The blazing hot publicity machine for Shalimar the Clown rolls out another feature on Salman Rushdie, this time in GQ. The cheapskate mag offers only 2 (out of 20!) sections from the print version online, so despite protestations from the Sepia Legal Dept., I transcribe the juicy bits below. Without further ado, heres the ever-quotable Salman on:
3. Comics
He liked Batman the most because he was the weirdest, Rushdie says. Strange thing to do, you know, hang upside down dressed like a bat and go out at night. He was always happiest when Batman came unaccompanied. I didnt like Robin the Boy Wonder at all, he explains, his voice still leaking some youthful annoyance. I thought he was completely redundant and had a silly uniform.[Yes, but does he know about this?]
4. Perceptions of his character after the fatwa, and Indira Gandhi bashing
The thing that happened to me had certain characteristics - it was theological, it was humorless, it was difficult to understand and all those characteristics got transposed onto me. So because it was humorless, I must be.Some were stung by the account of the previous few decades of Indian history in Midnights Children. Indira Gandhi, Indias prime minister at the time actually sued him for suggesting that her son Sanjay blamed her for the death of her husband, his father. Rushdie eventually yielded to pressure from his publishers to remove the passage, as long as she agreed that there was nothing else in the book a book fairly critical of her that she considers objectionable, and he says that the Indian press concurred with his view that this settlement was more a humiliation for the prime minister than for the author.
[The Iron Lady picked that over the transistors-for-sterilization bit? Color me surprised.]
5. The trials of English boarding school
Before his journey West [at 13], his mother tried to prepare him for some of the horrors he would face there. Such as, he remembers, having to wipe your bottom with paper. This he had refused to believe. I said, What do you mean? Its not possible. No water? Not possible.He brings up one of the great perceptions of such English educational establishments: I managed to get through four and a half years of English boarding school without a single homosexual experience I certainly never came anywhere close to it, either being hit on by anybody or the other way round. In that sense, I missed out on some apparently essential part of the experience.
6. Atheism, that pesky minute of conversion, and his subsequent renunciation of faith
He went and ate his first ham sandwich [at 14, in Britain], in order to prove that the thunderbolt would not strike me. The ham sandwich itself wasnt so good, but soon he discovered bacon sandwiches, and that was another matter altogetherIn an interview he gave shortly afterward [declaring his faith in Allah], he exemplified his new way of thinking: I feel that had I been a Muslim at the time that I wrote the book, I would clearly have written it differently clearly, and I want to make that point, and let there be no argument about it. But within him there was plenty of argument about it, and this conversion to Islam, as it was widely presented, was itself soon renounced. In truth, even in his days of darkest need, deep down his atheism never abandoned him.
9. Paging Michael Moore
I think if the West is to blame for anything, it is to blame for giving the house of Saud keys to the oil money and allowing them to use that money to propagate around the world Wahhabism, the most backward, primitive, and crummy version of Islam there had ever been, and to present that as Orthodoxy
12. His life as an ad-man (check out the pic Rushdie circa 1974!)
He was responsible for two campaigns known to anyone living in Britain in the 1970s for the designation of cream cakes as naughty but nice, and for the description of a new chocolate bar called Aero, full of air bubbles, using a chain of mutated adjectives: adorabubble, delectabubble, incredibubble It took me ten years to find out how to be a writer It would have been so easy to give up. I had all kinds of temptations. I was doing pretty well in advertising, and they dangle huge sums of money under your nose and a glamorous lifestyle, you know girls, commercial shoots, and locations, America, South Africa. The World opens up, and all you have to do is sell peanut butter and shampoo.
And damning word of praise-
upon reading it [his widely panned debut novel Grimus], his father said, What this tells me is that one day you will write a great book.
13. Scavenging for material
My view is that writers need to go everywhere. You need to put your hands into as many pieces of life as you can. Youve got to go to the whorehouse or the ballgame or the prison or the nightclub, it doesnt matter. Youve got to go everywhere. Because otherwise you dont know enough Ive always really liked the contrast between going really inside yourself for a living and then coming out and being with friends.
14. Shalimar
Much of Shalimar the Clown is set in Kashmir, the territory disputed by India and Pakistan, and his familys original homeland. Though it is far from what the book is about, Shalimar the Clown is at times savagely direct in its appraisal of the regions history and dilemma, and of fanaticism and fundamentalism He points to the books second epigraph, borrowed from Romeo and Juliet - A plague on both your houses and says this is, very strongly what I feel. I think Kashmir got fucked twice. First it got screwed over by the Indians, then it got screwed over by the fundamentalists coming over the border. So its had it at both ends. And during this long time, more than half a century, the views of the people living there have never been taken into account Theyve been trampled over in both directions. And the book tries to tell the truth about that. This is the writers job to tell the truth.
18.The effect of a fatwa on his writing
Shalimar, an international terrorist at this point, is sent to kill a writer, a godless man, a writer against god, who had sold his soul to the West. In the novel Rushdie makes clear the writer is French-speaking perhaps partly to make it obvious that its not him, and also as an acknowledgement of Tahar Djaout, a secularist Algerian writer who was murdered by Muslim terrorists in 1993. (One of the things I think its important to say, Rushdie points out, is that many writers have been killed in this period in which I was not killed.) Describing how to prepare a venue before the arrival of a potential target: Any professional knew that the so-called principal was easiest to attack in the space between the door of his vehicle and the door of the location he planned to enter.
Also discussed: Bono, Padma Lakshmi (She always thinks that she is the heroine of all my books, including the ones written before she was born, essentially), The Power Rangers (If I ever see another episode of Power Rangers it will be much too soon), Mark Knopfler of Dire Straights (I find as I got older that almost the only quality I look for in somebody is personal warmth), marriage, Madonna (upon being sent The Ground Beneath her Feet not only had she not read it, she had shredded it), and Lou Reed (The idea that one day I would get to hang out with Lou Reed was it was like telling me that you would hang out with God Only more fun.)
