BOOKS
Rushdie's journey comes to our shores
Posted on Sun, Jul. 06, 2008
BY ELLEN KANNER
Special to The Miami Herald
MEET THE AUTHOR
What: Salman Rushdie reads from
The Enchantress of FlorenceWhen: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Temple Judea, 5500 Granada Blvd., Coral Gables
Admission: By ticket only. Two tickets given with book purchase at any Books & Books location: 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 933 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach; 9700 Collins Ave., Bal Harbour. Books also will be sold at the event.
Info: booksandbooks.com; 305-442-4408
''I am one of the journeying people,'' Salman Rushdie says. ``I've done it all my life. I don't even feel it's complicated.''
The Bombay-born author knows complicated. His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, perceived as blasphemous by much of the Muslim community, launched a death-sentence fatwa by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, forcing Rushdie to live most of the '90s in hiding. While wed (and then last summer unwed) to wife No. 4, dishy Top Chef star Padma Lakshmi, he watched his private life turn into tabloid fodder. Indeed, there are portions of his life that Rushdie, who appears Tuesday at Temple Judea in Coral Gables for Books & Books, characterizes as ``dreadful.''
On June 25 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II (making him Sir Salman to you), an honor that sparked protests by Muslims around the world when it was announced a year ago. Two days after Rushdie's Buckingham Palace investiture, protesting Pakistani Shiite Muslims set fire to a British flag during a protest march in Islamadbad.
Still, Rushdie has managed to journey beyond. He has a MySpace page. He's a game guy. ``One of the things I've always felt is it's interesting to get your feet wet in as many ponds as possible.''
The latest ''ponds'' include stints in cinema -- a cameo in Bridget Jones's Diary and, most recently, the role of Helen Hunt's gynecologist in Then She Found Me. ''I had to audition,'' says Rushdie, who made Bollywood the backdrop of his 1981 Booker-winning Midnight's Children. Fortunately, he has acting chops; back in the '70s, he belonged to a London theater group.
While he's open to other acting gigs, Rushdie is unlikely to give up his day job. ''The reason I became a writer is the intimacy of reading,'' he says from New York. ``A movie happens on a screen, in a darkened place, but books are inside your head. You have an intimate communion with someone else's imagination. I love that.''
NEW NOVEL
His new novel The Enchantress of Florence (Random, $26) permits more than intimate communion. It allows Rushdie to play Scheherazade, concocting a dazzling mix of filigreed prose, wordplay and stories within stories.
Set in the 16th century, Enchantress opens with another journeyer, a blond stranger from faraway Florence who appears at the court of Akbar the Great to tell the emperor ''a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life.'' Having hooked the reader, Rushdie then effortlessly tosses together the cultures and myths of East and West, historical figures including Niccolo Macchiavelli and created ones like the beautiful Empress Jodha, whom Akbar has imagined into existence for his pleasure.
''It works on so many levels,'' says Will Murphy, Rushdie's editor. ``It's magical; it's engaging; it's enchanting. It casts a spell. One of the wonders of the book is you see East reflected in West and West reflected in the East, and each is the dream of the other.''
The result is a multilayered work that Origin author Diana Abu-Jaber finds ``deeply provocative, like a very complex wine.''
More than a heady brew, the novel also shows ''how the pieces of the world join up,'' Rushdie says. ``We don't live in separate little boxes called India or America. Everything flows into everything else.''
''He's one of the very few people who can occupy two cultures at once,'' says Bill Buford, the former Granta editor to whom the globe-spanning Enchantress is dedicated. ``He's always seeing the world from two perspectives.''
TELLING STORIES
With the ease in which he simultaneously inhabits three continents, Rushdie embraces classics, myths and pop culture, a talent he comes by naturally. As a boy growing up in Bombay, ''My father told me bedtime stories,'' he recalls. ``They were based on the enormous tales of wonder we have in the East. They were his version of Arabian Nights.''
Rushdie's mother told stories, too. ''She had in her mind the most extraordinary architecture of gossip,'' he says with affection. ``Who did what to whom, whose second cousin once removed had some scandalous affair with somebody else's wife. Like all great gossips, she couldn't prevent herself from telling the story even when she knew she wasn't supposed to. If you sat around long enough, it would come tumbling out. For a writer, it was like gold.''
When his mother died four years ago, Rushdie lost his font of gossip. Then, alas, he became one with his marriage to and divorce from Lakshmi, author of the Easy Exotic cookbook and 23 years his junior.
Rushdie, who turned 61 in June, has long kept company with beautiful women, especially those of his creation. There's Vina Apsara, the rock goddess in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Neela, the distracting beauty of Fury, but alongside Qara Koz (``Black Eyes''), the titular character of The Enchantress of Florence, these babes are Ugly Betties.
A classic femme fatale, Qara Koz will ditch you in a heartbeat should a better offer come along. Nothing personal. Might she be based on someone Rushdie knows? The author, whose three-year marriage fizzled while he was deep into the novel, replies, ``Aaargh.''
Seduction and betrayal are part of the novel, as are religion and power, but what's central to it is the nature of storytelling. ''Without stories, we are defenseless,'' says the blond stranger.
''Human beings are unique in that we tell each other stories, and we tell ourselves stories,'' Rushdie says. ``There isn't any other creature on the Earth who does this odd thing. Our relationship with narrative is very profound.''
NEW VOICES
That's why, rather than be silenced by the fatwa, Rushdie created the PEN World Voices Festival. The annual celebration of world literature began in 2005, while he was PEN's president.
''It's wonderful the work he's done for writers at risk, for world literature,'' says Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books. The two met in 1995, after publication of The Moor's Last Sigh, written while Rushdie was still in hiding. ''He came on a sort of stealth tour,'' Kaplan says. ``We had a word-of-mouth autographing, and the place was filled. It was really a kick.''
Iran withdrew its support of the fatwa in 1998, and Rushdie emerged from hiding with a bang. He joined U2 onstage at a London concert (he takes pains to point out he did not sing).
Hanging with the likes of Bono and Helen Hunt has its moments, but Rushdie prefers his communion to be intimate and ''for one's private life to be private.'' A huge Bob Dylan fan (who knew?), he turned down a chance to meet the performer after a concert. 'I don't need to be Bob Dylan's friend. I don't need to have dinner with him. I need to love his music. I was so frightened of being disappointed, to have that color the music I've loved all my life. And I thought, `You know what? I think I'll just go home now.' ''
And where, for a journeyer, is home?
''More than one place is the answer,'' Rushdie says. Sometimes it's New York, where he's lived for the past nine years. Sometimes it's London, where his two children are. Sometimes it's Bombay, his birthplace. Rushdie's favorite home, though, is the one he finds when ``writing my story. There's nothing quite like being deeply inside a story you feel is working and living and breathing all around you, to capture it and get it onto a page and make it a worthy offering to other people. That's the best part of my life without any question.''
Join the discussion
The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Not a registered user? It's Free!
Register here. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.
