Ask yourself which books you truly love

Before there were books, there were stories. At first the stories weren’t written down. Sometimes they were even sung. Children were born, and before they could speak, their parents sang them songs, a song about an egg that fell off a wall, perhaps, or about a boy and a girl who went up a hill and fell down it. As the children grew older, they asked for stories almost as often as they asked for food.

The children fell in love with these stories and wanted to hear them over and over again. Then they grew older and found those stories in books. And other stories that they had never heard before, about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole, or a silly old bear and an easily scared piglet and a gloomy donkey, or a phantom tollbooth, or a place where wild things were. The act of falling in love with stories awakened something in the children that would nourish them all their lives: their imagination.

A depiction of the Churning of the Milky Ocean, circa 1820.

Credit... The British Museum

The children made up play stories every day, they stormed castles and conquered nations and sailed the oceans blue, and at night their dreams were full of dragons. But they went on growing up and slowly the stories fell away from them, the stories were packed away in boxes in the attic, and it became harder for the former children to tell and receive stories, harder for them, sadly, to fall in love.

I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.

When, as a college student, I first read Günter Grass’s great novel “The Tin Drum,” I was unable to finish it. It languished on a shelf for fully 10 years before I gave it a second chance, whereupon it became one of my favorite novels of all time: one of the books I would say that I love. It is an interesting question to ask oneself: Which are the books that you truly love? Try it. The answer will tell you a lot about who you presently are.

A scene from “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen.

Credit... Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

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I grew up in Bombay, India, a city that is no longer, today, at all like the city it once was and has even changed its name to the much less euphonious Mumbai, in a time so unlike the present that it feels impossibly remote, even fantastic. In that far-off Bombay, the stories and books that reached me from the West seemed like true tales of wonder.

Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” with its splinters of magic mirror that entered people’s bloodstreams and turned their hearts to ice, was even more terrifying to a boy from the tropics, where the only ice was in the refrigerator. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” felt especially enjoyable to a boy growing up in the immediate aftermath of the British Empire.

Perhaps tales of elsewhere always feel like fairy tales. But for me, the real wonder tales were closer to home, and I have always thought it my great good fortune as a writer to have grown up steeped in them.

Some of these stories were sacred in origin, but because I grew up in a nonreligious household, I was able to receive them simply as beautiful stories. When I first heard the tale in the great epic Mahabharata about how the great god Indra churned the Milky Way, using the fabled Mount Mandara as his churning stick, to force the giant ocean of milk in the sky to give up its nectar, “amrita,” the nectar of immortality, I began to see the stars in a new way.

In that impossibly ancient time, my childhood, a time before light pollution made most of the stars invisible to city dwellers, a boy in a garden in Bombay could still look up at the night sky and hear the music of the spheres and see with humble joy the thick stripe of the galaxy there. I imagined it dripping with magic nectar. Maybe if I opened my mouth, a drop might fall in and then I would be immortal, too.

Illustration from the Mahabharata, circa 1800. 

Credit...Sepia Times/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

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

We were not Hindus, my family, but we believed the great stories of Hinduism to be available to us also. On the day of the annual Ganpati festival, when huge crowds carried effigies of the elephant-headed deity Ganesh to the water’s edge at Chowpatty Beach to immerse the god in the sea, Ganesh felt as if he belonged to me too; he felt like a symbol of the collective joy and, yes, unity of the city rather than a member of the pantheon of a “rival” faith.

When I learned that Ganesh’s love of literature was so great that he sat at the feet of India’s Homer, the sage Vyasa, and became the scribe who wrote down the Mahabharata, he belonged to me even more deeply; and when I grew up and wrote a novel about a boy called Saleem with an unusually big nose, it seemed natural, even though Saleem came from a Muslim family, to associate the narrator of “Midnight’s Children” with the most literary of gods, who just happened to have a big trunk of a nose as well. The blurring of boundaries between religious cultures in that old, truly secularist Bombay now feels like one more thing that divides the past from India’s bitter, stifled, censorious, sectarian present.

It has to be admitted that the influence of these tales is not always positive. The sectarian politics of the Hindu nationalist parties like India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party uses the rhetoric of the past to fantasize about a return to “Ram Rajya,” the “reign of Lord Ram,” a supposed golden age of Hinduism without such inconveniences as members of other religions to complicate matters. The politicization of the epic Ramayana, and of Hinduism in general, has become, in the hands of unscrupulous sectarian leaders, a dangerous affair.

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I want to return, however, to that childhood self, enchanted by tales whose express and sole purpose was enchantment. I want to move away from the grand religious epics to the great hoard of scurrilous, conniving, mysterious, exciting, comic, bizarre, surreal and very often extremely sexy narratives contained in the rest of the Eastern storehouse, because — not only because, but, yes, because — they show how much pleasure is to be gained from literature once God is removed from the picture.

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the stories now gathered in the pages of “The Thousand Nights and One Night,” to take just one example, is the almost complete absence of religion. Lots of sex, much mischief, a great deal of deviousness; monsters, jinnis, giant Rocs; at times, enormous quantities of blood and gore; but no God. This is why censorious Islamists dislike it so much.

In Egypt, in May 2010, just seven months before the revolt against President Hosni Mubarak, a group of Islamist lawyers got wind of a new edition of “Alf Laylah wa Laylah” (the book’s original Arabic title) and brought an action demanding that the edition be withdrawn and the book banned because it was “a call to vice and sin” that contained several references to sex. Fortunately, they did not succeed, and then larger matters began to preoccupy Egyptian minds. But the fact is, they had a point.

An illustration from “The Thousand Nights and One Night.”

Credit... Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images

There are indeed in that book several references to sex, and the characters seem much more preoccupied with having sex than being devout, which could indeed be, as the lawyers argued, a call to vice, if that’s the deformed puritanical way you see the world. To my mind, this call is an excellent thing and well worth responding to, but you can see how people who dislike music, jokes and pleasure would be upset by it. It is rather wonderful that this ancient text, this wonderful group of wonder tales, retains the power to upset the world’s fanatics more than 1,200 years after the stories first came into the world.

The book that we now usually call “The Arabian Nights” didn’t originate in the Arab world. Its probable origin is Indian; Indian story compendiums too have a fondness for frame stories, for Russian doll-style stories within stories, and for animal fables. Somewhere around the eighth century, these stories found their way into Persian, and according to surviving scraps of information, the collection was known as “Hazar Afsaneh,” “a thousand stories.”

There’s a 10th-century document from Baghdad that describes the Hazar Afsaneh and mentions its frame story, about a wicked king who kills a concubine every night until one of these doomed wives manages to stave off her execution by telling him stories. This is where we first see the name “Scheherazade.” Sadly, of the Hazar Afsaneh itself not a single copy survives. This book is the great “missing link” of world literature, the fabled volume through which the wonder tales of India traveled west to encounter, eventually, the Arabic language and to turn into “The Thousand Nights and One Night,” a book with many versions and no agreed canonical form, and then to move farther west, first into French, in the 18th-century version by Antoine Galland, who added a number of stories not included in the Arabic, such as the tales of “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”

And from French the stories made it into English, and from English they journeyed to Hollywood, which is a language of its own, and then it’s all flying carpets and Robin Williams as the genie. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that there are no flying carpets in “The Arabian Nights.” There is a legend that King Solomon possessed one that could change its size and become big enough to transport an army.)

“The Arabian Nights” poster for a burlesque show, 1888.

Credit... Universal History Archive/UIG, via Getty Images

This great migration of narrative has inspired much of the world’s literature, all the way down to the magic realism of the South American fabulists, so that when I, in my turn, used some of those devices, I had the feeling of closing a circle and bringing that story tradition all the way back home to the country in which it began. But I mourn the loss of the Hazar Afsaneh, which would, if rediscovered, complete the story of the stories, and what a find that would be.

Perhaps it would solve a mystery at the heart of the frame story, or rather at the very end of it, and answer a question I’ve been asking myself for some years: Did Scheherazade and her sister, Dunyazad, finally, after one thousand nights and one night and more, become murderers and kill their bloodthirsty husbands?

How many women did Shahryar, monarch of “the island or peninsula of India and China,” and his brother, Shah Zaman, sovereign ruler over barbarian Samarkand, actually kill? It began when Shah Zaman found his wife in the arms of a palace cook. Shah Zaman chopped them into several pieces and headed for his brother’s home, where he found his sister-in-law, Shahryar’s queen, in a garden in the company of 10 ladies-in-waiting and 10 slaves. The 10 and 10 were busy gratifying one another; the queen summoned her own lover down from a tree.

Ah, the malice and treachery of womankind! Shah Zaman told his brother what he had seen, whereupon the ladies-in-waiting, the slaves and the queen all met their fates. (The lover of Shahryar’s late queen seems to have escaped.)

King Shahryar and King Shah Zaman duly took their revenge on faithless womankind. For three years, they each married, deflowered and then ordered the execution of a fresh virgin every night. Scheherazade’s father, Shahryar’s vizier, or prime minister, was obliged to carry out Shahryar’s executions himself.

This vizier was a cultured gentleman, a man of delicate sensibilities — he must have been, must he not, to have raised such a paragon of a daughter as Scheherazade? And her sister, Dunyazad, too, another good, smart, decent girl.

What would it do to the soul of the father of such fine girls to be forced to execute young women by the hundreds, to slit girls’ throats and see their lifeblood flow? We are not told. We do know, however, that Shahryar’s subjects began to resent him mightily and to flee his capital city with their womenfolk, so that after three years there were no virgins to be found in town. No virgins except Scheherazade and Dunyazad.

By the time Scheherazade entered the story, marrying King Shahryar and ordering her sister, Dunyazad, to sit at the foot of the marital bed and to ask, after Scheherazade’s deflowering was complete, to be told a story, Shahryar and Shah Zaman were already responsible for two thousand two hundred and thirteen deaths. Only eleven of the dead were men.

Shahryar, upon marrying Scheherazade and being captivated by her tales, stopped killing women. Shah Zaman, untamed by literature, went right on with his vengeful work. One thousand and one nights later, the death toll stood at three thousand, two hundred and fourteen.

Scheherazade telling stories in “The Arabian Nights,” 1892.

Credit... Smith Collection/Gado, via Getty Images

Consider Scheherazade, whose name meant “city-born” and who was without a doubt a big-city girl, crafty, wisecracking, by turns sentimental and cynical, as contemporary a metropolitan narrator as one could wish to meet.

Scheherazade, who snared the prince in her never-ending story. Scheherazade, telling stories to save her life, setting fiction against death, a Statue of Liberty built not of metal but of words. Scheherazade, who insisted, against her father’s will, on taking her place in the procession into the king’s deadly boudoir. Scheherazade, who set herself the heroic task of saving her sisters by taming the king. Who had faith, who must have had faith, in the man beneath the murderous monster and in her own ability to restore him to his true humanity, by telling him stories.

What a woman! It’s easy to understand how and why King Shahryar fell in love with her. For certainly he did fall, becoming the father of her children and understanding, as the nights progressed, that his threat of execution had become empty, that he could no longer ask his vizier, her father, to carry it out. His savagery was blunted by the genius of the woman who, for a thousand nights and one night, risked her life to save the lives of others, who trusted her imagination to stand against brutality and overcome it not by force but, amazingly, by civilizing it.

Lucky king! But (this is the greatest unanswered question of “The Arabian Nights”) why on earth did she fall in love with him? And why did Dunyazad, the younger sister who sat at the foot of the marital bed for one thousand nights and one night, watching her sister being fucked by the murderous king and listening to her stories — Dunyazad, the eternal listener, but also voyeur — why did she agree to marry Shah Zaman, a man even deeper in blood than his story-charmed brother?

How can we understand these women? There is a silence in the tale that cries out to be spoken of. This much we are told: After the stories were over, Shah Zaman and Dunyazad were married, but Scheherazade made one condition — that Shah Zaman leave his kingdom and come to live with his brother, so that the sisters might not be parted. This Shah Zaman gladly did, and Shahryar appointed to rule over Samarkand in his brother’s stead that same vizier who was now also his father-in-law. When the vizier arrived in Samarkand, he was greeted by the townspeople very joyfully, and all the local grandees prayed that he might reign over them for a long time. Which he did.

My question is this, as I interrogate the ancient story: Was there a conspiracy between the daughter and the father? Is it possible that Scheherazade and the vizier had hatched a secret plan? For, thanks to Scheherazade’s strategy, Shah Zaman was no longer king in Samarkand. Thanks to Scheherazade’s strategy, her father was no longer a courtier and unwilling executioner but a king in his own right, a well-beloved king, what was more, a wise man, a man of peace, succeeding a bloody ogre. And then, without explanation, Death came, simultaneously, for Shahryar and Shah Zaman. Death, the “Destroyer of Delights and the Severer of Societies, the Desolator of Dwelling Places and the Garnerer of Graveyards,” came for them, and their palaces lay in ruins, and they were replaced by a wise ruler, whose name we are not told.

But how and why did the Destroyer of Delights arrive? How was it that both brothers died simultaneously, as the text clearly implies, and why did their palaces afterward lie in ruins? And who was their successor, the Unnamed and Wise?

We are not told. But imagine, once again, the vizier filling up with fury for many years as he was forced to spill all that innocent blood. Imagine the years of the vizier’s fear, the one thousand and one nights of fear, while his daughters, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, were hidden in Shahryar’s bedroom, their fate hanging by a story’s thread.

How long will a man wait for his revenge? Will he wait longer than one thousand nights and one night? This is my theory: that the vizier, now ruler of Samarkand, was the wise king who came home to rule Shahryar’s kingdom. And the kings died simultaneously either at their wives’ hands or at the vizier’s. It’s just a theory. Maybe the answer lies in the great lost book. Maybe it doesn’t. We can only … wonder.

At any rate, the final count of the dead was three thousand, two hundred and sixteen. Thirteen of the dead were men.

A 1933 illustration from “The Tortoise and the Hare” in “Aesop’s Fables.”

Credit... Arthur Rackham, via Culture Club/Getty Images

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The stories that made me fall in love with literature in the first place were tales full of beautiful impossibility, which were not true but by being not true told the truth, often more beautifully and memorably than stories that relied on being true. Those stories didn’t have to happen once upon a time either. They could happen right now. Yesterday, today or the day after tomorrow.

Animal fables — including talking-dead-fish fables — have been among the most enduring tales in the Eastern canon, and the best of them, unlike, say, the fables of Aesop, are amoral. They don’t seek to preach about humility or modesty or moderation or honesty or abstinence. They do not guarantee the triumph of virtue. As a result, they seem remarkably modern. The bad guys sometimes win.

The ancient collection known in India as the Panchatantra features a pair of talking jackals: Karataka, the good or better guy of the two, and Damanaka, the wicked schemer. At the book’s outset they are in the service of the lion king, but Damanaka doesn’t like the lion’s friendship with another courtier, a bull, and tricks the lion into believing the bull to be an enemy. The lion murders the innocent animal while the jackals watch. The end.

Many of Aesop’s little morality tales about the victory of dogged slowness (the tortoise) over arrogant speed (the hare), or the foolishness of crying “wolf ” when there is no wolf, or of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, seem positively soppy when compared to this Quentin Tarantino-like savagery. So much for the cliché of the peaceful, mystical East.

As a migrant myself, I have always been fascinated by the migration of stories, and these jackal tales traveled almost as far as the “Arabian Nights” narratives, ending up in both Arabic and Persian versions, in which the jackals’ names have mutated into Kalila and Dimna. They also ended up in Hebrew and Latin and, eventually, as “The Fables of Bidpai,” in English and French. Unlike the “Arabian Nights” stories, however, they have faded from modern readers’ consciousness, perhaps because their insufficient attention to happy endings made them unattractive to the Walt Disney Company.

Yet their power endures; and it does so, I believe, because for all their cargo of monsters and magic, these stories are entirely truthful about human nature (even when in the form of anthropomorphic animals). All human life is here, brave and cowardly, honorable and dishonorable, straight-talking and conniving, and the stories ask the greatest and most enduring question of literature: How do ordinary people respond to the arrival in their lives of the extraordinary? And they answer: Sometimes we don’t do so well, but at other times we find resources within ourselves we did not know we possessed, and so we rise to the challenge, we overcome the monster, Beowulf kills Grendel and Grendel’s more fearsome mother as well, Red Riding Hood kills the wolf, or Beauty finds the love within the beast and then he is beastly no more. And that is ordinary magic, human magic, the true wonder of the wonder tale.

A postcard illustration of a scene from the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel.”

Credit... Popperfoto, via Getty Images

The wonder tales taught me that approaches to storytelling were manifold, almost infinite in their possibilities, and that they were fun. The fantastic has been a way of adding dimensions to the real, adding fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions to the usual three; a way of enriching and intensifying our experience of the real, rather than escaping from it into superhero-vampire fantasyland.

Only by unleashing the fictionality of fiction, the imaginativeness of the imagination, the dream songs of our dreams, can we hope to approach the new, and to create fiction that may, once again, be more interesting than the facts.

The fantastic is neither innocent nor escapist. The wonderland is not a place of refuge, not even necessarily an attractive or likable place. It can be — in fact, it usually is — a place of slaughter, exploitation, cruelty and fear. Captain Hook wants to kill Peter Pan. The witch in the Black Forest wants to cook Hansel and Gretel. The wolf actually eats Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. Albus Dumbledore is murdered, and the Lord of the Rings plans the enslavement of the whole of Middle-earth.

We know, when we hear these tales, that even though they are “unreal,” because carpets do not fly and witches in gingerbread houses do not exist, they are also “real,” because they are about real things: love, hatred, fear, power, bravery, cowardice, death. They simply arrive at the real by a different route. They are so, even though we know that they are not so. The truth is not arrived at by purely mimetic means. An image can be captured by a camera or by a paintbrush. A painting of a starry night is no less truthful than a photograph of one; arguably, if the painter is Van Gogh, it’s far more truthful, even though far less “realistic.”

The literature of the fantastic — the wonder tale, the fable, the folk tale, the magic-realist novel — has always embodied profound truths about human beings, their finest attributes and their deepest prejudices too. The wonder tale tells us truths about ourselves that are often unpalatable; it exposes bigotry, explores the libido, brings our deepest fears to light. Such stories are by no means intended simply for the amusement of children, and many of them were not originally intended for children at all. Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin were not Disney characters when they started out on their journeys.

It is, however, a rich age in literature for children and young-hearted adults. From Maurice Sendak’s place “Where the Wild Things Are” to Philip Pullman’s post-religious otherworlds, from Narnia, which we reach through a wardrobe, to the strange worlds arrived at through a phantom tollbooth, from Hogwarts to Middle-earth, wonderland is alive and well. And in many of these adventures, it is children who grow into heroes, often to rescue the adult world; the children we were, the children who are still within us, the children who understand wonderland, who know the truth about stories, save the adults, who have forgotten those truths.

Salman Rushdie is a novelist, essayist and the author of “The Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020,” from which this essay is adapted.

(Source: NYT)

Salman Rushdie on the notion of truth, and life after death threats

Author Salman Rushdie has been famous in literary circles for decades, for his writing, certainly, as well as for the fatwa that was very publicly declared against him after his book The Satanic Verses incurred the wrath of Iran’s religious leader in the late 1980s. In the years since, he has received a long list of awards, published more novels, stories, and works of non-fiction. Now 73, he has an active Twitter account, where he recently announced he’s working on a new book set in India. We sat down with him when he was in Vancouver for the Writers Festival in 2017, for this feature from our Spring 2018 issue.

Author Salman Rushdie. - Grant Harder

Salman Rushdie is about to board a Harbour Air flight from Vancouver to Victoria and is remembering all the times he has seen parts of Canada from above. As a 24-year-old copywriter for an ad agency working with Air Canada, Rushdie was flown around the country, arriving first in Vancouver then taking in Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto.

His most recent image of Canada was also from a high-up vantage point. A friend sent him an imaginary map, drawn up after the election of the current U.S. president; New York and California were blended into an expanded Canada.

That’s a country Rushdie says he would like to live in.

Location matters to him. He cannot write his books without knowing first where the setting is for his characters. For nearly two decades, he has lived in New York, after spending most of his adult life in England, the last few years of which were spent in hiding. All three cities he has lived in have been attacked by terrorists over the last 20 years: London, New York, and Mumbai, which he precisely, deliberately, calls Bombay.

In the first chapters of Rushdie’s latest book, The Golden House (Penguin Random House), patriarch Nero Golden forbids his family from mentioning Mumbai, the place they are fleeing. “Tell them we are snakes who shed our skin. 

Tell them we just moved downtown from Carnegie Hill. Tell them we were born yesterday,” Nero orders his sons as they leave the airport for their new home in New York. “Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say, American.”

The facade set up by Nero is dismantled quickly for the reader. What was supposed to be the grand reveal of the novel—a tragedy involving the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack that drove the well-heeled Golden family out of their country to seek an even more decadent life in America—is uncovered early on, signifying to the reader that there is a much darker mystery still to unfold.

Rushdie says he knew he wanted to write something about the Mumbai attack that killed 166 people right after the incident took place, but wasn’t sure exactly how. The character of Nero was also taking shape in Rushdie’s mind years before he knew he wanted to put them together in the same novel.

It was in his youth that Rushdie first heard about Domus Aurea, an opulent golden house built by the fiddling Emperor Nero after a fire destroyed most of ancient Rome. So lavish was the home that Nero’s successors, embarrassed and angered at the scale of it, stripped and buried the palace. Within 40 years of Nero’s death, Dominus Aurea had been obliterated, built upon, and hidden from view.

“The question with a mystery is: what do you tell the reader when?”

Although Rushdie didn’t know how The Golden House would end, he knew there were a few separate ideas that would eventually come together to make sense. “That’s normal for me,” he says. “I suddenly see how they’re all pieces of the same jigsaw and how they all fit together. It’s happened so often, I almost expect it to happen. The last missing piece was the location.”

He found that location in a spot he knew well: a Greenwich Village townhouse once briefly occupied by Bob Dylan, where his friends, the artist couple Alba and Francesco Clemente, currently live. Rear yards of individual homes on a block below Bleeker Street open to form a communal space known as the MacDougall-Sullivan Gardens.

The apartment and gardens became a stage. Rushdie could imagine looking out the back window and across the yard, gazing into someone else’s window. Peering into private lives is how narrator Rene first encounters the Golden family, then deliberately inserts himself into their world. “It was a private world surrounded by a public world. What I’m doing is telling a story inside a story,” Rushdie says. “Here is this story about this family inside the tragedy. All around it is the larger catastrophe of America.”

In the book, Rushdie explores the criminal history of the Golden family and the deceptions they create to cover their past. It’s the closest to a mystery novel as anything he has written. “The question with a mystery is: what do you tell the reader when? When I was first working on it, I didn’t reveal anything about their past until very late in the novel, then I thought, ‘That’s going to annoy people to have this empty space where the truth is,’” Rushdie says. “The fact is, they have to keep a secret. There’s no reason I need to.”

Rushdie has been famous in literary circles since his second novel, Midnight’s Children, was published in 1981. Seven years later, he became the most well-known writer in the world when The Satanic Verses was published and incurred the wrath of Iran’s religious leader, who ordered a fatwa on him. He had to live in hiding and with protection, but others associated with the book did not have the same security. The Japanese translator of the book, Hitoshi Igarashi, was fatally stabbed; a translator in Italy was attacked; and in a targeted fire set by zealots aimed at Turkish translator Aziz Nesin, dozens of people were killed in a hotel, though Nesin survived.

Today, Rushdie travels on subways, goes to see baseball games, attends concerts. The death threat against him is not perceived as a danger any longer, and indeed, has even become a pop culture joke: the 2017 season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, which includes a cameo by Rushdie, centres around a musical that Larry David’s on-screen persona wrote about the fatwa.

When Rushdie arrives at the Cactus Club Coal Harbour, just a handful of people recognize him. There are no visible security guards accompanying him, although at a reading for the Vancouver Writers Festival at the Chan Centre the night before, the RCMP were there along with security staff. At the event, after Rushdie spoke, a man approached the author with a box. It was empty, but the word “Dye” was on it—an incident that organizers at the Vancouver Writers Festival say was a poor, insensitive, and worrying joke. But at no time, says Rushdie, was he concerned for his safety. “It’s been over for 20 years. It’s not a factor,” he says. “It went on for nine years, I’ve lived in New York now for 19 years and there’s no security issue there, nor is there here.”

The last seven of those years have been a particularly productive period for him, with The Golden House being his fourth novel since 2010. It started with his second children’s book Luka and the Fire of Life, followed by his memoir, Joseph Anton, two years later in 2012. Then, two novels: Two Years Eight Months and 28 Nights published in 2015, and The Golden House published in September 2017.

His novel before The Golden House was all about genies, spirits, and other mythical creatures, along with allegories and illusions. This new book is decidedly different. “The notion of truth and what is truth is so under attack now,” Rushdie says. “It made me think one of the reasons why The Golden House doesn’t contain any fantastic elements is that I thought this may not be the time for this kind of writing.” Reality is his unshakeable focus now. He believes his readers want the truth, and they can handle the truth.

(Source: Montecristo Magazine)

Rowling, Rushdie and Atwood warn against ‘intolerance’ in open letter

Harper’s letter asserts way to ‘defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion’, but critics accuse authors of censorious mentality

JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are among the signatories to a controversial open letter warning that the spread of “censoriousness” is leading to “an intolerance of opposing views” and “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”.

Rowling, whose beliefs on transgender rights have recently seen scores of Harry Potter fans distance themselves from her, said she was “proud to sign this letter in defence of a foundational principle of a liberal society: open debate and freedom of thought and speech”.

‘Toleration of differences’ … JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie. Composite: AP, Getty, Tim Knox

Rowling compared the current climate to the McCarthy years, adding: “To quote the inimitable Lillian Hellman: ‘I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions’.”

Published in Harper’s Magazine, the letter is signed by more than 150 writers, academics and artists, also including major names such as Martin Amis, Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell and Gloria Steinem.

Acknowledging that “powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society”, the letter goes on to decry what it calls “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity”.

Hitting out at how a “panicked damage control” is leading to the delivery of “hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms”, the letter criticises how “editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organisations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes”.

Its instigator, the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, referenced incidents including the allegations of racism which led to resignations at US institutions like the National Book Critics Circle, and the Poetry Foundation, to the New York Times.

“Donald Trump is the Canceler in Chief,” Williams told the NYT. “But the correction of Trump’s abuses cannot become an overcorrection that stifles the principles we believe in.”

The letter ends with the writers asserting that “the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away”.

It has been met with criticism online. “As is usually the case for people who manifest in favor of free and open debate and against repression, several of the people on this @Harpers Open Letter have behavior in their past that reflects the censorious mentality they’re condemning here,” tweeted the journalist and author Glenn Greenwald.

For the US senator Brian Schatz, his take on the letter was “that lots of brainpower and passion is being devoted to a problem that takes a really long time to describe, and is impossible to solve, and meanwhile we have mass preventable death”.

One of the original signatories to the letter, historian Kerri Greenidge, said she did not endorse it and was asking for a retraction. Her sister, the author Kaitlyn Greenidge, said she had been sent the letter and asked to sign it, but had declined. She told Harper’s, in a reply she shared online, that she did not “subscribe to the concerns in this letter and do not believe this threat is real. Or, at least, I do not believe being asked to consider the history of anti blackness and white terrorism when writing a piece, after centuries of suppression of any other view in academia, is the equivalent of a loss of institutional authority.”

Another signatory, writer Jennifer Finney Boylan, said she had not known who else had signed the letter. “I thought I was endorsing a well meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company. The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.”

We're not just old white guys … [this letter] includes Black thinkers, Muslim thinkers, Jewish thinkers, people who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left- Thomas Chatterton Williams

Asking for retraction … Kerri Greenidge said she did not endorse the letter. Photograph: Boston Globe/Getty Images

Williams said that one of the criticisms levelled at the letter was that it was a list of people who are scared, showing they fear change. This was not the case, he said.

“No, this is people who are concerned about an intolerant climate and believe justice and freedom are inextricably linked. The scared people declined to sign,” he wrote on Twitter. “And of course that is not to say that EVERYONE who declined to sign did so out of fear. 

There were very instructive conversations and disagreements. People really see things differently. But some not insignificant number of people agreed but said they feared the repercussions.”

He told the New York Times: “We’re not just a bunch of old white guys sitting around writing this letter. It includes plenty of Black thinkers, Muslim thinkers, Jewish thinkers, people who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left wing. We believe these are values that are widespread and shared, and we wanted the list to reflect that.”

(Source: The Guardian)

The Rohingya are facing genocide. We cannot be bystanders

We cannot allow people to be slaughtered and burnt out of their homes, while the world watches, write Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Madhur Jaffrey, Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, Riz Ahmed, Freida Pinto and dozens of others in an open letter.

Over the past two months, more than 600,000 Rohingya people have been driven from their homes, had their land destroyed, and endured torture and rape while searching for safety. Remember what happened in Rwanda? Now, pay attention to Myanmar.

The Rohingya are often described as among the most persecuted people on earth. They are a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, and despite having lived in Myanmar’s Rakhine state for centuries, they’re refused citizenship. For years, their movement has been restricted, and they have been denied access to education, health care, and other basic services.

Under the guise of fighting insurgency, or terrorism, the Rohingya have suffered what the UN has called a “textbook case” of ethnic cleansing. Since 25 August, almost half the Rohingya population in Myanmar has been driven out – one of the fastest movements of people in recent decades.

Bangladesh has opened its borders and is doing what it can, which is a lot for the most densely populated country on earth, already fighting poverty and the consequences of climate change.

 ‘After every atrocity, we say ‘never again’. We must mean it.’ Photograph: Hannah Mckay/Reuters

The international response to the Rohingya crisis has fallen far short of what’s needed. The UN appeal is still underfunded, and world leaders have not put sufficient political pressure on the government.

Myanmar is no longer a pariah state; it has a democratically elected government and has been flooded with foreign direct investment over the past few years.

The corporations who have invested in this region must speak up and divest, unless human rights are respected, or they too will be complicit in these horrendous acts.

This Friday, world leaders will gather at the Asean summit but the Rohingya crisis is nowhere on the agenda. We call on leaders to pressure the Myanmar government to stop these atrocities, grant the Rohingya citizenship, and allow them to return to a place they call home.

Countries must fully fund the UN appeal and close the funding gap that is leaving traumatized children without basic food, water, and shelter. Finally, member states of the United Nations must assess what diplomatic efforts can enable them to fulfill their responsibility to protect the Rohingya.

We must not be bystanders to this genocide. We cannot allow people to be slaughtered and burnt out of their homes, while the world watches.

After every atrocity, we say: “Never again.” We must mean it.

Full list of signatories:
Waris Ahluwalia, Babi Ahluwalia, Sachin Ahluwalia, Riz Ahmed, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Aziz Ansari, Dev Benegal, Gotham Chopra, Nandita Das, Rana Dasgupta, Anil Dash, Kiran Desai, Noureen DeWulf, Geeta Gandbhir, Vikram Gandhi, Shruti Ganguly, Janina Gavankar, Neelam Gill, Maneesh Goyal, Arjun Gupta, Mohsin Hamed, Hitha Prabhakar-Herzog, Anadil Hossain, Vijay Iyer, Sakina Jaffrey, Madhur Jaffrey, Poorna Jagannathan, Riddhika Jesrani, Rega Jha, Mindy KalingRaghu Karnad, Siddhartha Khosla, Hari Kondabolu, Shruti Kumar, Anjali Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Ajay Madiwale, Karan Mahajan, Rekha Malhotra, Aasif Mandvi, Sunita Mani, Nimitt Mankad, Suketu Mehta, Hasan Minhaj, Smriti Mundhra, Ajay Naidu, Aparna Nancherla, Kumail Nanjiani, Karuna Nundy, Maulik Pancholy, Joseph Patel, Shomi Patwary, Freida Pinto, Shaifali Puri, Aniq Rahman, Saira Rao, Zuleikha Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Reema Sampat, Reshma Saujani, Nikil Saval, Sumana Setty, Shiza ShahidKamila Shamsie, Anoushka Shankar, Sheetal Sheth, Sonejuhi Sinha, Madhureeta Goel, Southworth Lakshmi, Sundaram Himanshu Suri, Sonali Thimmaya, Pej Vahdat

(Source: The Guardian)

Salman Rushdie reveals the one event that he’ll never forget as a writer

When does a writer finally ‘feel’  like a writer? Is it in that moment a publisher agrees to publish their manuscript? Or Is it when their work hits the stands? Or the times when their work starts getting awards and they finally gain recognition?

Millennials who know Salman Rushdie may find it difficult to gauge when this happened for Salman Rushdie. Awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1981, Rushdie has been a star writer. The author, who turns seventy today, has also been so prolific that it would appear strange if one learnt that even he, as reputable and famous as he is, had doubts about becoming a writer.

But the truth is just that. Like most writers, Rushdie had a tough time becoming a writer. It was only over a decade after he graduated that his second novel – “Midnight’s Children” – catapulted him to fame.

The ‘super-fame’ is not what the writer remembers as that defining moment when he felt like a writer. In an episode of ‘Shrink Rap’- a television series which ran in the late 2000s – Rushdie speaks of a much tinier event that finally made him believe in himself. In the video, where the author opens up about his childhood traumas, Rushdie talks about this event, welling up with emotions.

Coming from an acclaimed author who has numerous laurels to his name, watching the interview can be a humbling experience. Especially for all aspiring authors, who sometimes find themselves doubting their capabilities, just like Rushdie did once upon a time.

(Source: YKA)