Interview with Salman Rusdie

Salman Rushdie is the critically acclaimed author of numerous novels including Midnight’s Children, winner of the Booker Prize. His engaging style of magical realism has thrilled audiences the world over for the past twenty-eight years, and his most recent period piece The Enchantress of Florence is a tour de force of historical fiction.

I sat down with Mr. Rushdie in Atlanta recently to discuss The Enchantress of Florence, the writing process, and The Best American Short Stories of 2008 (which he edited).

Shawn Stufflebeam: I'm always curious what a professional author’s writing process is. Is it a daily discipline, or are you binge writer?

Salman Rushdie: No it's pretty much a daily discipline really. I mean, I think that you kind of have to do it that way. I know friends of mine who are screenwriters and playwrights who actually sometimes find that it's better to do it as you say in kind of an intense binge. Noel Coward is famous for having written his plays in weekends. But you can’t write a novel like that; it's just too long. You’ve got to develop that marathon runner’s habit of just ticking off the miles, at a sort of a steady pace. And I think there’s also something temperamentally about many novelists, which is that you quite like the fact that it takes a long time, because it means that you live with the idea, rather than just blurting it out. And during the process of living with it, quite often you find more in it than you knew you had, or slightly different things than you thought you were doing. But I do it completely like an office job, really; I get up in the morning and work.

SS: How long do you bang away at it each day? Do you take weekends off?

SR: No, I try even on the weekends to do a little bit. I’m not saying I don’t go out for Sunday brunch, but I do think that the rhythm thing is important, that you have to just get into the rhythm of it and not get out of it. Because you can’t just jump back in – it will take you several days if you break the stride. I’m writing a book now, and essentially I just do it every minute I’ve got. Like today I’ve been writing all day. I came to meet you, then I’ll go and teach the class, and probably at night I’ll do a bit more.

SS: What made you want to write The Enchantress of Florence in particular – was there a moment that it came to you?

SR: Not really. There wasn’t exactly a moment, because another thing I’ve discovered about my books is that they often sit in my head for a long time before I write them. It’s very unusual for me to think of a book and say, “Okay, I’m going to write that.” In fact, the fact that they stay in my head is one of the things that tells me that I want to write them. So in a funny way it chooses you – it sticks in your head. And there were things about this, I mean, without knowing the actual story of the book, there were aspects of it that I’d known for a very long time. I went to Florence I was twenty years old, and Machiavelli is somebody I’ve been interested in for a very long time. I just thought he was such a richer and more complicated character than the kind of one dimensionally bad guy that his name conjures up.

SS: He has kind of an evil connotation now.

SR: Yes, and it’s in many way undeserved. And if you grow up in India, and go through an Indian high school, you learn about the Mughal Empire, kind of in the way that here you would learn about Founding Fathers. It’s kind of standard, the big six Mughal emperors, of which Akbar is the third and most important. The particular character of this king had always stuck with me because it struck me how odd it is… I mean, he was very advanced for his time, and he was very forward-looking, and he was very tolerant, I mean, those things are true. But the bit that interested me is how odd it was that such ideas should occur in the head of a tyrant. This is no democrat – he’s an absolute ruler.

SS: And very successful.

SR: Yes, and never lost a battle, and didn’t take kindly to being contradicted. Had the power of life and death over every single person in his kingdom, and wasn’t interested in giving that up. And yet, he had these extraordinary ideas about tolerance and justice, which were, in some ways, a couple of hundred years ahead of their time. And so I thought that contradiction in him – it was interesting because that must have been a contradiction that he rammed up against all the time. If the way in which you think and the way in which you act are kind of at odds with each other, it makes you interesting.

And the thing about the sixteenth century, what’s most interesting about it, is that the world that we live in now is just being born. And I thought, ‘Well, there’s something interesting about that.’ If we go back to the beginning, and see what it was like then, it could give us some clues about why we’re like this now.

SS: Something else that was interesting to me was the mirror motif in the novel. You seem to be the right man at the right time to bridge cultures that mirror each other.

SR: Yeah, well that’s been my life, really. Partly chosen, and partly accidental. I have bounced around between a lot of places, and I always thought of myself essentially as a city person. The one thing you learn as an urban person is if you know how to live in Bombay, within a week you know how to live in New York. So yes, one of the things that I did find myself doing in this book was to show how these two apparently very different cities reflected each other in many ways – in their sexual behavior, in their social codes, et cetera.

SS: And The Enchantress of Florence, Qara Köz was able to move from one to the other.