it's because of my wife, it's because of medical science and the skill of the surgeon and luck. The injuries, had they been just slightly differently located, would have ended the story right there. I mean, in fact, one of the surgeons in the hospital said to me that my good luck was that the man who tried to kill me had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.

• 1:01:43Sam Fragoso?

  He also seemed to have no idea how to read any of your work.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  No, he was not interested.

• 1:01:48Sam Fragoso?

  What offends you more, that he stabbed you or that he stabbed you having only read two pages of your work?

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  No, it's more offensive that he stabbed me.

• 1:01:57Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  I don't take that view. I would have preferred that he hadn't stuck a knife in me.

• 1:02:04Sam Fragoso?

  I just think that, you know, if you're gonna do something that you should be well read.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Yes, I thought it was.

• 1:02:09Sam Fragoso?

  Undermotivated.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Well, that's what I, I think I said it somewhere in Knife, that if I created that character, my editor would probably have said, there's not sufficient motivation, there's not enough reason for him to do what he did. And that's one of the reasons why when writing Knife, I tried to get inside his head. I had this, in otherwise completely non-fictional book, there's a chapter where I imagine a conversation with him, which I try and get inside his head. I did toy with the idea of trying to have a meeting with him, which people in my family were strongly against.

• 1:02:41Sam Fragoso?

  They didn't want you to do that.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  They didn't want me to do that. I'm sure that, I'm not sure that he would have wanted to do it. In fact, I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't have wanted to do it.

• 1:02:47Sam Fragoso?

  What did you want to get out of a conversation with him?

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  To say why.

• 1:02:52Sam Fragoso?

  Why do you think?

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think he went to his father's village in Lebanon, which was a very Hezbollah village. And he came back from that visit changed, according to his mother, radicalized, looking for a way of expressing that, and that became me, unfortunately.

• 1:03:13Sam Fragoso?

  It's impossible to talk about this moment without holding what is one of the most horrific acts of political violence in recent memory. Charlie Kirk, I don't think, had one idea that I liked or supported. And yet, having watched that video, and I did watch it, I have to say, I did think about you.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Well, you're not the only one who did that. Look, I've spent my life arguing that the whole point about free speech is to defend speech that you don't like. It's no trick to defend the speech of people that you agree with or people whose statements you're indifferent to. That's easy. Where you discover, if you believe in free expression, is when somebody says something you really don't like. And that's across the spectrum, you know? It's not one side or the other. But I think that's a lesson about free expression that is being forgotten.

• 1:04:14Sam Fragoso?

  Why is it being forgotten?

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  For different reasons. I think on the right, in this authoritarian moment, it's clear that free speech equals speech that we want to be said and doesn't extend to speech that we don't like. What's more concerning to me is that more liberal progressive people also seem to feel that denying certain kinds of speech, a platform, is worth doing. That if you like censoring speech that you think to be improper for various reasons, whether it's improper racially or sexually or for whatever reason, that's just a very slippery slope. And I try and say that whenever I can.

• 1:04:58Sam Fragoso?

  Did you watch the video?

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:04:59Sam Fragoso?

  Well, you know of the...

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't need to watch people being murdered. I've been there.

• 1:05:08Sam Fragoso?

  Is, uh, you know, in 2023, I mean, you make this joke. I mean, I'm so glad the gallows humor is alive and well in you. You said that the knife event could not take your sense of humor. What did it take from you?

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  It took from me, for a start, a kind of innocence. I mean, I've been living in America for 25 years. And for 22 of those 25 years, I was living perfectly normal life. And I had come to believe that that threat, such as it was, had faded away. And I had more than two decades of evidence to prove that. I had done any number of public events without any hint of trouble. So it removed that. What I just said was innocence, but also, let's say, safety.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  And it made me understand that if I'm going to go on doing anything in the way of public life, that I have to think about how to do that differently with more precautions.

• 1:06:00Sam Fragoso?

  In 2023, you told David Remnick in The New Yorker, "It's getting to be difficult to call India a democracy because a democracy is not just who wins the election, it's whether you feel safe in the country, whether you voted for the government in power or not." Do these descriptions now describe how you see America?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Beginning to, you know, I mean, I don't, I, I don't want to get ahead of myself. You don't want to run ahead of history. This is not yet a dictatorship, but there are people here who wouldn't mind if it was. And some of the most powerful people in America are included in that, in that list.

• 1:06:38Sam Fragoso?

  Do you feel safe saying things that are not necessarily in line with the Republican Party?

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  So far, I'll let you know.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I, I'm too long in the tooth to censor myself. I'm just going to say what I'm going to say.

• 1:06:53Sam Fragoso?

  Right. If you were going to censor yourself, it would have happened a long time ago.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  It would have happened. And one of the things I've learned in this unusual literary life is that self censorship is the worst crimes, is a crime against yourself. And I think one of the things we're talking about now here that is evident is that comedy is what upsets power the most.

• 1:07:17Sam Fragoso?

  And is that one of the reasons why you agreed to be part of that season of Curb Your Enthusiasm?

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for discussing my most important work.

• 1:07:25Sam Fragoso?

  Uh, that we really try to hit all the, all the bases here.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  No, what had happened was that I had met Larry David very briefly, but I didn't know him. I mean, we'd had a brief chat and anyway, then months passed. My agents got a phone call from Larry David's agent saying that he would like to talk to me. So I said, give him my phone number and he called me up and then he said, you know, they had this idea and did I want to be in it? And the first, my first thought was, is this funny or is it not funny? I mean, there was a lot, long part of my life when it wouldn't have been funny at all.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  And then I thought, okay, if we've reached a point at which we can have fun with it, then that's a kind of victory. So I said, yeah, okay, I'll do it. And he admitted to me afterwards that they had no plan B.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  They wouldn't have known what to do if I'd said no.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  You know, Curb Enthusiasm, there's no scripts.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  No, I know.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  It's all, it's all.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  Because that's what I asked him. I said, can I read a script? And he said, that's, that's difficult because there's no script.

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  It took me a long time. It took me maybe several years to get to the point that I'm going to talk to you about now. I want to give you a shortcut, which is that, yeah, it is all those things. It can be scary. It can be bewildering, et cetera. But there are things that you gain. There are a lot of women who are attracted to you in this condition.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Really? I didn't think there was any condition that they'd be attracted to me.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  You are a dangerous man. There are very beautiful women who like that.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Even with me, they would like it?

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  It's not exactly you. It's the fatwa wrapped around you, like kind of sexy pixie dust.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  But you have to stop acting like a wuss. I mean, look at you. You look like a person trying to hide.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  That is not sexy. Be a man, stop this, and fatwa sex will follow.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Fatwa sex?

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  The best sex there is.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  So those improvised lines, did that come from a lived experience?

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  That was, well, a fantasy of a lived experience.

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  But, but, but actually, I was quite proud of myself because I worried that these people that I was on screen with are geniuses of improv.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  You know, and I thought, I don't want to be the only person who's no good.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're, you're an actor out of college a little bit.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  I think I got away with it.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  I think it's true. Comedy.

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Is the thing they do not want.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  They do not want it.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because the moment you laugh at something.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  It loses its power.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  You know, and so, yeah, comedy is the most powerful tool with which to fight tyranny.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Well, the, the second most powerful tool, I think, at least for you, is the written word. So when we come back, let's return to the page a little bit. After the break, the end of my conversation with Salman Rushdie.

• 1:10:44Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:11:26Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:12:09Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:12:38Sam Fragoso?

  And thinking about your work, when you're in the hospital and you're prescribed a litany of drugs, I heard that you had some hallucinations. And I wondered, what does Salman Rushdie hallucinate about?

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  Well, it was so odd because what I hallucinated was alphabets. First of all, letters floating in the air, in between me and whatever was in the room. But also, I hallucinated places, palaces and castles, which were entirely, I mean, like the bricks were made up of letters. So I hallucinated the world of books, I guess. It was very strange. I really liked it. And then, I guess, they took me off the fentanyl and the hallucinations went away. And I was kind of disappointed.

• 1:13:27Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  I can still see them. You know, everything comes out somewhere. I haven't used them yet as a story, but I bet I do.

• 1:13:36Sam Fragoso?

  I love that even while high, it comes back to the letters and words.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Comes back to the alphabet. I mean, I've now been a published writer for more than half a century. That's a long time.

• 1:13:47Sam Fragoso?

  How do you feel, Salman?

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Old, but also kind of, it's the life I wanted. It's the world I've lived in all my adult life. So it's who I am. It's what I am.

• 1:13:59Sam Fragoso?

  But you know, in this new book of yours, 11th Hour, one of the stories of the quintet is called Oklahoma. It really seems to be reckoning with the man who's been published for 50 years, all wrapped up in this amazing piece.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  It's my father weirdest story in the book. But I really am proud of it because that was technically very hard to write.

• 1:14:22Sam Fragoso?

  So it set it up for people.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Well, the novel of Kafka's that relatively few people read is actually the one that he wrote first, which is given the title, "America." He didn't have a title for it, but he did toy with calling it "The Man Who Disappeared." And in that novel, his protagonist, Carl, at a certain point gets a job with a mysterious thing called the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Nobody knows actually what that does. And he gets on a train with a friend and they're going to Oklahoma. And Kafka told his friends that he wanted Carl in Oklahoma to find some kind of happy ending, to find some kind of fulfillment. The idea of a Kafka happy ending is bizarre, but he never gets there because Kafka

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  has him in the train going to Oklahoma and he stops writing. And he never finished the book. So Carl was just stuck in the train, you know, forever. And I thought, okay, the man who disappeared, let me start there. And then it became a story about, as you say, about, I mean, the well-known trope of the old grisly old timer and the young buck, you know? And what is their relationship like?

• 1:15:33Sam Fragoso?

  And yet you strike me as neither of those.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Or both of those.

• 1:15:37Sam Fragoso?

  Or both of them.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  I think both of those.

• 1:15:39Sam Fragoso?

  It's an amalgamation.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because I still feel I have a kind of access to my younger self. Not my younger self as a person, but my younger self as a writer. The person who wrote Midnight Children, I'm still that person too.

• 1:15:52Sam Fragoso?

  Why?

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  I just think writing is, if you do it right, it's writing, the writer that you are is with you forever. Even if you change a lot, because I think I don't write the way I used to write. But I still feel I have access to that young person. So when I was writing about this young person who is a complete mess, I found him very easy to write.

• 1:16:14Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, he has a little bit of a talented Mr. Ripley.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Yes, he has a little bit of that. And the old gent has bits of me, of course, but also bits of writers I met when I was young and who were older, who I spent a little time with. Peter Matheson and Bonnegut and Doctorow and et cetera. There's a whole, James Salter, William Gaddis, William Gass. I met a lot of those people when I was young. And I think this fellow is a bit of all of them.

• 1:16:47Sam Fragoso?

  There is fashion in literature, as in all things, as the older man says. And finally, you may become fashionable again, a development which, like any true artist, you should despise.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good line, right? My view is that one of the things you have to be as a writer is immune to the winds of fashion. You have to not think about that.

• 1:17:13Sam Fragoso?

  How do you not think about that?

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  You have to, you have to know the road you're on, you know? You have to be very clear. And that's what I felt after the attack on the Satanic verses. What I told myself is you know, the road you're on. You know, the direction you want to go as a writer. So go down the damn road. Don't be deflected. And that's what I've done all my life. I've just thought, okay, this is the road I'm on. And I would really love it for everybody to come along.

• 1:17:39Sam Fragoso?

  How many books did you say you've written?

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  This is the number 23.

• 1:17:43Sam Fragoso?

  My God, that's amazing. At 23 books in, remember that day that we talked about? The day you felt like you first became a writer?

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:53Sam Fragoso?

  Do those days?

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Still happen? They're good days. There's, I think every writer would say that every so often there's a, there's a good day when you think, oh, this stuff's easy. Then the next 20 days are really difficult. There's always, there's a, there's a moment in the movie Shakespeare in Love. When Shakespeare is shown writing at what we afterwards discover to be Romeo and Juliet. And there's a moment where he gets up from his desk and he snaps his fingers and he says, God, I'm good.

• 1:18:24Sam Fragoso?

  God, I have to tell you, I do a lot of work for these episodes.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  I see that.

• 1:18:29Sam Fragoso?

  This new book, I have not felt this excited in a long time while reading.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  You know, there are some advantages to having written this many books.

• 1:18:38Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  I hope, which is that you kind of know how to do it.

• 1:18:41Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  And something about the shorter form is a kind of freedom. You don't have to take into account the architecture that a novel requires. You can just simply do a thing and then it's done.

• 1:18:54Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I'm hoping nine years in of hosting the show, I know a little bit about how to do this. And I feel like the only way I could end this episode is to hold both the macro and the micro of your life. Cause you know, your wife, she's a poet. And in your book Knife, you talk a lot about what she had to endure on the periphery. Because she did not dare show you what she had to hold. And I want to know, now that you two have returned to something like a normal life, how that period and its aftermath made this new chapter possible?

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Well, one part of that is straightforward and honest to say that there was a long period of what we now call trauma. Both of us had, in our different ways, have had to wrestle with that with the help of therapists. And that, that takes a long time, you know, because this was a big event in anyone's life. But the other thing, I feel that something as, as explosive as this, this kind of bomb drops into the middle of a marriage, it can destroy the marriage. I mean, you, maybe you don't come through it together.

• 1:20:09Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Or it bonds you forever. And it did that. And, you know, she's got a memoir coming out. And, and I mean, most of it is not about me, but there is a bit about me in it.

• 1:20:21Sam Fragoso?

  It comes out at the beginning of next year.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  January. And so from that, you can get a sense of what it was like to be her. And we had to fight our way back through the, through the debris.

• 1:20:32Sam Fragoso?

  How do you do that?

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  By being strong enough, I guess. And you need help. You need help from family. You need help from friends. You need help from professionals. You need all of that. But then in the end, you have to find it in yourself. In the end, nobody can really do it for you. You have to do it for yourself. And I think both of us have, I think both of us feel at this point, which is slightly more than three years in, that the thing doesn't weigh on us in the way that it did. It's not that it's not there.

• 1:21:01Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  It'll always be there.

• 1:21:03Sam Fragoso?

  It's never not there.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  It's never not there. That's why I use this term at the end of Knife, I talked about it being a wounded happiness. You know, the wound is there, but so is the happiness.

• 1:21:13Sam Fragoso?

  And the wound of India?

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, I really think it won't be healed until I go back again.

• 1:21:20Sam Fragoso?

  And can you?

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  There's no reason for me not to go, except the whole security issue.

• 1:21:25Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  You know, in, in the 11th hour, the story called The Musician of Kohani.

• 1:21:30Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  There's a moment in which I deliberately insert myself. Into the world of the book, because the world of the story is the world I've written about in the past. And I just thought, I'm just taking one more walk up that hill.

• 1:21:42Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm. And you want to take.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  I want to take one more walk up that hill, which is where I was born and raised.

• 1:21:49Sam Fragoso?

  In that story, I believe there's a line, "You need to have your heart stepped on in order for the music to sound."

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you've never been brokenhearted, you haven't lived. And if you're a serious artist, every powerful experience contributes to your art, you know, and these are very powerful experiences in any life. I actually would really, my ideal reader, actually, however, is that Martian you mentioned.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  You know, the person who comes to these books and knows nothing about me except the books.

• 1:22:25Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I am the opposite of that Martian. And so as we close, I want to go back to a piece you wrote in 1990. This is one year after the anniversary of the Fatwa, where you once again return to the page.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  I feel as if I've been plunged like Alice into the world beyond the looking glass, where nonsense is the only available sense. And I wonder if I'll ever be able to climb back through the mirror. Do I feel regret? Of course I do. Regret that such offense has been taken against my work when it was not intended, when dispute was intended and dissent, and even at times satire and criticism of intolerance and the like, but not the thing of which I'm most often accused, not filth, not insult, not abuse. I regret that

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  so many people who might have taken pleasure in finding their reality given pride of place in a novel will now not read it because of what they believe it to be, or will come to it with their minds already made up. And I feel sad to be so grievously separated from my community, from India, from everyday life, from the world. Please understand, however, I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition. I will strive to change it, but I inhabit it. I'm trying to learn from it. Our lives teach us who we are.

• 1:24:00Sam Fragoso?

  Do you remember writing that?

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was at a really bad, that was 1990 or so. That was, it was on the one hand, a very bad moment. On the other hand, what I had done, which I don't refer to in that, in that essay, is I had written one of the most joyful books of my life, which was Harun in the Sea of Stories.

• 1:24:20Sam Fragoso?

  For your son.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Which I wrote for my son, a book with a happy ending. I had become very interested in happy endings. So I thought I'd write one. Maybe I'd make it happen.

• 1:24:31Sam Fragoso?

  "I'm a writer. I do not accept my condition. I will strive to change it, but I inhabit it. I'm trying to learn from it. Our lives teach us who we are."

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  I still think that. I mean, I'm happy to say that my condition is improved.

• 1:24:46Sam Fragoso?

  That's why I wanted to ask you, at this age, your life has taught you that you are what?

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Those 23 books are the answer. If you want to know me, there's 23 books that'll tell you.

• 1:24:58Sam Fragoso?

  And the books, do they outlast the people who try to oppress them?

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  You know, literature is really powerful. I mean, put it like this. Many writers who were persecuted and even killed, their work survived the thing that persecuted them. So, you know, Mandelstam, the poetry survives, the Soviet Union does not. Garcia Lorca, his poetry survives, the phalange does not. Now, even you go back, I'm very interested in the story of the poet Ovid, who upset Caesar Augustus. We don't even know exactly what it was that he did that Augustus disliked. But he was exiled. He was sent to this sort of dump on the shore of the Black Sea and was never allowed to come back to Rome.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Kept, wrote all these pleading letters to be allowed to come back to Rome, never allowed to, died out there. Well, we still have Ovid. We don't have the Roman Empire. So, literature is very powerful and lasts. Writers, much weaker.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  You know, if you're my kind of writer, you do write for posterity as well as for the present. You want your books to last. You want to be able to leave behind that shelf of books and that people will still find it relevant. You know, actually, one of the things since we've been going back in time, I really like it that Midnight Shone on, which was a book I wrote when I started writing it, was about, I don't know, 1976 or something. So 50 years ago. And people still find things in it that speak to them. People who were not born when the book was published.

• 1:26:38Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I'll just say, I was born in 1994. And to quote Knife, "I believe that art is a waking dream and that imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal." And I just want to thank you for having done that time and time again for me and my life. And I think many people listening.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

• 1:27:08Sam Fragoso?

  This was a thrill. Thank you for the time.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  It was great.

• 1:27:10Sam Fragoso?

  Salman Rushdie.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Quite a marathon.

• 1:27:15Sam Fragoso?

  One worth running?

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, you've done your work. I could see that. You know more about me than me.

• 1:27:21Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, you can have my notes if you need to look back.

• 1:28:10Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to share the program on social media. Tag us at Talk Easy Pod so we can repost. You can leave us five stars on Spotify, a review on Apple, all of it, any of it, really does help us continue making the program each and every Sunday. I want to give a special thanks this week to Greg Cubey and Pete Dyer at Random House, Sam Behr, and of course, our guest, Salman Rushdie. His new book, The 11th Hour, is available this week wherever you get your books. To order a copy, visit our show notes at TalkEasyPod.com. Also on the site, you'll see a link to preorder The Flower Bearers by Rushdie's wife,

• 1:28:54Sam Fragoso?

  Rachel Eliza Griffiths. She's a great writer in her own right. For more episodes like this one, I'd recommend Arun Dati Roy, Zadie Smith, and George Saunders. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, wherever you like to listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for bonus content and ad-free listening. Just hit subscribe on Apple or head to lemonadapremium.com. Talk Easy is produced by Carolyn Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Matt Sasaki and Corey Attad. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was engineered by Brett Tubin out of Relic Room in New York City. Our music comes from Dylan Peck.

• 1:29:39Sam Fragoso?

  Our illustrations are by Chris Shannell. Photographs today are by Sarah Schneider with research assistance from Ben Eisen. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here on Sunday with a brand new episode. Until then, stay safe and so long.

• 1:30:19Speaker 04

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed,

• 1:31:01Speaker 04

  avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S.com/rz for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.

• 1:31:39Speaker 05

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long-haul truck together.

• 1:31:48Speaker 06

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:31:51Speaker 05

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:31:53Speaker 06

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:31:56Speaker 05

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:32:00Speaker 06

  That's it.

• 1:32:02Speaker 05

  Find out what it's like to be a long-haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.