In his last book, his memoir Joseph Anton, published in 2012, Booker Prize-winning writer Salman Rushdie recounts an incident that happened when he went to America for the publication of his inarguably most-famous novel, Midnight’s Children. As they sat drinking beer one afternoon, the writer Kurt Vonnegut asked him whether he was “serious about this writing business”. When Rushdie answered yes, Vonnegut told him: “Then you should know that the day is going to come when you won’t have a book to write, and you’re still going to have to write a book.”
Eleven novels, a memoir, three non-fiction books later, what can one expect from a Rushdie novel? As Rushdie let slip at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last October – and Random House confirmed – his first novel for adults in seven years is due out soon, and it’s not going to run into hundreds of pages like say, his Midnight’s Children (over 600), but be a slim book of 250-and-odd pages. At Cheltenham, while he set the literary Twitter world abuzz with his pronouncement that he was in “danger of finishing a book,” he said: “It’ll be like 250 pages. It’s like clearing my throat. I’ve finally learned how to shut up.”
But why should he shut up?
Especially now, when the world is fragmented like never before, and when India, which he likes to revisit in his books again and again, has a new right-leaning dispensation riding on the hopes of an aspirational India. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, the length notwithstanding, is a nod to A Thousand and One Nights, the stories of Scheherazde, the “wonder tales of the East”, his father would narrate to him at bedtime when Rushdie was a small boy. In fact, it’s being described by Random House as a “wonder tale about the way we live now.” The novel “blends history, mythology and a timeless love story to bring alive a world… that has been plunged into an age of unreason”.
“A wonder tale… in an age of unreason.” That could mean so many possibilities, even for a thin book. Will it be fair to expect it to be set in an imaginary, mythical land? Will he return to the chaos of the subcontinent again? Will he root it in a present day divided, yet powerful, America? Will the language mirror a reality that tends to lean on the sometimes fantastic, sometimes unreasonable world that we are being forced to getting used to wherever we may live, from America to Australia, Europe to India? Which history, mythology, past, present will his wonder tale tell? And after The Satanic Verses how much will he want to tell, and more importantly, be allowed to tell?
History, mythology, past, present – Rushdie’s novels have mined these themes ever since he decided to write a story about the “twins” in Midnight’s Children way back in 1981. The story about Saleem Sinai, born at midnight August 14-15 1947, the same time India was getting its independence from the British, was a biting commentary on India’s past and present, and told in a language that inspired many other young Indian writers to give voice to their thoughts. The success of Midnight’s Children was instant. Rushdie had found the language to match the “hot and overcrowded and vulgar and loud” land that was India.
He won the Booker in 1981 and the Booker of Bookers in 1993 for the magically-realistic novel. In it, Rushdie was also, of course, examining the world of his origins, the Bombay-bred Kashmir boy who was sent to the UK to study and live. Two years after Midnight’s Children (which was actually his second novel, published six years after his first, Grimus) Shame, which was the second part of his examination of his roots, this one dealing in most part with Pakistan, the country his parents chose to live in.
On September 26, 1988, his most controversial book, The Satanic Verses, was published.
He writes in his memoir that it was imagined as a book of journeys and with an aim to connect the worlds that he came from to the very different world he was living in. This innocent view was lost to many – even among those who didn’t read it ‒ who said the book was “against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran.” India was the first to ban the book, but Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, on February 14, 1989, declared a fatwa on Rushdie, forcing him to go underground for more than a decade.
The fatwa years produced The Moor’s Last Sigh (again a return to Bombay) and a delightful children’s book, written for his son Zafar who was only 9 when the fatwa was declared, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. When Rushdie moved to America to settle, two future novels, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury, tried to examine his new home, New York, but the efforts were quite disastrous, perhaps prompting him to return to the subcontinent – where he still isn’t quite welcome – with Shalimar the Clown, this one based in Kashmir.
His last novel for adults, The Enchantress of Florence, also combines public history with personal imgination, this time in the era of the Mughal emperor Akbar. As Rushdie writes in his memoir, when his father told him stories, he “told them and retold them and remade them and reinvented them in his own way.” Just as Rushdie has been doing for the past few decades, and we wait to read what’s inside Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights to find out what story is he telling/retelling/remaking/reinventing.
Sudipta Datta is a freelance journalist who writes on books.
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Eleven novels, a memoir, three non-fiction books later, what can one expect from a Rushdie novel? As Rushdie let slip at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last October – and Random House confirmed – his first novel for adults in seven years is due out soon, and it’s not going to run into hundreds of pages like say, his Midnight’s Children (over 600), but be a slim book of 250-and-odd pages. At Cheltenham, while he set the literary Twitter world abuzz with his pronouncement that he was in “danger of finishing a book,” he said: “It’ll be like 250 pages. It’s like clearing my throat. I’ve finally learned how to shut up.”
But why should he shut up?
Especially now, when the world is fragmented like never before, and when India, which he likes to revisit in his books again and again, has a new right-leaning dispensation riding on the hopes of an aspirational India. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, the length notwithstanding, is a nod to A Thousand and One Nights, the stories of Scheherazde, the “wonder tales of the East”, his father would narrate to him at bedtime when Rushdie was a small boy. In fact, it’s being described by Random House as a “wonder tale about the way we live now.” The novel “blends history, mythology and a timeless love story to bring alive a world… that has been plunged into an age of unreason”.
“A wonder tale… in an age of unreason.” That could mean so many possibilities, even for a thin book. Will it be fair to expect it to be set in an imaginary, mythical land? Will he return to the chaos of the subcontinent again? Will he root it in a present day divided, yet powerful, America? Will the language mirror a reality that tends to lean on the sometimes fantastic, sometimes unreasonable world that we are being forced to getting used to wherever we may live, from America to Australia, Europe to India? Which history, mythology, past, present will his wonder tale tell? And after The Satanic Verses how much will he want to tell, and more importantly, be allowed to tell?
History, mythology, past, present – Rushdie’s novels have mined these themes ever since he decided to write a story about the “twins” in Midnight’s Children way back in 1981. The story about Saleem Sinai, born at midnight August 14-15 1947, the same time India was getting its independence from the British, was a biting commentary on India’s past and present, and told in a language that inspired many other young Indian writers to give voice to their thoughts. The success of Midnight’s Children was instant. Rushdie had found the language to match the “hot and overcrowded and vulgar and loud” land that was India.
He won the Booker in 1981 and the Booker of Bookers in 1993 for the magically-realistic novel. In it, Rushdie was also, of course, examining the world of his origins, the Bombay-bred Kashmir boy who was sent to the UK to study and live. Two years after Midnight’s Children (which was actually his second novel, published six years after his first, Grimus) Shame, which was the second part of his examination of his roots, this one dealing in most part with Pakistan, the country his parents chose to live in.
On September 26, 1988, his most controversial book, The Satanic Verses, was published.
He writes in his memoir that it was imagined as a book of journeys and with an aim to connect the worlds that he came from to the very different world he was living in. This innocent view was lost to many – even among those who didn’t read it ‒ who said the book was “against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran.” India was the first to ban the book, but Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, on February 14, 1989, declared a fatwa on Rushdie, forcing him to go underground for more than a decade.
The fatwa years produced The Moor’s Last Sigh (again a return to Bombay) and a delightful children’s book, written for his son Zafar who was only 9 when the fatwa was declared, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. When Rushdie moved to America to settle, two future novels, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury, tried to examine his new home, New York, but the efforts were quite disastrous, perhaps prompting him to return to the subcontinent – where he still isn’t quite welcome – with Shalimar the Clown, this one based in Kashmir.
His last novel for adults, The Enchantress of Florence, also combines public history with personal imgination, this time in the era of the Mughal emperor Akbar. As Rushdie writes in his memoir, when his father told him stories, he “told them and retold them and remade them and reinvented them in his own way.” Just as Rushdie has been doing for the past few decades, and we wait to read what’s inside Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights to find out what story is he telling/retelling/remaking/reinventing.
Sudipta Datta is a freelance journalist who writes on books.
