Your ticket to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the rest of South Asia
Novelist Sir Salman Rushdie, Emory professor Dr. Deepika Bahri, filmmaker Deepa Mehta and writer Christopher Hitchens discuss love, sex, writing, stories and friendship. The conversation was inspired by Rushdie’s assertion in his 1999 essay on the anniversary of the fatwa that “love feels more and more like the only subject.” Emory University.
Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta and Dr. Matthew Bernstein, Emory Professor of Film Studies, discuss Mehta’s friendship with Salman Rushdie, her beautiful Elements film trilogy, issues of censorship in India and Mehta’s forthcoming adaptation of Rushdie’s novel “Midnight’s Children.” Emory University
Having moved beyond postcolonialism and a welter of sari-and-mango novels, Indian literature has struck out into darker, messier terrain, Rana Dasgupta writes. Is this the new lore of an agonised nation? From The National:
Novels and nations are linked by an intimate kind of analogy. If nations are the stage on which modern life and feeling unfold, novels are the form in which these things are recounted, understood and turned, finally, into lore. Such is the apparent scale and ambition of modern life that no smaller treatment than the novel will finally match up – not even cinema, which, for all its protean vitality, has never quite displaced the novel from the pinnacle of modern cultural achievement.
This is why emerging nations strive to beget great novels. During the years of America’s rise, for instance, the project of the “great American novel” was conscious and determined. Industry alone would not make the United States great: to grow beyond Europe it needed to match Flaubert and Tolstoy. In 1897, the novelist Frank Norris wrote that American writers should be focused on the task of creating the novel “which is the most thoroughly American in its tone and most aptly interprets the phases of American life”. More:
Robert McCrum in The Observer:
Chetan Bhagat
A year after the launch of Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winning movie of Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A, some more quiz questions: Who is the most read living Indian writer? Is it a) Aravind Adiga (Booker prize-winning author of The White Tiger); b) Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children); c) Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy); or d) Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)?
The answer: none of these. Two generations after independence, one of the vital characteristics of the new India is that the educated middle class who once turned to English for business applications now see it in a different light. To them, in a manner typical of English language and culture in many parts of formerly colonial society, it is becoming decoupled from its bitter imperial past.
This new middle-class audience – small entrepreneurs, managers, travel agents, salespeople, secretaries, clerks – has an appetite for literary entertainment that falls between the elite idiom of the cultivated literati, who might be familiar with the novels of Amitav Ghosh or Salman Rushdie, and the Indian English of the street and the supermarket. Theirs is the Indian English of the outsourcing generation. For these people, there is only one author: Chetan Bhagat. Who? More:
Posted by Namita Bhandare
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any bigger, the DS Jaipur Literature Fesival is back with Season V (Jan 21-25), with more international writers, more Indian writers and certainly a bigger anticipated audience than previous years.
Writers who’ve confirmed attendance include Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle and Amit Chaudhuri, widely regarded as India’s best-known writer of his generation.
To pretend that there is a hierarchy or even a social pecking order at the fest would be misleading. There are no tickets; entry is free to all. Everybody queues up for lunch and dinner — everybody including Salman (Rushdie), Pico (Iyer) and Vikram (Seth). Writers and readers lounge in the winter sun, signing books, drinking coffee and gossiping (oh, the gossip).
The Lit Fest is the baby of writers William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale. Writing for The Guardian recently, Dalrymple said: “Wherever I appeared at literary festivals around the globe, all the usual celebrated Indian writers were there – everywhere, that is, except India.”
And so, began India’s quest for a fest. Starting with 17 writers over three days, the fest will this year include 160 writers and performers. [See the complete programme and list of writers attending here.]
This year’s festival is set once again in the charming, heritage Diggi Palace, the haveli of the Thakurs of Diggi, a small princely state. The Durbar Hall with its Venetian mirrors and framed portraits of venerated gods and ancestors seats about 300. Over the years, however, as the number of writers descending on Jaipur has gone up, Diggi Palace has sprouted new venues. There’s the Mughal Tent (which seats about 100 people), Baithak (about 75) and the front lawn (can easily take upwards of 1,000).
It was at the front lawn, last year where Vikas Swarup received news that Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s film based on his book Q&A had received 11 Oscar nominations. The crowd erupted in a roar as Swarup made his hasty departure for the film’s Mumbai premiere. Jai Ho.
Every fest has its own little gem, its highlights: Salman Rushdie ticking off ‘hostile’ journalists for what he saw as unfriendly reports in the press. Vikram Seth getting ticked off by a local newspaper for sipping a glass of wine while speaking to his moderator Sonia Faleiro.
This year’s showstopper could well be a controversial, woman writer and thinker. Her name is not up on the official programme yet, because she is yet to get a visa. But, do watch this space. If she comes, fireworks.
Previously on AW
Booker prize winner Salman Rushdie is in Mumbai with film-maker Deepa Mehta for the film adaptation of his book Midnight’s Children. Excerpts from the Times of India:
On meeting Amitabh Bachchan: I’ve met Mr. Bachchan before, in New York, and at both meetings, he was a charming, gracious presence.
On asking Deepa Mehta to film the novel: Her passion for my work and my admiration of hers.
Does Midnight’s Children have a ‘filmable’ quality? Now that we have a screenplay we like, I would say that, yes, Midnight’s Children is eminently filmable. I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
Did Rushdie get the editor of Granta sacked? From The Telegraph, London:
When Sigrid Rausing, the Tetra Pak heiress, announced this summer that Alex Clark was stepping down as editor of her books magazine, Granta, she left the literary world bemused.
Now, Sir Salman Rushdie has entered the fray to deny that he had anything to do with Clark’s departure after it was disclosed that she had rejected an essay he submitted, “Notes on Sloth”. To add salt to his wounds, an email to his agent explaining the rejection ended up in his inbox.
“It is true that there was a rude email that was forwarded to me,” says the Booker Prize-winning author. “I wasn’t particularly happy about it, but I spoke to Alex and said: ‘Look, I have no interest in forcing people to publish things they don’t want to publish,’ so I withdrew it.”
Happily, John Freeman, Granta’s new editor, will publish the essay in his first issue. More:
Posted by Asian Window:
How does this guy do it?
Sir Salman Rushdie, the balding, 62-year-old Booker Prize-winning author who has been married four times, has now been seen with a 27-year-old Harvard graduate of Chinese and Hungarian descent, Min Lieskovsky.
This just a week after his tabloid spat with ex-girlfriend Pia Glenn.
According to the New York Post, Rushdie was seen at the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony Gala with stunning author and anthropology student Min Lieskovsky. The guest list also included Tina Brown, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Oliver Stone and Annie Leibovitz.
Lieskovsky says she is “addicted to male models.” She wrote in ElleGirl: “I’ve dated six of the world’s top models as ranked by Models.com, the so-called Nasdaq of modelling…”
Another quote from ElleGirl: “Each male model I dated told me he had never met a girl like me: smart, but easy to talk to; nerdy, but still pretty hot.” (Full article here)
For more on Min Lieskovsky, read the Gawker story headlined “Salman Rushdie’s New Squeeze”. Gawker also has “Facebook messages between Salman Rushdie and his brand new love cookie” (Here’s the link)
Just two weeks back Rushdie’s previous girlfriend, American actress Pia Glenn, gave a tell-all interview to the Mail on Sunday where she said he was obsessed with his fourth wife, Padma Lakshmi, and would begin the day by putting his own name into Google to see what had been written about him. She said Rushdie was “cowardly, dysfunctional and immature.” She claims “he would talk about Padma day and night.” Three months ago he dumped her by email. More here.
Rushdie hit back. He told the New York Post Glenn is “an unstable person who carries around a large, radioactive bucket of stress wherever she goes.” He adds that she’s also “an accomplished liar…confused, and desperate for attention.”
About ex-wife Padma Lakshmi he said: “When my marriage to Padma ended I was saddened and hurt, that’s true, but that was two and a half years ago, and, like any adult, I have accepted the world as it is.” (More here in the Daily Mail).
American actress Pia Glenn has given a tell-all interview to the Mail on Sunday about her fling with the novelist Sir Salman Rushdie. She says he was obsessed with his fourth wife, Padma Lakshmi, and would begin the day by putting his own name into Google to see what had been written about him. Three months ago he dumped her by email:
Their first date was dinner at a chic bistro where a stream of other famous diners, including fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, came over to pay their respects.
Afterwards, he took Pia for a drink. She recalled: ‘We were squished on a couch and he had his arm around me and all of a sudden he forcefully kissed me. I thought it was clumsy, and that made it all the more endearing.
‘Later, he invited me to go home with him and said I could use the guest room.’ She refused.
There were more dates and, in the first week of January, they became lovers.
‘I was enjoying spending time with him – I felt he got who I was and that I got who he was.
‘A lot of people are intimidated by me because I’m a giant and they are intimidated by him because of his intellect.’
She gradually moved into his mansion. Pia said: ‘It was Salman who started to call it “our house” but it never felt like my home.
‘It was furnished with stiff antiques and the housekeeper had been there when he was married to Padma. He was obsessed with Padma.’
At the time, the former Lady Rushdie was being linked in New York gossip columns to the Wall Street billionaire Teddy Forstmann and the venture capitalist Adam Dell, whose brother had founded Dell computers.
‘Salman would alternate between putting them down and saying he pitied them,’ said Pia. ‘When he saw my laptop was a Dell, he went off into a tirade. More:
From the Daily Mail:
The controversial author, 61, was spotted at the opening of the film Francesca with Canadian-born former model Carolann Javicoli.
The pair cosied up around the pool of the exclusive Hotel De Bains at a party after the event and happily posed for pictures.
Mrs Javicoli told the Mail that Rushdie is a ‘wonderful man with a wicked sense of humour’.
‘Salman does tend to attract a lot of beautiful women around him. That’s just the sort of man he is. But he sees the beauty inside and out,’ she said. Click here for photo:
From The Guardian:
Salman Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence has missed out on a major literary award yet again, after he was pipped to the post by Jhumpa Lahiri in the regional heats for the Commonwealth writers’ prize.
Lahiri’s collection of short stories Unaccustomed Earth, which track from Seattle to Thailand to India as they explore family life and the immigrant experience, also beat Rushdie’s fellow Booker contender Philip Hensher to win the Europe and South Asia regional heat. Chair of the judges, Professor Makarand Paranjape said the Bengali-American writer had faced “some very tough competition” from both Hensher’s “magisterial survey of English suburbia”, and Rushdie’s “fecund and fierce imagination”.
Salman Rushdie in The Guardian on movies and movies based on books:
Adaptation, the process by which one thing develops into another thing, by which one shape or form changes into a different form, is a commonplace artistic activity. Books are turned into plays and films all the time, plays are turned into movies and also sometimes into musicals, movies are turned into Broadway shows and even, by the ugly method known as “novelisation”, into books as well. We live in a world of such transformations and metamorphoses. Good movies – Lolita, The Pink Panther – are remade as bad movies; bad movies – The Incredible Hulk, Deep Throat – are remade as even worse movies; British TV comedy series are turned into American TV comedy series, so that The Office becomes a different The Office, and Ricky Gervais turns into Steve Carell, just as, long ago, the British working-class racist Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part turned into the American blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker in All In the Family. British reality programmes are adapted to suit American audiences as well; Pop Idol becomes American Idol when it crosses the Atlantic, Strictly Come Dancing becomes Dancing With the Stars – a programme which, it may interest you to know, invited me to appear on it last season, an invitation I declined.
From Daily Mail:
For it seems that the middle-aged writer has defied both the years and his waistline to find fresh love – and, not for the first time, the object of his affection takes eye-catching form.
Pia Glenn is a 32-year-old actress of Amazonian proportions whose professional role currently means stripping off and lap-dancing in a raunchy Broadway satire.
As is his custom, Sir Salman, 61, has said little about his statuesque new girlfriend. Pia, though, has been more forthright and, in her first interview since stepping out in public with the millionaire author, has left little room for doubt about her motives: she is fascinated, she says, obsessed even, by his mind.
‘I’m a very frank, realistic person about our attraction. It’s a multifaceted thing,’ she explains enthusiastically. ‘Neither of us is blind and, of course, it is physical but it isn’t only or mostly about looks.’
Geoffrey Robertson writes exclusively for The Daily Beast
It was twenty years ago, on St Valentine’s Day, that the Ayatollah Khomeini launched the mother of all prosecutions against Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, and his publisher Penguin Books. Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, the Ayatollah chose to sentence first and try later—through a fatwa proclaiming the death sentence for blasphemy on all connected with publishing the book. One of its translators was in consequence murdered (“executed” as Iran preferred to say); the book was burnt at demonstrations throughout the world (twenty-two protesters were killed by police in Pakistan); and a $3 million bounty was offered for the author’s capture—alive or (preferably) dead. Soon afterwards, Salman came to stay for a short time.
In Tehelka, Shoma Chaudhury tracks the underlying psychology of vigilantes across the country
In Mangalore they beat women for drinking. In Pune, they tear priceless manuscripts because they feel a historian has insulted Shivaji. In Delhi, they spit on a man at a podium because they feel he is a traitor to the nation. In Bhopal, they break a school because they feel the principal has violated the national anthem. In Bombay, they raid and pillage because they feel outsiders are stealing jobs and thwarting their mother tongue. In Orissa, they burn houses and kill people because they feel their faith is in danger of dwindling. In Gujarat, they rape and kill thousands because they want to teach a community a lesson. They pull artists’ hair, threaten writers, slap women, hit men, burn paintings, ban films, tear posters, pulp, burn, rape, kill, beat. As a matter of routine, they spill into the street.
Twenty years ago a fatwa was imposed on Salman Rushdie, but as Kenan Malik explains in The Sunday Times, Islam’s outrage touched more than one man – it altered us all:
In January 1989 a group of Muslim protesters in Bradford had made headlines when they paraded through the town with a copy of The Satanic Verses before burning it. I knew Bradford and many of the players in the Rushdie drama, having helped to organise anti-racist protests in the town. Why, I wondered, were people taking to the streets to burn books? I went back to Bradford that February. It was three weeks after the book-burning and a week before the fatwa. I was waiting in the Victorian semi that housed the Council of Mosques when I heard a familiar voice. It was Hassan, a friend from London. “What are you doing in this godforsaken place?” I asked him.
Hassan laughed. “Trying to make it less godforsaken,” he said. “I’ve been up here a few months helping in the campaign against Rushdie.” And then he laughed again when he saw my face. The Hassan I had known in London had been a member of the Socialist Workers party (as had I).
When Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, it was the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom. Two decades later, the violence continues, and Muslim fundamentalists have gained a new advantage: media self-censorship. Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair [via 3quarksdaily]:
At a dinner party that will forever be green in the memory of those who attended it, somebody was complaining not just about the epic badness of the novels of Robert Ludlum but also about the badness of their titles. (You know the sort of pretentiousness: The Bourne Supremacy, The Aquitaine Progression, The Ludlum Impersonation, and so forth.) Then it happily occurred to another guest to wonder aloud what a Shakespeare play might be called if named in the Ludlum manner. At which point Salman Rushdie perked up and started to sniff the air like a retriever. “O.K. then, Salman, what would Hamlet’s title be if submitted to the Ludlum treatment?” “The Elsinore Vacillation,” he replied-and I find I must stress this-in no more time than I have given you. Think it was a fluke? Macbeth? “The Dunsinane Reforestation.” To persist and to come up with The Rialto Sanction and The Kerchief Implication was the work of not too many more moments.
This is the way, when discussing Rushdie and his work, that I like to start. He is sublimely funny, and his humor is based on a relationship with language that is more like a musical than a literary one. (I here admit to my own worst plagiarism: invited to write the introduction to Vanity Fair’s “Black & White Issue” some years ago, I took advantage of Salman’s presence in my house to ask him to riff on the two keywords for a bit. He free-associated about everything from photogravure to the Taj Mahal, without a prompt, for about 30 minutes, and my piece was essentially done.) And this is a man whose first language was Urdu!
More:
Twenty years after the Ayatollah Khomeini called for his execution, Salman Rushdie is still alive – and still making enemies. John Preston in the Telegraph:
A car pulls up outside a Georgian house in Soho. Out steps Salman Rushdie. He’s dressed entirely in black – black overcoat, black scarf, black jacket, black sweater, trousers, shoes… The only thing not completely black is his shirt and that’s only because it’s got a few white stripes on it. He looks – actually, he looks just like a hit-man.
In his hand he carries a polythene bag full of books. When he comes upstairs, I find myself peering through the opaque plastic trying to make out the titles. One of them turns out to be the French version of his last novel, The Enchantress of Florence – now out in paperback. The book, declares Rushdie with satisfaction, has done terrifically well in France, getting ‘the sort of rave reviews you find yourself making up in the bath’.
Over here, it had a more mixed reception, but then, as Rushdie says of himself, ‘I’m not the sort of writer who ever gets five out of 10 reviews. I tend to get 11 out of 10, or minus one out of 10. That’s all right, though; it shows that people are having strong reactions.’
David Van Biema in Time:
The fatwa – now more or less lifted – did not sour Rushdie from his conviction that religion is necessary to writers, if only because it provides the only available language on certain topics. “I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not – there are no words to express some things except religious words,” he said. “For instance, ’soul.” I don’t believe in an afterlife or heaven or hell, yet there isn’t a secular word for that feeling that we are not only flesh and blood. Whether you’re religious or not you may find yourself obliged to use language shaped by religion.”
Under the prompting of Gauri Viswanathan, a Columbia professor of English and Comparative literature, Rushdie expressed a deep appreciation for the outward expressions of faith. “I grew up looking out my window at Kings College chapel [the iconic building at Cambridge University, which Rushdie attended],” he says. “And its hard not to believe in the capacity of religion to create beauty” with that sight in his memory. He then expressed wonder that, as a non-Christian secularist, he was invited in 1993 to preach a sermon in that same chapel and did. “There are moments in your life that surprise you,” he said.
Twenty years after the publication of the book that almost cost him his life, Sir Salman Rushdie is still glad that he wrote The Satanic Verses. In an interview with writer and broadcaster Clive James, filmed exclusively for The Times website, he said he “wouldn’t not have wanted” to be the writer asking the big questions about religion and civilisation posed by the book.
The interview comes after a petrol bomb attack on the home of the publisher of a controversial novel about the Prophet Mohammed. Martin Rynja, 44, whose Gibson Square publishing house will release The Jewel of Medina by American author Sherry Jones, in the UK was unhurt, but is under police protection.
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Click here for highlights of the interview:
Aravind Adiga
The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, considered to be the most prestigious award for literary fiction in English, is out. Early favourite, Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence gets passed over while two other Indian writers — Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies) and the 33-year-old Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger) make it to the final six.
BBC lists the six who made it.
In The Telegraph (UK), James Delingpole is unimpressed with the list of ‘token Asians’, ‘Irish misery novelist’ and ‘gay’ writer — usual suspects. But writers rarely slag off other novelist or, for that matter, literary awards.
Token Asian; Oirish misery novelist; another token Asian; Guardian woman; gay; token Australian wild-card with beard who looks definitely a bit foreign. Hmm. I wonder which of the usual suspects on the shortlist is going to win the Booker Prize this year.
“Aaagh!” I’m going to go, when I see these appallingly sexist, racist, homophobic words under my byline in bald print in a respectable, widely read national newspaper. “Did I really write that sentence? Was I drunk? Was I trying to kill my literary career stone dead?”
Amitav Ghosh
And in The Telegraph (India), Amit Roy takes a closer look at the Indian contenders
Two books by Indian authors — Sea of Poppies by Calcutta-born Amitav Ghosh and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, a debut novelist from Chennai — have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
There was bitter disappointment for Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif, whose much-fancied A Case of Exploding Mangoes was on the long-list of 13 novels announced in July and was being talked about as the probable winner.
In The Guardian, why Salman Rushdie not is “not good enough” for Booker shortlist:
Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was simply not a good enough book to make it past the longlist stage of this year’s Booker prize, according to the chair of judges, Michael Portillo. To add insult to the double Booker of Booker winner’s injured pride, Portillo added that the judges didn’t even spend that much time discussing it.
“I can say that the discussions we had about Salman Rushdie, as with all the other books, was a discussion about the book and not about the author. It was about the merits of the book,” he told guardian.co.uk after the press conference at which the shortlist was announced.
“In the opinion of these five people taken together, Salman Rushdie’s was not one of the top six books for us. We didn’t have a huge debate about it.”
More:
His films and novels are filled with raucous sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. This Spring, the 53-year-old Hanif Kureishi received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. Not bad going for a London suburban lad, writes Rachel Donadio in the New York Times Magazine [via 3QuarksDaily]
One of the most revealing insights into Britain’s recent social history comes early in “My Son the Fanatic,” Hanif Kureishi’s tender and darkly prescient 1997 film. It’s morning in an unnamed city in northern England, and Parvez, a secular Pakistani immigrant taxi driver brilliantly portrayed by Om Puri, watches Farid, his increasingly devout college-age son, sell his electric guitar. “Where is that going?” Parvez asks Farid as the buyer drives off. “You used to love making a terrible noise with these instruments!” Farid, played by Akbar Kurtha, looks at his father with irritation. “You always said there were more important things than ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” he says impatiently in his thick northern English accent. “You couldn’t have been more right.”
This seemingly casual exchange cuts to the heart of almost everything that has animated Kureishi in nearly three decades as a playwright, screenwriter, novelist and essayist. This is, after all, the man who co-edited “The Faber Book of Pop” and whose films and novels — including “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “The Buddha of Suburbia” — are filled with raucous sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. But this is also the man who had the presence of mind to poke around in English mosques in the late ’80s and early ’90s, sensing that something might be stirring there, as indeed it was. Kureishi’s novel “The Black Album,” set in 1989 and named after a Prince album, explored the growing discontent, disenfranchisement and radicalism of some young British Muslims.
Christopher Hitchens on Salman Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence in The Atlantic [via 3QuarksDaily]
Salman Rushdie is so much identified with seriousness—his choice of subjects, from Kashmir to Andalusia; his position as a literary negotiator of East and West; his decade and more of internal exile in hiding from the edict of a fanatical theocrat—that it can be easy to forget how humorous he is. In much the same way, his extraordinary knowledge of classical literature sometimes causes people to overlook his command of the vernacular. Here are two examples of wit and idiom from his latest fiction, The Enchantress of Florence. In the first, an enigmatic wanderer, appareled in a coat of many colors, enters a splendid city:
Not far from the caravanserai, a tower studded with elephant tusks marked the way to the palace gate. All elephants belonged to the emperor, and by spiking a tower with their teeth he was demonstrating his power. Beware! the tower said. You are entering the realm of the Elephant King, a sovereign so rich in pachyderms that he can waste the gnashers of a thousand of the beasts just to decorate me.
This is the offbeat manner in which one might start a tale for children, as Rushdie did in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. By contrast, here is Ago Vespucci in Florence, trying by strenuous exercise in a whorehouse to cure his revulsion at the entry of the king of France to the city.
Sir Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children has been voted the favourite Booker prize-winner of all time. Rushdie in Chicago to promote his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, said, “I have to say this is just a marvellous moment for me and for Midnight’s Children … I’m slightly lost for words which usually I’m not.” His sons Zafar and Milan accepted the trophy.
More here:
Rushdie talks to Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian about The Satanic Verses, surviving a fatwa, and why free speech is as important as ever.
Salman Rushdie is sitting at the desk of Rabbi Judith Lazarus Siegal sipping Grey Goose vodka. This seems the wrong thing to do in a Jewish temple, but apparently it isn’t: another rabbi drops by to suggest that he gets his juicer and we make daiquiris. The author politely declines: he takes his vodka neat. It’s a literary thing. “Vikram Seth apparently likes a clear drink in his glass too when he gives readings,” says Rushdie, “though in his case I believe it’s gin.”
Christina Patterson in The Independent:
From the first stroke of midnight, I was hooked. It wasn’t midnight, actually. It was just after lunch in a garden in Italy, and the Italian family I was staying with were shuttered inside, asleep. As a sun-starved teenager from Guildford, I wasn’t going to waste a wave of sunshine nor a single moment, because the clock had struck, and a character, and a nation, and a passion had been born.
More:
DJ Taylor in The Independent:
One of my sharpest memories from student days is of traipsing the winter pavements of Oxford in December 1981, desperately searching for an unsold copy of Midnight’s Children, thenearmarked as somebody’s Christmas present. A month into the new year, Rushdie turned up at a college arts festival, and I picked my way through the January slush to luxuriate in his glow.
Tell us what you think.
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The Prospect/Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the world’s top 100 “public intellectuals” — “the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time” — has nine from this part of the world.
The criteria to make the list, says FP, could not be more simple: Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.
India:
1: Historian Ramachandra Guha
2: Political psychologist Ashis Nandy
3: Environmentalist Sunita Narain
4: Economist-Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen
5: Journalist author Fareed Zakaria
6: Novelist Salman Rushdie
7: San Diego-based neuroscientist VS Ramachandran
Pakistan: Lawyer-politician Aitzaz Ahsan
Bangladesh: Microfinance guru Mohammed Yunus
China has four.
Click here for the full list, to vote your selection or to add a candidate.
Salman Rushdie is playing the role of an obstetrician in Then She Found Me. Helen Hunt stars in, directs, and also helped write and produce the movie. Here’s the New York Times review:
“Then She Found Me,” a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its modest accomplishment. The directorial debut of Helen Hunt, who plays April Epner, an anxious 39-year-old kindergarten teacher in New York City, it has all the ingredients of a slick, commercial farce, which it emphatically is not.
In fact, the movie, based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, has enough material for two such farces. In one, a childless mother obsessed with her ticking biological clock becomes pregnant after clumsy breakup sex with her husband of less than a year. (Her obstetrician is played by, of all people, Salman Rushdie.)
[Photo: Salman Rushdie as Dr. Masani, Helen Hunt as April, Colin Firth as Frank and Matthew Broderick as Ben in Then She Found Me]
Farrukh Dhondy in The Times of India:
The old Jewish joke asks “How do we know Jesus was a Jew?” Answer: “He entered his father’s profession, lived with his parents till in his thirties and believed his mother was a virgin.” Jesus himself said “By their works shall ye know them” or words to that effect and very recently while reading The Enchantress of Florence, the latest novel by Salman Rushdie, it occurred to me that this dictum can be used as the literary critical key to identity.
I confess that on the night before a Salman Rushdie book is to be published, I take my sleeping bag and camp outside the doors of some famous bookshop, much as travellers, in the era before Minister Laloo Yadav’s reforms, did at the ticket windows of our railway stations. That I am inevitably the only person in the overnight queue and inevitably questioned by the Phillistine London police, has never deterred me. After I’ve read the book I immediately look up all the reviews I can find to determine what I should think about it.
The reviews of The Enchantress prove that a massive delusion has been foisted on the literary world. From the Times Literary Supplement to the Indian press, the critics are all grievously mistaken, barking up the wrong tree. They are like people who go fishing, leaving behind lines and hooks, mounted instead on horses and running with hounds to horns. Wrong creature, mistaken pursuit.
