Salman Rushdie’s Fantastical American Quest Novel

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: Salman Rushdie’s Fantastical American Quest Novel

Date: September 9, 2019
Host: Deborah Treisman
Guest: Salman Rushdie

---

Overview

In this episode, The New Yorker’s Deborah Treisman interviews Salman Rushdie about his novel Quichotte. Drawing inspiration from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Rushdie’s book becomes an expansive, fantastical, episodic journey across modern-day America, confronting racism, opioid addiction, family estrangement, pop culture obsession, and existential threats, all with irreverent humor and deep humanity. The conversation explores Rushdie’s creative process and his views on writing in and about the present moment.

---

Key Discussion Points

1. Inspiration from Don Quixote

• Rushdie revisited Don Quixote and was enchanted by Edith Grossman’s translation. This led to the inspiration for Quichotte, featuring an aging protagonist obsessed with a TV personality and accompanied by a conjured son, paralleling Quixote and Sancho.

  • Quote [03:35]:
    “Almost immediately my character kind of popped into my head who...has in common with Don Quixote himself, that they're both silly old fools.” — Salman Rushdie

• The book, however, diverges, soon adding a metafictional layer with the story of the character’s author.

  • Quote [04:11]:
    “I've never really written about writing before...and I wasn't sure that it should stay in the book. ...Then what happened is that these two stories began to talk to each other in ways that I found interesting.” — Salman Rushdie

2. Structure and Tone: The Picaresque and Its Possibilities

• Rushdie intentionally uses an episodic, picaresque framework to explore a variety of genres—satire, science fiction, spy thriller, and domestic drama.

  • Quote [06:18]:
    “It was a way for the novel to be metamorphic, you know, to be constantly changing the kind of novel that it is. ...The stories can be told in different ways.” — Salman Rushdie

• The through-line is Kishat’s spiritual quest for self-improvement and the search for "the good," mirrored by that of his author.

  • Quote [07:33]:
    “Kishat is going not only on a physical journey, he's also going on a kind of what you might call a spiritual journey. ...And so is his author.” — Salman Rushdie

3. Themes: Obsession, Virtue, and the American Crisis

• Quichotte explores the dangers and illusions of obsession—Kishat becomes infatuated with a TV host to the point of being perceived as a stalker.

  • Quote [08:40]:
    “He's fallen in love with a TV talk show host who doesn't know him at all and in fact is a little afraid of the idea that he's coming for her.” — Deborah Treisman

• The protagonist faces a moral crisis: to attain love, he must do something bad, challenging his ideals about goodness.

• The opioid crisis appears as a central narrative strand. Rushdie was motivated both by research and by his sister’s death from opioid overdose.

  • Quote [10:22]:
    “My youngest sister, she died from what seems pretty clear was an opioid overdose...And it actually also probably led me toward writing a book about brothers and sisters and about...trying to fix it.” — Salman Rushdie

• The novel tackles many contemporary American issues: racism, the opioid epidemic, black sites, cyber warfare, and family estrangement.

• On addressing contemporary issues:

  • Quote [12:44]:
    “I've always really liked the risky thing of writing very close up against the present moment. If you do it wrong, then it's a catastrophe. If you do it right...you somehow capture a moment.” — Salman Rushdie

4. Apocalypse, Metaphor, and Hope

• The book flirts with apocalyptic imagery—both societal and personal.

  • Quote [13:58]:
    “The point about end of the world novels is that they're usually not about the end of the world. They're usually about some form of crisis in the world.” — Salman Rushdie

• Rushdie sees apocalypse as a metaphor for personal endings and a reflection on the transformation or vanishing of the world he’s known.

• On hope:

  • Quote [15:22]:
    “I don't think it's any part of the writer's duty to provide hope, but I do think that in some way, in the optimism and hopefulness of the character of Kishot, there is that...” — Salman Rushdie

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Metafiction:
  “I've never done that thing about: here is a writer writing a book, you know, and I wasn't sure that it should stay in the book...But then these two stories began to talk to each other.” – Salman Rushdie [04:11]

• On Episodic Narrative:
  “If your characters are traveling from place to place...they can have very different kinds of adventure...So it was a way for the novel to be metamorphic.” – Salman Rushdie [06:18]

• On Writing About the Present:
  “I've always really liked the risky thing of writing very close up against the present moment. If you do it wrong, then it's a catastrophe. If you do it right...you somehow capture a moment.” – Salman Rushdie [12:44]

• On Science Fiction’s Influence:
  “I’ve always moved in the direction of the surreal and the fabulous...science fiction gives you some of the equipment for how to approach that.” – Salman Rushdie [21:59]

---

In-Depth Segments & Readings

• [16:37] Rushdie Reads from Quichotte:
  An aging Indian-American gentleman, obsessed with a TV talk show host, reinvents himself as ‘Quichotte’ and embarks on a fantastical quest for love, paralleling the delusions and sincerity of Don Quixote.

• [17:42] Loneliness in the Social Media Age:
  The novel’s protagonist experiences acute social isolation, connecting with others only superficially through social media.

• [19:01] Rushdie on Science Fiction as a Teen:
  Vivid recollections of reading both literary figures (Bradbury, Le Guin, Vonnegut) and “nuts and bolts” science fiction. He nods to works like Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” for inspiring his apocalyptic motifs.

• [22:05 & 22:15] On Family and Estrangement:
  Deeply personal discussion of his sister’s death and how it fueled the novel’s themes of sibling separation and efforts towards reconciliation, especially in the context of migrant families.

• [23:58] Evolution of His Writing Process:
  Rushdie describes his progression from tightly planned structures to a looser, more discovery-driven approach that trusts imaginative spontaneity.

  • Quote [25:24]:
    “As I've gone on, that has become less and less the case. And I've become much more excited by the prospect of discovery of what simply happens in the act of writing.” — Salman Rushdie

• [25:51] On Finding the Ending:
  Rushdie admits uncertainty about how the parallel narratives would unite—drawing inspiration from sci-fi short stories to help “solve” the book’s structure.

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic/Quote | |-----------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:35 | Initial spark and homage to Don Quixote | | 04:11 | Introduction of the metafictional author character | | 06:18 | On picaresque and genre-switching in the novel | | 10:22 | The personal and research motivation behind opioid crisis narrative | | 12:44 | Risk and rewards of writing close to the present moment | | 13:58 | The metaphor of apocalypse in literature | | 15:22 | Issue of hope in fiction | | 16:37 | Rushdie reads from Quichotte | | 19:01 | Early science fiction influences | | 22:15 | Familial estrangement and migration | | 23:58 | How Rushdie’s approach to writing novels has changed with experience | | 25:51 | The late discovery of the novel’s ending |

---

Conclusion

This episode offers a rich, layered conversation on the origins and ambitions of Quichotte, Salman Rushdie’s “kaleidoscopic” American novel. The interview traverses influences from Cervantes to science fiction, the personal pain of familial loss, addiction, the dangers of obsessive love, and the anxiety–and hope—of living in an ailing contemporary America. Rushdie’s insights reveal an artist determined to risk engagement with modern crises, exploring the absurd and surreal as pathways to the emotional and moral heart of our time.

Transcript

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

As summer draws to a close and the kids go back to school, I know I'm going to want to keep in touch with my kids at a price I can afford. Back to school Shopping can be a hassle, but your phone plan shouldn't be. That's why I made the switch to Mint Mobile. For a limited time, Mint mobile is offering three months of unlimited premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. So while other parents are sweating overage charges, I have a little bit more room in my budget for cool back to school threads. Say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plan's jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages, Mint Mobile is here to rescue you. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Dish overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month. This year, skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get this new customer offer and your three month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a [e-mail] New Yorker that's that's mintmobile.com New Yorker upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Deborah Treisman talks with Salman Rushdie. Rushdie's new novel, Keyshot, is a kaleidoscopic journey through Trump's America.

[Michael Calore]

Salman Rushdie is one of the most revered novelists working today. He's still best known for the Satanic Verses, the novel that earned him a death sentence from The Ayatollah Khomeini 30 years ago. The infamous fatwa. The attempts on Rushdie's life that followed only seem to have heightened his resolve to go on writing. In a 2012 essay in the New Yorker, he wrote, art is not entertainment. At its very best, it's a revolution. His new book is called Kishat. It's funny, it's fantastical, and it's even a little bit apocalyptic. The name Qui Shot starts with a Q. Like Quixote and like Cervantes, Don Quixote. Published more than 400 years ago, it's the story of a kind of quest. Salman Rushdie sat down with the New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treisman.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Hi. Someone.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Hi. Nice to be here. Deborah.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

So your novel, which is about to come out, Kishat draws among other things on the story of Don Quixote. What made you want to go back and reimagine that story?

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Well, it was just a happy accident, really. What happened is about four and a half years ago, something like that, I read Don Quixote again for the first time since I was 20, you know, and. And the thing that had happened in the interim was that the translation was much better now, you know, there was this brilliant Edith Grossman translation. So I really enjoyed the. The return to. To the book. And almost immediately my character kind of popped into my head who. Who obviously is. Has in common with. With Don Quixote himself, that they're both silly old fools. My Kishat invents for himself or brings in, conjures into being for himself a son whom he calls Sancho. So there's that which obviously I owe to Cervantes. But what then happened is that my character really wanted to go in another direction, you know, so the book isn't. Isn't structured on Cervantes book. It was a way of setting off on a journey. And initially I thought that's what the book would be. I thought it would be this journey novel about this old gent and his young sidekick son setting off across America on a sort of quest for impossible love. And then this other thing happened completely unexpectedly, which is that I found myself writing about the person who was writing him.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Right. Not me, the author.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

The imaginary author.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

And for a while I was very undecided about that. You know, I've never really written about writing before. I've never done that thing about. Here is a writer writing a book, you know, And I wasn't sure that it should stay in the book. And I sort of gave myself permission to go down that road a bit. But then if I didn't like it, to take. Take it out again.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Right.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

And go back to the simpler structure of just Kishat and his journey. But then what happened is that these two stories began to talk to each other in ways that I found interesting. You know, they began to echo and mirror and differ from each other in ways that I thought were valuable, you know. And so then I found myself telling two stories.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

And in a way that I suppose I should not divulge at the very end of the book. There's a way in which they become.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

The same story in the course of Kishat's journey. It is also a Journey novel. It is kind of a road novel across the country. And I was wondering when reading it whether you actually made this drive, whether you sort of.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

No, I mean, I thought about it. I thought about it. I thought that maybe I should just get in a Chevy Cruze.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah. Stay at these campgrounds and visit these towns.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Stay at these various days ins and Motel Sixes and somewhat across America.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

I didn't do it. But, you know, I mean, I've been knocking around America for close to 20 years now, you know, And I have been to most of the places in the book or places very like them, you know. Cause one or two of the places are made up, you know, There is no town in New Jersey called Barringer where people turn into mastodons.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Right. Some of what Kishat encounters on his journey is very real. You know, he comes across the heart of racist America and various forms of bigotry along the way, and he also comes across mastodons. There's also an Italian speaking Jiminy Cricket.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Yes.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

So how do those things come together in one story for you?

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

With difficulty. I sort of wanted the book to be many kinds of book at the same time, if I could make it work. And I think actually the model of the picaresque novel, of the episodic novel allows you to do that because, you know, if your characters are traveling from place to place to place, they can have very different kinds of adventure in different places. And those stories can be told in different ways, you know. And so it was a way for the novel to be metamorphic, you know, to be constantly changing the kind of novel that it is. So there's a bit where it's a spy novel, you know, There's a bit where it's, like, absurdist, you know, There's a bit where it's. Where it's a science fiction novel. And there are bits, I think, which to me are some of the more important bits, which are completely realistic stories of human beings trying to mend fences, brothers and sisters with estranged relationships trying to fix it, succeeding or failing. And I think those human sections, you know, to me, are actually the heart of the book. There's all this playfulness all around them.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah, yeah. Do you worry about keeping a consistent tone when you're moving through these different landscapes?

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Well, you have to know what it is that holds the book together. And what I think that is, is that Kishat is going not only on a physical journey, he's also going on a kind of what you might call a spiritual journey. He's trying to be a better person. He's trying to be worthy of the hand of this impossible love, this talk show queen that he's fallen for. So he's on a quest for self improvement, if you like, for becoming a better human being. And so is his author. You know, his author is aware of the fact that he's made mistakes in his life, that he's hurt people who are close to him, et cetera, and he wants to make things better. So he also is, in a way, engaged on a similar project, you know, and that's the line that I think goes through the book and that holds it, that makes it one book.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And Kishotte's through line is that he wants to get to an end where he wins this impossible love. And he's fallen in love with a TV talk show host who doesn't know him at all and in fact is a little afraid of the idea that he's coming for her.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Thinks of him as you would as a stalker.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And for Kishat, it is sort of a journey into virtue to become virtuous enough to win the hand of this woman. And in fact, where it takes him is into a real moral morass.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

He's very invested in the idea of the good, you know, and he wants to be a good person. And then he's offered this terrible choice, which is that in order to gain access to his beloved, he has to do something bad. And then he has to face a choice within himself. And that choice only has weight if, you know, that he's somebody for whom the idea of goodness is very important, which he also invests that idea of goodness in the beloved. He believes her to be good. And then he discovers that maybe she's not quite as saintly as he thought.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Which brings us to the other theme of Kishat's story, which is the opioid crisis in America, which he is unwittingly tangled up in. And I wonder what made you want to write about that.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Well, two things, really. One came out of research and one came out of personal experience. The research part of it was that I have a general interest in what Indian Americans are getting up to. So I just try and keep an eye open for interesting stories in that part of the field. And I came across the story of an Indian American gentleman in the pharma business who was. Well, I mean, now he's in jail, so I think we could call him a crook.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yep.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Who. Who was involved in the improper sale of opioids in. In a way not dissimilar to the character in the book. And then I. It just offered me like a kind of light bulb moment. It offered me a narrative way of getting Kishot together with his beloved if she herself had an opioid habit and was looking for the drugs. So it actually helped us in a story way. It was helpful. And then there's a kind of sadder personal thing, which is that my youngest sister, she died from what seems pretty clear was an opioid overdose, which none of us, I think, had understood the depth of her addiction to these things. But obviously that's remained. I mean, it's now over 10 years ago, but it's something that, for obvious reasons, has really stayed with me. And it actually also probably led me towards writing a book about brothers and sisters and about brothers and sisters who have drifted apart from each other and who don't know each other anymore, really. And there's a history of some trouble between them, but they want to. That meant things. I think that in some way also originated in this sort of bit of personal sadness.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah. I mean, the opioid situation in this country is so enormous and overwhelming. Did you worry that that sort of theme or that plot twist would overwhelm the story of the novel?

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Well, I mean, I think it's important in the book, you know, I mean, I think it's fair enough if people find it important in the book. It's one of the major narrative lines, but it is only one of them. No, I don't think it overwhelms, but I think it's dealt with seriously. You know, I think if you're going to take on a subject like that, then you have to do it right. You know, you have to know what you're talking about and you have to. You have to give it proper weight.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah. This novel does deal with opioids. It deals with other topical things, black sites. It deals with cyber warfare. It deals with so many. So many things that are happening culturally now. And I wonder, do you feel anything obligation or urge as a novelist to address things that are culturally and sociologically important or politically important?

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Well, I wanted it to be a contemporary novel. I wanted it to be a novel about what's going on, you know, And I wanted Kishot to journey not just through little towns in the Midwest, so on, but to sort of journey through the reality of our time. And not Kishotte himself as a character, but Kishott as a book should be about what's going on. You know, I've always really liked the risky thing of Writing very close up against the present moment. If you do it wrong, then it's a catastrophe. If you do it right, then with luck, you somehow capture a moment, you know, and people in the future, if there is a future in which people read books, can read it and be taken back into the moment, you know, and so it has the dual pleasure for contemporary readers of kind of recognition. Yes. That's how things are. And for future readers of discovery of, oh, that's probably how things used to be.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Well, without giving anything away, the book in the world of the book is racing towards apocalypse of some kind. Are we?

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Well, I mean, one of the things I have to confess is that, you know, I, as a kid, was a science fiction nut, and I think a lot of science fiction got into this book. The point about end of the world novels is that they're usually not about the end of the world. They're usually about some form of crisis in the world. And in this case, I think they're also about the two characters of the two main storylines facing the end of their world. In other words, you know, coming close to the end of life and both of them contemplating that, you know, and the physical manifestations of apocalypse are, in a way, a metaphor for their own personal apocalypse, which all of us face, you know, and also I think on a broader, less personal level, the idea that. That we might be at the end of a particular world, the world in which, essentially, in which I have spent my life, you know, and you too, you know, most of us have spent our lives in a particular world that appears to be vanishing. You know, it appears to be, or it appears to be transforming so much that it can't be said to be the world that previously existed. And that idea of the end of a world, you know, not the end of the world, you know, is something that was certainly in my mind.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

I mean, I don't think it's any part of the writer's duty to provide hope, but I do think that in some way, in the optimism and hopefulness of the character of Kishat, there is that, you know, he. Against all the odds, he has no reason for optimism, and yet he feels it. And he makes things happen, and he makes things happen. And I felt that that gave the book a kind of a quality of hopefulness, even though he is surrounded by things that ought to militate against that.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Calore]

Last week, novelist Salman Rushdie sat down with the New Yorker's Deborah Treisman to discuss his new book, Kishat. The book is a kind of prismatic portrait of contemporary America. And at its center is a man who, like many of us, is obsessed with television, but maybe even a little more than most. Here's Rushdie reading from the very beginning of Kishat.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a traveling man of Indian origin, advancing years and retreating mental powers who had developed an unwholesome because entirely one sided passion for a certain television personality, the beautiful, witty and adored Talk show host Ms. Salma R. Whom he had never met, an infatuation that he characterized, quite inaccurately as love. In the name of this so called love, he christened himself Quichotte for the opera Don Quixote, and resolved to be his beloved's knight errant, to pursue her zealously right through the television screen into whatever exalted high definition reality she and her kind inhabited, and by deeds as well as by grace, to win her heart.

[Michael Calore]

Kishat's journey to find Ms. Salma Richard is a journey across the landscape of our America. He confronts racism, the lingering effects of the war on terror, and the loneliness and isolation that can come from life in the social media age.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

The truth was that Kishat had almost no friends anymore, no social group, no cohort, no posse, no real pals, having long ago abandoned the social world. On his Facebook page he had friended or been friended by a small and dwindling group of commercial travelers like himself, as well as by an assortment of lonely hearts, braggarts, exhibitionists, and salacious ladies behaving as erotically as the social medium's somewhat puritanical rules allowed. Every single one of these quote unquote friends saw his plan when he had enthusiastically posted it for what it was, a harebrained scheme verging on lunacy, and attempted to dissuade him for his own good from stalking or harassing Ms. Salma Rich in response to his post. There were frown emojis and Bitmojis wagging fingers at him reprovingly, and there were gifs of Salma' ar herself crossing her eyes, sticking out her tongue, and rotating a finger by her right temple, all of which added up to the universally recognized set of gestures meaning cray cray. However, Kishat would not be deterred.

[Michael Calore]

Rushdie's book also has some fantastical elements, which he attributes in part to his early reading habits. Here's Salman Rushdie with the New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Were you always a science fiction reader?

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

I was for a bit, when I was A teenager at boarding school in England, I spent a lot of my spare time reading sci fi. To put it simply, there's sort of literary and hardcore. So I mean, of course I loved the literary, the kind of Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin kind of science fiction. But I also really liked the really, you know, nuts and bolts hardcore thing in magazines with wonderful names. Like there was a magazine called Galaxy. There was a magazine called Astounding. There was another magazine called Amazing, with typography you could imagine. And there you had the real techno writers, not so much the fantasy writers as the real science fiction, where science was the point. Frederick Pole and C.M. cornbluth, James Blish. You have to be the real aficionado to get to these people. And I mean, I retained some of it. And in particular these two stories that I made some reference to during writing Kishat. One is Katherine Maclean's Pictures Don't Lie and the other is Arthur C. Clarke's story the 9 billion names of God, a bizarre early computer story about Tibetan monks who buy a computer to count the 9 billion names of God. At which point they say the purpose of the universe will have been fulfilled and the universe will end. So that gave me a little clue about how to approach my end of the world story. At a certain point I stopped reading so much science fiction and a lot of it had to do. I mean, now it's different because now there's a lot of very good science fiction written by women and a lot of very interesting women characters in science fiction, whether it's, you know, Octavia Butler or whoever it might be. Back then in the 60s, which is when I was doing this, it was a very male form. Women in science fiction tended to be either, you know, three breasted Barbarella types, right. Or they were white coated lab coat, lab lab technicians of completely no sexuality at all. And both of them seemed quite tedious to me. And I just somehow that put me off for a while, but I retained lots of it. Mm.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Mm. And it probably helped form your imagination at that point.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Yeah, I think it did. I think, you know, it has helped. I mean, you know, I've never been particularly a kitchen sink realist, have I? I mean, I've always moved in the direction of the surreal and the fabulous.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And so on, and anything can happen.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

And anything can happen. And I think science fiction gives you some of the equipment for how to approach that.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah. You mentioned your sister's death due to opioid addiction. Were you Thinking of that specifically when you were writing the story?

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Well, it had a lot to do with the starting point. I mean, it was one of the. Not just the opioid thing, but the problems of sibling relationships, you know, became something that I really wanted to write about. Because this is my much younger sister, who's 14 years younger than me, and we didn't live in the same country and we didn't see that much of each other. And I had no idea that she was sinking into this addiction. And since then, obviously, if you lose somebody as close to you as a sister, you think about it a lot. And I wanted to write about that, about how brothers, particularly in this age when we live such scattered lives where families can be dispersed around the world, like my family, like many migrant families. And I wanted to write about what that does to family ties and how things can be strained and what people can do or can't do to try and make things better, you know. And all of that, I think, came out of the circumstances of my own family.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah. I mean, the book has two pairs.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Of brother and sister, and the story between them is not the same. They're both trying to do the same thing, but how it goes is not the same.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah, yeah. They both involve estrangement and then attempts at.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Attempts at reconciliation and just distance. Distance. There are people who've led their lives very distant from each other, physically distant. And therefore there's other kinds of distance.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah. So this is, I think, your 14th novel.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Yeah.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Has the way you go about writing a novel changed?

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Yeah, it's changed quite a lot, in fact, you know, over this long period of time. I mean, the first novel was 1975, so it's been a while. I used to need much more architecture. I actually couldn't start until I had a very clearly mapped out structure. And even not just the big picture of the book, but actually some of the smaller aspects of the book. I really needed to have worked it out. And until I had that, the wheels wouldn't turn, really. I wasn't able to put flesh on the bones. As I've gone on, that has become less and less the case. And I've become much more excited by the prospect of discovery of what simply happens in the act of writing. Because I do believe very strongly that the way in which your mind works in the moment of writing, in the act of creation, is a way in which it doesn't work at any other time. So in the act of creation, you can make your characters think things, say things, behave in ways that you would never have imagined in real life for yourself or for people that you know. And so I've come to trust that imaginative moment, you know, except that you also have to be very skeptical of it. You know, you can let yourself go down a path, but you have to become very, very critical of it the moment you've done it. Is this right? Is it wrong? Is it where I want to be? Is it not where I want to be? But let it happen on the page. And an enormous amount of the in this book are of that kind. You know, as I say, I didn't expect the author character to be there at all, you know, and he became rather a major character.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

At what point did you know where the, where you were going with the book? What the end would be?

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

I mean, frighteningly late. Really.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

You know, because I did know that for me, for the book to fully work, these two narrative lines had to in some way merge. You know, the writer and the written had to somehow satisfyingly unite. And I didn't know how to do it and was quite bothered about that.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

And then one day it just happened. I just sat there and I thought, oh, I know what you know. And again, the thing that helped me was the memory of a very, very old science fiction story by Katherine maclean called Pictures Don't Lie, which was also made into the kind of late night TV B movie that Kishott might have watched in one of his many motel rooms. So it had a natural way to enter the story, but without saying exactly what I did with the story. Cause I didn't use the story exactly as written, but it gave me my ending.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Yeah.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

And at that point I felt real happiness because I thought, okay, now maybe it works. It was a scary book to write this because all the way through writing it, I had to face the constant questioning. Is what you're doing absurd and bizarre in a good and useful and valuable way, or is it just absurd and bizarre for the sake of it and nobody will care?

[Dorothy Wickenden]

I think you're starting to have an answer to that question.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Well, you know, so far, so good.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Well, thank you, Salman.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Thank you.

[Michael Calore]

Salman Rushdie. He spoke last week with the New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global editorial director.

[Michael Calore]

I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of.

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

The biggest stories in tech.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI.

[Michael Calore]

Social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you.

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

Don'T miss an episode.

[Salman Rushdie / Deborah Treisman / Katie Drummond / Lauren Goode]

From prx.