The New Yorker Radio Hour - Salman Rushdie’s Fantastical American Quest Novel

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, talks with Salman Rushdie about “Quichotte,” his apocalyptic quest novel. A few years ago, when the four hundredth anniversary of “Don Quixote” was being celebrated, Rushdie reread Cervantes’s book and found himself newly engaged by a much improved translation. He immediately began thinking of writing his own story about a “silly old fool,” like Quixote, who becomes obsessed with an unattainable woman and undertakes a quest to win her love. This character became Quichotte (named for the French opera loosely based on “Don Quixote”), who is seeking the love of—or, as she sees it, stalking—a popular talk-show host. As Quichotte journeys to find her, he encounters the truths of contemporary America: the opioid epidemic, white supremacy, the fallout from the War on Terror, and more. “I’ve always really liked the risky thing of writing very close up against the present moment,” Rushdie tells Treisman. “If you do it wrong, it’s a catastrophe. If you do it right, with luck, you somehow capture a moment.” At the same time, the novel gives full rein to Rushdie’s fantastical streak—at one point, for instance, Quichotte comes across a New Jersey town where people turn into mastodons. Treisman talks with the author about the influence of science fiction on his imagination, and about his personal connection to the tragedy of opioids. Rushdie’s much younger sister died from the consequences of addiction, and the book is centrally concerned with siblings trying to reconnect after separation. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Salman Rushdie is one of the most revered novelists working today. He's still best known for the Satanic Verses, the novel that earned him a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini 30 years ago, the infamous Fatwa. The attempts on Rushdie's life that followed only seemed to have heightened his story. resolve to go on writing. In a 2012 essay in The New Yorker, he wrote Art is Not Entertainment. At its very best, it's a revolution. His new book is called Kishat. It's funny. It's fantastical. And it's even a little bit apocalyptic. The name Kishat starts with a cue, like Quixote. And like

Cervantes' Don Quixote published more than 400 years ago, it's the story of a kind of quest. Salman Rushdie sat down with the New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. Hi, Saman. Hi. Nice to be here, Debra. So your novel, which is about to come out, Kishat, draws, among other things, on the story of Don Quixote. What made you want to go back and reimagine that story? Well, it was just a happy accident, really.

What happened is about four and a half years ago, something like that, I read Don Quixote again for the first time since I was 20. And the thing that had happened in the interim was that the translation was much better now. You know, there was this brilliant Edith Grossman translation. So I really enjoyed the return to the book. And almost immediately, my character kind of popped into my head, who obviously has in common with Don Quixote himself that they're both silly old fools. My kishat invents for himself or brings in, conjures into being for himself, a son whom he calls Sancho. So there's that, which obviously I owe to Sarmantus.

But what then happened is that my character really wanted to go in another direction, you know. So the book isn't structured on Sarvantus's book. It was a way of setting off on a journey. and initially I thought that's what the book would be. I thought it would be this journey novel about this old gent and his young sidekick son setting off across America on a sort of quest for impossible love.

And then this other thing happened completely unexpectedly, which is that I found myself writing about the person who was writing him. Right. Not me. The author. The imaginary author. Yeah. And for a while I was very,

undecided about that. I've never really written about writing before. I've never done that thing about here is a writer writing a book. And I wasn't sure that it should stay in the book. And I sort of gave myself permission to go down that road a bit, but then if I didn't like it to take it out again and go back to the simpler structure of just Kishat and his journey. But then what happened is that the two stories began to,

talk to each other in ways that I found interesting. You know, they began to echo and mirror and differ from each other in ways that I thought were valuable, you know, and so that I found myself telling two stories. Yeah. And in a way that I suppose I should not divulge at the very end of the book, there's a way in which they become the same story. In the course of Kishat's journey, it is also a journey novel. It is kind of a road novel. Yes.

across the country and I was wondering when reading it whether you actually made this drive, whether you sort of No, I mean,

I thought about it. I thought about it. I thought that maybe I should just get in a Chevy cruise. Yeah. Stay at these campgrounds and visit these towns. Stay at these various days ins

and motel sixes and so on across America. Yeah. I didn't do it. But, you know, I mean, I've been knocking around America for close to 20 years now.

And I have been being to most of the places in the book or places very like them. Because one or two of the places are made up, you know. There is no town in New Jersey called Berringer where people turn into Mastodons. Right. Some of what Kishat encounters on his journey is very real. You know, he comes across the heart of racist America and various forms of bigotry along the way. And he also comes across Mastodons. And there's also an Italian-speaking Jiminy Crick.

Yes. So how do those things come together in one story for you? With difficulty. I sort of wanted the book to be many kinds of book at the same time if I could make it work. And I think actually the model of the Pickeresque novel, of the episodic novel, allows you to do that. Because, you know, if your characters are traveling from place to place to place, they can have very different kinds of adventure in different places, and those stories can be told in different ways, you know, and so it was a way for the novel to be metamorphic, you know, to be constantly

changing the kind of novel that it is. So there's a bit where it's a spy novel, you know, there's a bit where it's an like absurdist parable, you know, there's a bit where it's a science fiction novel. And there are bits, I think, which to me are some of the more important bits, which are completely realistic stories of human beings trying to mend fencing brothers and sisters with estranged relationships, trying to fix it, succeeding or failing. And I think those human sections, you know, to me are actually the heart of the book.

There's all this playfulness all around them. Yeah, yeah. Do you worry about keeping a consistent tone when you're moving through these different landscapes? Well, you have to know what it is that holds the book together. And what I think that is, is that Kishat is going not only on a physical journey, He's also going on a kind of what you might call a spiritual journey.

He's trying to be a better person. He's trying to be worthy of the hand of this impossible love, this talk show queen that he's fallen for. So he's on a quest for self-improvement, if you like, for becoming a better human being. And so is his author. You know, his author is aware of the fact that he's made mistakes in his life, that he's hurt people who are close to him and etc. And he wants to make things better. So he also is, in a way, engaged on a similar project, you know. And that's the line that I think goes through the book and that holds it, and that makes it one book.

And he shuts through lines that he wants to get to an end where he wins this impossible love. And he's fallen in love with a TV talk show host who doesn't know him at all. And in fact, is a little afraid of the idea that he's coming for her. picks of him as you would, as a stalker. And for Kishat, it is sort of a journey into virtue, to become virtuous enough to win the hand of this woman. And in fact, where it takes him is into a real moral morass. He's very invested in the idea of the good, you know,

and he wants to be a good person. And then he's offered this terrible choice, which is that in order to, gain access to his beloved, he has to do something bad. Yeah. And then he has to face a choice within himself. That choice only has weight if you know that he's somebody for whom the idea of goodness is very important. Yeah.

And which he also invests that idea of goodness in the beloved. You know, he believes her to be good. And then he discovers that maybe she's not quite as saintly as he thought. Which brings us to the other theme of Kishat's story, which is the opioid crisis in America, which he is unwittingly tangled up in. And I wonder what made you want to write about that? Well, two things really. One came out of research and one came out of personal experience. The research part of it was that I'd have a general interest in what Indian Americans are getting up to.

So I just try and keep an eye open. for interesting stories in that part of the field. And I came across the story of an Indian American gentleman in the farmer business who was, well, I mean, now he's in jail, so I think we could call him a crook. Yep. Who was involved in the improper sale of opioids in a way not dissimilar to the character in the book. And then it just offered me, like a kind of light bulb moment, it offered me a narrative way of getting Kishat to get. with his beloved if she herself had an opioid habit and was looking for the drugs.

Right. So it actually helped us in a story way it was helpful. And then there's a kind of sadder personal thing, which is that my youngest sister, she died from what seems pretty clear was an opioid overdose, which none of us, I think, had understood the depth of her addiction to these things. But obviously, that's remained, I mean, it's now over 10 years ago, but it's something that, for obvious reasons, has really stayed with me. And it actually also probably led me towards writing a book about brothers and sisters, you know, and about brothers and sisters who have drifted apart from each other and who don't know each other anymore really. And there's a history of some trouble between them, but they want to mend things.

That meant things. I think that in some way also originated in this sort of bit of personal sadness. Yeah. I mean, the opioid situation in this country is so enormous and overwhelming. Did you worry that that sort of theme or that plot twist would overwhelm the story of the novel? Well, I mean, I think it's important in the book, you know. I mean, I think it's fair enough if people find it important in the book. It's one of the major narrative lines.

but it is only one of them. No, I don't think it overwhelms, but I think it's dealt with seriously. I think if you're going to take on a subject like that, then you have to do it right. You know, you have to know what you're talking about and you have to give it proper way. Yeah.

This novel does deal with opioids. It deals with other topical things, black sites. It deals with cyber warfare. It deals with so many things that are happening culturally now. And I wondered, do you feel any obligation or urge as a novelist to address things that are culturally and sociologically important or politically important? Well, I wanted it to be a contemporary novel. I wanted it to be a novel about what's going on. And I wanted Kishat to journey not just through little towns in the Midwest, so on,

but to sort of journey through the reality of our time. And not Kishott himself as a character, but Kishat as a book should be about what's going on. You know, I've always really liked the risky thing of writing very close up against the present moment. If you do it wrong, then it's a catastrophe. If you do it right, then with luck, you somehow capture a moment, you know. And people in the future, if there is a future in which people read books. can read it and be taken back into the moment. So it has the dual pleasure for contemporary readers of kind of recognition.

Yes, that's how things are. And for future readers of discovery, oh, that's probably how things used to be. Well, without giving anything away, the world of the book is racing towards apocalypse of some kind. are we? Well, I mean, one of the things I have to confess is that, you know, I as a kid was a science fiction nut. And I think a lot of science fiction got into this book. The point about end-of-the-world novels is that they're usually not about the end of the world.

They're usually about some form of crisis in the world. And in this case, I think, they're also about... the two characters of the two main storylines, facing the end of their world. In other words, you know, coming close to the end of life. And both of them contemplating that. You know, and the physical manifestations of apocalypse are in a way of a metaphor for their own personal apocalypse, which all of us face. And also, I think, on a broader, less personal level, the idea that we might be at the end of a particular world. the world in which, essentially in which I have spent my life, you know, and you too.

You know, most of us have spent our lives in a particular world that appears to be vanishing. You know, it appears to be, or it appears to be transforming so much that it can't be said to be the world that previously existed. And that idea of the end of a world, you know, not the end of the world, you know, is something that was certainly in my mind. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's any part of the writer's duty to provide hope. But I do think that in some way, in the optimism and hopefulness of the character of Kishat, there is that. You know, he against all the odds, he has no reason for optimism, and yet he feels it. And he makes things happen.

And he makes things happen. And I felt that that gave the book a kind of quality of hopefulness, even though he is surrounded by things that ought to militate against that. Yeah, yeah. Salman Rushdie talking with fiction editor Deborah Treesman. More of their conversation in just a minute. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last week, novelist Salman Rushdie sat down with the New Yorkers, Deborah Treisman, to discuss his new book, Kishap. The book is a kind of prismatic portrait of contemporary America, and at its center is a man who, like many of us, is obsessed with television, but maybe even a little more than most. Here's Rushdie, reading from the very beginning of Kishap. They once lived at a series of temporary addresses across the United States.

United States of America, a traveling man of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers, who had developed an unwholesome because entirely one-sided passion for a certain television personality, the beautiful, witty and adored talk show host, Miss Salma R, whom he had never met, an infatuation that he characterized quite inaccurately as love. In the name of this so-called love. He christened himself Kishot for the opera Don Kishot and resolved to be his beloved's knight-errant, to pursue her zealously right through the television screen into whatever exalted high-definition reality she and her kind inhabited, and by deeds as well as by grace, to win her heart. Kishat's journey to find Miss Salma R is a journey across the landscape of our

America. He confronts racism, the lingering effects of the war on terror, and the loneliness and isolation that can come from life in the social media age. The truth was that Kishat had almost no friends anymore, no social group, no cohort, no posse, no real pals, having long ago abandoned the social world. On his Facebook page, he had friended, or been friended by, a small and dwindling group of commercial travelers like himself, as well as by an assortment of lonely hearts, braggarts, exhibitionists, and salacious ladies behaving as erotically as the social mediums somewhat puritanical rules allowed. Every single one of these quote-unquote friends saw his plan when he had enthusiastically posted it for what it was, a hairbrain scheme verging on lunacy,

and attempted to dissuade him for his own good from stalking or harassing Miss Salma R. In response to his post, there were frown emojis and bit mojis wagging fingers at him reprovingly, and there were gifts of Salma Ar herself crossing her eyes, sticking out her tongue and rotating a finger by her right temple, all of which added up to the universally recognized set of gestures, meaning cray-cray. However, Kishat would not be deterred. Rushdie's book also has some fantastical elements, which he attributes in part to his early reading habits. Here's Salman Rushdie with the New Yorker's fiction editor, Debra Treesman. Were you always a science fiction reader?

I was for a bit. When I was a teenager at boarding school in England, I spent a lot of my spare time reading sci-fi. To put it simply, they're sort of literary and hardcore. So, I mean, of course I loved the literary, the kind of Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Clark, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, kind of science fiction. But I also really liked the really, you know,

nuts and bolts, hardcore thing in magazines with wonderful names, like there was a magazine called Galaxy. There was a magazine called Astounding. There was another magazine called Amazing. With typography, you can imagine. And there you had, the real techno writers, you know, not so much the fantasy writers as the kind of the real science fiction, you know, where science was the point, you know.

Frederick Pole and C.M. Cornbluth, James Blish, you have to be the real aficionado to get to these people. And I mean, I retained some of it. And in particular, these two stories, that I made some reference to during writing Kishot. One is Catherine McLean's pictures don't lie, and the other is Arthur C. Clarke's story, the nine billion names of God. A bizarre early computer story about Tibetan monks who buy a computer

to count the nine billion names of God, at which point they say, the purpose of the universe will have been fulfilled and the universe will end. So that gave me a little clue about how to approach my end of the world story. At a certain point, I stopped, reading so much science fiction. And a lot of it had to do, I mean, now it's different because now

there's a lot of very good science fiction written by women and a lot of very interesting women characters in science fiction, whether it's, you know, Octavia Butler or whoever it might be. Back then, in the 60s, which is when I was doing this, it was a very male form. Women in science fiction tended to be either, you know, three-breasted barborella types. Or they were white-coated lab coat, lab technicians of completely no sexuality at all. And both of them seemed quite tedious to me. And I just somehow that put me off for a while. But I retained lots of it. And it probably helped form to your imagination at that point. I think it did. I think, you know, it has helped. I mean, you know, I've never been particularly a kitchen sink realist, have I? I mean,

I've always moved in the direction of the surreal and the fabulous and so on. And anything can happen. And anything can happen. And I think science fiction gives you some of the equipment for how to approach that. Yeah. You mentioned your sister's death due to opioid addiction. Were you thinking of that specifically when you were writing the story? Well, it had a lot to do with the starting point.

I mean, it was one of the, not just the opioid thing, but the problems of sibling relationships became something that I really wanted to write about. Because this is my much younger sister, the sister was 14 years younger than me. And we didn't live in the same country, and we didn't see that much of each other. And I had no idea that she was sinking in. to this addiction. And since then, obviously if you lose somebody

as close to you as a sister, you think about it a lot. And I wanted to write about that, about how brothers, particularly in this age when we live such scattered lives where families can be dispersed around the world, like my

family, like many migrant families. And I wanted to write about what that does family ties and how things can be strained and what people can do or can't do to try and make things better. And all of that, I think, came out of the circumstances of my own family. Yeah. I mean, the book has two pairs of brother and sister. And the story between them is not the same. They're both trying to do the same thing, but how it goes is not the same. Yeah, yeah. They both involve estrangement and then attempts at reconciliation. And just distance, distance. They're people who've led their lives very distant from each other, physically distant, and therefore there's other kinds of distance.

Yeah. So this is, I think, your 14th novel? Yeah. Has the way you go about writing a novel changed? Yeah, it's changed quite a lot, in fact, you know, over this long period of time. I mean, the first novel was 1975, so it's been a while. I used to need much more architecture. I actually couldn't start

until I had a very clearly mapped out structure and even not just the big picture of the book but actually some of the smaller aspects of the book I really needed to have worked it out and until I had that the wheels wouldn't turn really I wasn't able to put flesh on the bones

as I've gone on that has become less and less the case and I've become much more excited by the prospect of discovery, of what simply happens in the act of writing. Because I do believe very strongly that the way in which your mind works in the moment of writing, in the act of creation,

is a way in which it doesn't work at any other time. So in the act of creation, you can make your characters, think things, say things, behave in ways that you would never have imagined in real life, you know, for yourself or for people that you know. And so I've come to trust that imaginative moment, you know, and accept that you also have to be very skeptical of it.

You know, you can let yourself go down a path, but you have to become very, very critical of it the moment you've done it. Is this right? Is it wrong? Is it where I want to be? Is it not where I want to be? But let it happen on the page. And an enormous amount of the things in this book are of the, that kind. As I say, I didn't expect the author character to be there at all. And he became

rather a major character. At what point did you know where you were going with the book, what the end would be? I mean, frighteningly late, really. Yeah. Because I did know that for me, for the book to fully work, these two narrative lines had to in some way merge. You know, the writer and the written had to somehow satisfyingly unite. I didn't know how to do it. I was quite bothered about that. And then one day it just happened. I just sat there and I thought, oh, I know what.

And again, the thing that helped me was the memory of a very, very old science fiction story by Catherine McLean called Pictures Don't Lie, which was also made into the kind of late-night TV B movie that Kishat might have watched in one of his many motel rooms. So it had a natural way to enter the story. But without saying exactly what I did with the story, because I didn't use the story exactly as written, but it gave me my ending. And at that point, I felt real happiness

because I thought, okay, now maybe it works. It was a scary book to write this, because all the way through writing it, I had to face the constant questioning. Is what you're doing absurd and bizarre in a good and useful and valuable way? Or is it just absurd and bizarre for the sake of it, and nobody will care?

I think you're starting to have an answer to that question. Well, you know, so far so good. Well, thank you, Soman. Thank you. Soman Rushdie. He spoke last week with the New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. Once you hear Brittany Howard's voice, you're not likely to ever forget it. Howard is the front woman of the Grammy-winning blues rock band, the Alabama Shakes.

But this year, she's striking out on her own with a solo album. I was like, guys, you know, I think I'm going to do my own record. And at first it was met with, like, a lot of confusion and disappointment. But then we sat down. Were they angry? I'm not sure if they were angry. I think they're more, like, surprised. But we sat down and we talked about it for several hours.

And at the end of the conversation, everybody was like, okay, we understand we get it. Today in the back of their minds, or do you get the sense that they felt that was the end of the Alabama shakes? Probably, yeah. Is it? I don't know. Wherever creativity leads my ship, I can't force it. I'll talk to Brittany Howard about her new record, Jamie. That's next week.

I'm David Remnick, and that's it for the New Yorker. Radio Hour this week. Hope you enjoy the show, and I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon-Corby, Jill Duboth, Karen Frillman, Callaliyah, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, and Stephen Valentino with help from Mung Faye Chen, Emily Mann, and Kegan Zima.

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