April 21, 2005

Rushdie Interview

This is an interesting, long-ish interview of Salman Rushdie (I didn't have a problem accessing it but if you hit a subscription wall, use bugmenot.com). Rushdie talks about novelists as "bloody-minded" people, magical realism, the fatwa, why it was a victory for him, his new book, Shalimar the Clown, and a bunch of other things. Here's a snippet.

R: [O]ther than the occasional rhetorical noise coming out of Iran - which there are unpleasant people there who occasionally say unpleasant things - there haven't been any real, actual threats for probably seven years now.

W: Well, it's interesting that during the years that there were threats you were still able to put out some really, well-written, critically acclaimed books. I've always been curious as to how that period of seclusion affected your writing habits.

R: Well, you know, I think that writers are quite often disciplined people. And I think that one of the things as a novelist that you do have is the discipline of a daily habit and a daily routine to do your work. You know, just simply because a novel is a long piece of work that if you don't have the kind of discipline, it never gets written. I think most novelists that I know, in some degree, are very good at simply buckling down and simply getting on with it. And one of the feelings that I had very strongly during those years was that I wished to simply continue down the path I'd set for myself as a writer. And in a way, it was an aspect of my resistance, you know, to not be silenced, to not in anyway be deformed by it as a writer. I though it would have been easy for me to not write or to writer very embittered books or to writer very frightened books. And all of that seemed to me to be a terrible defeat. And I thought the best thing I can do is to go on trying to write the kind of books that I've always wanted to write. And go on being myself. And I guess I found in myself the bloody-mindedness to do that (laughs).

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