The one-man sound bite missile named Rushdie aims His cross-Atlantic test firing at Time and the Times (thanks, Sapna and Karthik):

There’s a line about Klingons on the very first page of Shalimar. Aren’t you worried that a pop reference like that will date the book?

… A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it’s the balance of that that’s difficult to achieve. I have a suspicion that Klingons might be more enduring than we suspect.

Speaking of Klingons, wasn’t your wife… on an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise?

Yes, she was. She was an alien empress of most of the universe, I think. The episode was all right. Next Generation was the one that I liked best. [Link]

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p>Now that Lakshmi’s been on Star Trek, our nerdy readers have official permission to idolize. I love the uncharacteristically autistic, Trekkie honesty here (whereas in the Times Rushdie gives wuvvy-dovey, team player quotes). His wife was on TV, and it was just ‘eh’? Something tells me he’s going to learn about ‘withholding’ tonight, and I don’t mean taxes

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p>The Times delves into his early career, which is always where the critical lessons of history are found — not how a success expands, but how it struggled from obscurity in the first place:

He was not part of the Barnes-Amis-McEwan lit-lad circle back then and, as someone who was still struggling to find his voice, was keenly aware that they had found their way as writers far earlier on: “There was Martin with The Rachel Papers… and Ian with his first collections of short stories… and I thought, ‘I wish I would be able to write as well as this’, but I was still stumbling around trying to find out what to do. It took me a long time to get going as a writer.”

His debut, Grimus, was both a critical and commercial failure and despite the huge and continued success of Midnight’s Children, all the more remarkable for it being only his second novel, Rushdie could not forgive the casual dismissiveness of those first reviews… he admits that if he sees people reading it, his instinct is to hide behind the furniture. “… it embarrasses me.” [Link]

On his revenge against the critics:

When he won the Booker prize for Midnight’s Children in 1981 (it was further honoured with the ultimate of accolades, the Booker of Bookers, in 1993 for the best novel in the 25-year history of the award), Rushdie made what was widely considered to be a most ungracious acceptance speech… his anger was fuelled by the reaction to Grimus: “When people were saying, ‘Find a different form of employment’, and I thought, you know, for a first book that’s real cruelty. I remember that. And I guess, with hindsight, you shouldn’t ever try to get even because you always lose.” [Link]

On going balls-out artistically with Midnight’s Children:

He started writing Midnight’s Children in his mid-thirties but it took him at least five years to complete it, which isn’t so long when you consider what a vast canvas it fills: Independence, the Partition, India, Pakistan, Kashmir… when he looks at the novel now, he simply cannot recognise himself as its creator: “I often wonder who that is. Because I don’t write like that any more. I think a lot has changed, not just in the language but also in the perspective. I mean, it’s a young man’s book and it has the strength of that.”

In its extreme vigour and vitality? “Some of the fearlessness just deciding to take it on,” he says. “After the failure of the first book and after one or two false starts or things that never made it to print, I remember thinking, well, you’d better either give up or do something much more conservative and middle-of-the-road and non-risky. Something, you know, littler.

“Or take the biggest risk you can. So that if you’re going to go down, at least go down in flames. And, actually, I remember very clearly thinking, well, OK, then, I’ll do this because I can’t think of anything more artistically dangerous. And, yes, it took me for ever…” [Link]

He continues his sophisticated deconstruction of Ceylon as snot

The light bulb moment for him was when he was gazing at a map of India – “When you write a book like this, you do find yourself looking at maps quite a bit, you know” – and was struck by the thought that the country looked just like a big nose with a drip hanging off it. Thus Saleem’s physiognomy can be read as a map of India, just as his destiny is interwoven with the history of his birthplace.

It is Saleem, as it turns out, not his creator, who has the last word. “It’s a strange thing that happens to me every time I do a reading from Midnight’s Children, I get a runny nose. It’s like Saleem’s curse,” Rushdie says. “It’s got to the point now where I know that if I’m going to read from it, I’d better have a handkerchief handy.” [Link]

If only Clinton had shtupped a more glamorous dame:

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“It was my view that if the President had f***** Sharon Stone, he would not have been impeached.” Hmm. Isn’t that dreadfully sexist? “No. Yes. Well, maybe. What I’m saying is that the fact that she was not Marilyn Monroe had something to do with the backlash. You know, if John Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe as a mistress, people would say, ‘Well, sure.’ You know.” [Link]

And that never-ending topic, the fatwa:

… the shop owners in Britain’s Muslim community… were told that if they didn’t stick anti-Rushdie posters in their windows their shops would be damaged: “… was happening was gangsterism. People were being paid to go on those demonstrations; people were frightened into going on them…”

Rushdie still finds it odd that people felt the need to exaggerate the conditions of his nine-year captivity: the le Carré-esque fiction of “safe houses” when the mundane reality was that he always had to find his own places to live; the mad idea that he had to switch habitats 56 times in three months. (Even in the first year, he only moved nine or ten times, and in the last seven years he lived in the same house.) The truth, as he says, was bad enough – not being able to tell his children where he lived, the lack of privacy, none of the familiarity of your own possessions – without making it surreal. [Link]

I haven’t required any kind of security for whatever it is now, getting on seven years… It already had nine years of my life. I’d quite like the rest of my life to be about something else. [Link]

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