Two months ago, in an amber-lit auditorium tucked away in New York’s Greenwich Village, a group of world-renowned writers gathered to discuss how literature might determine the shape of Europe after communism. Perennial Nobel candidate Cees Nooteboom had arrived from Holland by way of Spain, while Russian-born novelist Andre Makine represented his adopted homeland of France. The audience of readers was made up of New Yorkers – which means they could have been from anywhere.
It shows how the world has changed that the most powerful literary celebrity in the room – the one most intimately connected with the perils and pleasures of a global society – could slip into the back row and watch undetected. His name was Salman Rushdie.
It has been several years since the 57-year-old novelist lived under the fatwa put upon him by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1989, Rushdie was condemned to death by Khomeini, then the head of Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic Republic. Khomeini accused Rushdie of committing blasphemy against Islam in his novel “The Satanic Verses.” “The Satanic Verses” can almost define itself as a novel again, though, rather than being referred to as that novel. And Rushdie can enter and leave restaurants through front doors again.
Still, Rushdie is a powerful draw – a kind of enduring symbol of freedom – a form of capital he drew upon as president of the literary organization PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists and Novelists) American Center to corral hundreds of writers and critics from around the world to the New York Festival of International Literature, a weeklong series of readings and discussions showcasing literature and ideas from around the globe.
This year’s festival brought writers from all parts of the globe, even when some of their work had yet to be translated. The event was a huge hit, playing host to sell-out crowds, even when the authors were as obscure as German writer Patrick Roth, whose work is not available in the U.S., even though he lives in Los Angeles.
In Rushdie’s mind, the success of this reception shows how eager Americans are to read outside their backyard, something from which he takes great comfort.
“The lack of translation means Americans don’t have an opportunity to find out about the best stuff, but when you do bring it to them they are very, very receptive,” the Bombay-born author says.
As the PEN festival also revealed, now that Rushdie has his freedom, he is gingerly stepping out again, not least with the help of his fourth wife, Padma Lakshmi, a model and United Nations women’s ambassador. The couple married last year and have quickly become a fixture on New York’s social scene.
Rushdie has lived part time in New York for more than five years and he is not about to stop. He can attend baseball games now, if he likes, but it is no longer news. Were it not for the occasional journals published by his wife, which refer to him as S and describe movie dates with Lou Reed, his whereabouts might be entirely unknown.
If indeed Rushdie is suddenly more visible, it has not reduced the wattage of his celebrity. So resilient is its penumbra, in fact, that talking to him can be an almost surreal experience. The man speaks easily, does not mind being interrupted, and only occasionally sidles into a ribald aside.
About his own celebrity, he says: “The only thing it’s good for now is getting tables in restaurants.”
There is a friendliness and humor, and an intimacy to his manner. It takes a while before you twig to the fact that you have heard this before, only
in his novels. In them, as he does in person, Rushdie speaks enthrallingly easily.
With his hectic schedule of social appearances, it’s hard to imagine Rushdie sitting still at his desk long enough to produce new work. But the past five years, Rushdie has published a novel, “Fury”; a collection of essays; “Step Across This Line”; a theatrical adaptation of his Booker Prize-winning novel, “Midnight’s Children”; and dozens of articles, mainly for the New York press.
His desk has not become his mistress. “No, no, not a mistress at all,” Rushdie says giggling, “but a wife. And a shrewdish one at that.”
In fact, he was spending quite a lot of time there until the PEN event, which will be apparent when his new novel, “Shalimar the Clown,” is published in September. Strutting in at 400 pages, it arrives with a whiff of triumphant return. Word on the street is that it is his strongest work yet, and a cursory read reveals the hype to be justified. Indeed, Rushdie is back.
Beginning in Los Angeles in 1991, the book opens with the fatal stabbing of a former ambassador to India by his Kashmiri chauffeur. As it turns out, the man, who calls himself Shalimar the Clown, is not a meek and silent servant but a former war hero, who has plotted this event with chilling patience. As we go deeper into his history, we discover that the slaying is not just political but deeply personal.
Like “The Satanic Verses” and “Midnight’s Children” before it, “Shalimar the Clown” evolves into a huge rollicking narrative that tells not just the stories of its four principal characters, but also a tale of the age in which they live. An age of hyperbole and bloodshed, assassination and fundamentalism. And Rushdie draws on Indian mythology, Los Angeles fakery, Hindu culture and the limits of the English language to capture it all.
Rushdie never has felt trapped or hemmed in – in part because his frame of reference as a novelist is so broad. “One of my good fortunes as a writer is to have access to a lot of traditions – and not just inside western culture, high culture or low culture. Remember, I am a child of the ’60s generation: I was 21 in 1968, I am also somebody who is passionately in love with the language of cinema, so all this stuff, music, movies, it’s just readily available – not something I have to bone up on.”
Rushdie is just beginning the research for a new novel and he’s beginning to feel that tidal tug toward deeper waters. “I am trying to develop an idea for a novel which I’ve had for quite some time,” he said in a burst of candor. “It would be a historical novel in which I imagine a connection between the millennial empire of India and Rome. I’d be creating an imaginary ambassador who would bring India and Machiavellian Florence into collision with each other.”
It’s a fanciful connection, a perfect skeleton on which to hang the arabesques of plot and intrigue Rushdie loves to play with, even though he remains a “literary” novelist. “One of the things that happened in the wake of modernism is that you wound up with popular fiction which told great page-turning stories, but had no other qualities,” he says. “And you had the so-called literary novel, which had all those other virtues, but didn’t tell a story.”
Ultimately, the “story” has always been the author’s driving passion in life, whether in his magical literary tales, or when speaking out in defense of himself and others; his chief concern has always been to create voices and make them heard.
Even with his new sense of freedom, Rushdie has lost none of his fight.
John Freeman is a writer in New York
