Salman Rushdie, Part 2

Last night, after 10:00 o’clock, I did watch again most of the three-hour interview with Salman Rushdie, just to get correct the statement about Shakespeare, which came near the end. It was, “There’s Shakespeare, and then there’s the rest of us.” Love it.

This was, by far, the best interview with a writer I’ve experienced yet on C-SPAN2. I disagreed with several of the concepts he holds with regard to religion, and I dare say, politics. He stated, “I’m not a person of religious faith.” His developing belief is that physics will explain everything, especially the creation of the universe, and that is, without “a God in the sky.” He was raised in Islam, but he all but said, “There is no Allah.” He doesn’t complain, he said, if individuals embrace a personal religion for inspiration, or whatever, but he does speak out when he feels religious groups try to influence governments. Yes, he’s familiar with our Constitution. (He appears to have read everything.)

Now here are some gleanings about his life, his writing, and his reading from his answers to questions that poured in:

His Midnight’s Children sold in the multi-millions. He needs solitude to write in. Even a bird chirp would distract him, if he were writing outside. He is attracted to surrealism. His books are research-intensive. His major subject in college was history. Literature [for the writer] is paying attention. The past is made up of shifting sands, and each generation may have a different interpretation. The screen showed his current reading, three books at the same time! [Ever heard of such a thing before?] Some of his favorite books of all time are Joyce’s Ulysses; Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland; and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. His favorite among his own writings is the “next one.” His choice for the best novel to come out of the Nazi era, from the point of view of Nazism [but the author learned], is Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959). Grass won the Nobel Prize in 1999. Some think Rushdie is too controversial to win the Nobel(Internet). One idea is that it might offend the Muslims. In 2007 Rushdie was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his service to literature. He has resided longer in England than anywhere else, and that is where he lived when in exile, after his Satanic Verses, a novel, came out. And last, but the most interesting perhaps, he pronounced “err” as “ur,” just the way we learned it, growing up, as we heard, “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” “Ur” sounds so much better, regardless of Webster.

About 1:00 a. m., I went to bed after a wonderful evening. Sorry, in case you missed this.

♥