The Curious Intimacy of Strangers

The beauty of reading a book by yourself is how the author's imagination interacts with your own, in a way it doesn't if you're watching a movie. There's that curious intimacy of strangers. That's why I think this genre will survive.

Sir Salman Rushdie in an interview with Donna Seaman. The author received the Chicago Public Library Foundation Carl Sandburg Literary Award at a banquet in the Harold Washington Library on Thursday, October 15.

Outrage and Ouchy Grammar

It's been a day when our minds have been on much more serious things - tragic death (possible murder?) of political aide Teoh Beng Hock, and bombings in Jakarta.

Nevertheless, I had a little outrage left for this reader's letter in The Malay Mail today, asking why Salman Rushdie's books are sold in MPH when :

... they are banned in most Muslim countries.

(Unspecified, of course!!)

The unnamed MPH spokesman gives a very conciliatory answer and passes the buck to distributor Pansing.

If this bloke had wandered into my bookstore, I'd have told him to check in his bigotry and ignorance at the customer service counter. If I were a newspaper editor, I wouldn't have wasted column inches on him.

The fact is Rushdie's books are not banned in Malaysia with the exception of The Satanic Verses (although everyone who wants to read it can easily lay their hands on a copy). There is no earthly reason for them to be.

And the rest of us should stand up firmly against the very suggestion that books should disappear from the shelves.

I'm an extremist? You betcha. But I only read books. I don't plant bombs or throw young men out of windows. (Outrage is better saved for those people.)

As for whether Rushdie's books apart from The Satanic Verses are banned in other countries - I suspect not but I need to dig around to find the actual evidence. And certainly there is a move towards greater tolerance and away from book banning in the UAE [via].

While we're getting angry with things in The Malay Mail, let me ask you (since I feel like playing teacher today) if you can spot the grammar error in this sentence :

A leading light of the abolish English for science and maths campaign has a new book.

The article goes on to talk about how the Higher Education Ministry and the Malaysian National Institute of Translation (MNIT) will hold a road show nationwide to promote A. Samad Said's book, Bisik Warna. The Deputy Higher Education Minister calls it :

...a work of arts (sic) and words from the national laureate on life, organisations, leaders and philosophy ...

The (sic) proving that the journalist who wrote the column can spot someone else's ouchy grammar error, even if they can't see their own.

Congrats to Pak Samad anyway, and it is good to see a book getting so much official support.

Rushdie the House Guest

We made him welcome. I was his lawyer and he was a good friend of my wife, the author Kathy Lette. More important than these links, as it turned out, was the orientation of our house in Islington, north London, which overlooked a church: our bedrooms, the security service explained, offered a clear view of the approach of any would-be assassin.

Geoffrey Robertson QC, in The Times, on having Salman Rushdie as a house guest following the fatwa, twenty years ago yesterday.

More (if you can bear it!) at The Guardian - this time in the form of a documentary which interviews those involved in the book burning incidents.

The Lingering Chill of Rushdie's Fatwa

How far has the fall-out from the fatwa chilled the literary muse in Britain? asks Boyd Tonkin in The Independent today, the latest in a succession of writers to consider the knock-on effects ahead of the twentieth anniversary on February 14th. He finds ;

From time to time, extreme reactions from self-appointed guardians of faith do hint at a tinder-box mood of outrage without and caution within.

Other authors also contribute their views, including Hanif Kureishi :

One of the effects of Obama is that people are more aware that the white phase is over. In the future, we'll all be in nations made up of a number of minorities. Everything is going to have to be argued for: questions of language, honour and insult. Literature is the space where all of this can be taken seriously and thought about deeply... The problem is, if you become too respectful, there's no real contact...

and Suhayl Saadi :

The Rushdie Affair was a wholly negative phenomenon... It empowered both Islamism and liberal imperialism and set up the "straw man" dualism in which, globally, writers of Muslim origin are perpetually expected to display loyalty to one or other of these extremist positions... All novels are political, but this book became a political football in which the only winners were the hooligans.

Twenty Years of the Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses remains a book about the struggles of migration and the frictions of cultural exchange. It pokes fun at all manner of targets, not least America and Britain. Above all, perhaps, it dramatises the conviction that there is nothing more sacred than the freedom to question what is sacred. Twenty years on, it's a principle that urgently needs to be remembered.

In an excellent piece in the Observer Andrew Anthony describes how the book, first published twenty years ago, ignited a cultural war across the globe - the repercussions of which are still being felt, especially in terms of greatly increased censorship in Britain :

Who would dare to write a book like The Satanic Verses nowadays? And if some brave or reckless author did dare, who would publish it? The signs in both cases are that no such writer or publisher is likely to appear, and for two reasons. The first and most obvious is fear. The Satanic Verses is a rich and complex literary novel, by turns ironic, fantastical and satirical. Despite what is often said, mostly by those who haven't read it, the book does not take direct aim at Islam or its prophet. Those sections that have caused the greatest controversy are contained within the dreams or nightmares of a character who is in the grip of psychosis. Which is to say that, even buried in the fevered subconscious of a disturbed character inside a work of fiction - a work of magical realism fiction! - there is no escape from literalist tyranny. Any sentence might turn out to be a death sentence. And few if any of even the boldest and most iconoclastic artists wish to run that risk.

Postscript :

Literary Saloon pointed me in the direction of another article worth reading on the same issue : Twenty Year's On : Internalising the Fatwa by Kenan Malik. Particularly interesting :

The lesson of the Rushdie Affair that has never been learnt is that liberals have made their own monsters. It is the liberal fear of giving offence that has helped create a culture in which people take offence so easily.

Another Postscript :

Screech left this link to Christopher Hitchens Vanity Fair essay on the same theme in the comments. Very well worth a read.

Midnight's Children for Big Screen

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, long considered to be unfilmable is to be brought to the big screen, and Deepa Mehta (known for her Elements trilogy) has been signed up to direct and co-write the adaptation with the author himself. Filming will start in 2010.

The Truth About Polenta

Oh dear! Did Rushdie get the truth about polenta glaringly wrong in The Enchantress of Florence? Just shows how carefully you have to check your facts when you write a novel, and how you will be found out (even on the most obscure points) if you don't.

And talking of Rushdie, his piece on India's transexuals in the Times (which I should have linked too earlier) is well worth a read.

His Record is Toast, Says Rushdie.

Don't challenge Salman Rushdie to a duel of the book-signing pen!

Wine writer Malcolm Gluck had the audacity to question whether Rushdie could possibly have signed as many books as he had claimed, or whether he had just scribbled his initials. According to Maev Kennedy in the Guardian :

Gluck's claimed record is 1,001 copies in 59 minutes, set at a wine warehouse in London in 1998. Gluck achieved this with the help of a team of three men, one fetching the copies, one opening them at the blank page, and another whisking the signed copies away.

Rushdie said he had signed 1,000 copies, on his most recent tour promoting the Enchantress of Florence, in a books warehouse in Nashville in 57 minutes.

A crack team of bookstore staff is apparently essential to facilitate the process and Rushdie is apparently right up there in the company of President Jimmy Carter, the novelist Amy Tan as one of the world's fastest book-signers. (Although the article adds that thriller writer Ken Follett could be a serious contender. He signed 2,050 copies in three-and-a-half hours at a book fair in Madrid earlier this year, beating his own record of 1,600 last year at a fair in Italy.)

Btw, I really wish bookshops here would get authors to sign stocks of their books when they are in town! The only author who did this as far as I know was naughty Nirpal. Peter Carey was the biggest one (as far as I am concerned) who got away.

Rushdie Hatrick!

First he won the Booker in 1981.
Then he won, the Booker of Bookers in 1993.
And I've just heard (thanks Eric!) that he's now picked up the Best of Booker.

Congrats Sir Salman on yet another success for Midnight's Children.

(But what won Scott Pack's Alternative Booker? Take a look here.)

Knighted and Benighted

I feel I have been damaged as a writer by the way people perceive my work as part of a political event. It is seen as a political entity rather than an artistic one. When Midnight's Children and Shame were published, people responded quite differently to my writing. Then there was a real shift in tone, when they said: ‘Oh that was what he was really trying to do!' That is one of the pleasurable things about this new book: the storyteller is not me. I am still a fiction writer underneath all that mess.

Salman Rushdie gives an exclusive interview to the Times in the wake of the publication of his latest novel The Enchantress of Florence. He talks to Kate Muir about how he got over a shyness for writing about sex; the challenges of writing in a post-September 11, post-Iraq war world; and his move away from what New Yorker critic James Wood has described as his “hysterical realism”.

The novel is out this month.

Writing in Inglish

On India's 60th birthday Maria Misra posts an excellent piece on the Guardian blog looking at the phenomenal success of Indian literature in written in the English language.

It was assumed sixty years ago that:

... once the Raj was sent packing its language would quickly follow. ... In 1964, the year that English was supposed to have been phased out, Buddhadeva Bose, a renowned Bengali poet, declared that Indian literature in English was now dead.

But the language clung on tenaciously, and thanks to Salman Rushdie and his successors: ...

Indian English, once declared dead, was reborn as masala-ized, chutnified Inglish, and midnight's literary grandchildren scented fame and fortune.

Misra hopes (as should we all) that some of the best of Indian vernacular literature gets translated into English so that we can enjoy that too.

Protesting Rushdie

Perusing in the Guardian about the piece on the break-up of Rushdie's marriage (which interests me not at all and probably you guys even less) I came across a mention of anti-Rushdie protests in Malaysia. Funny how our local papers didn't mention this!

The Herald Tribune picked up the story as did Channel News Asia. Apparently 30 (or was it 50) members of PAS turned up at the gates of British High Comm and began chanting Destroy Salman Rushdie, Destroy Britain! and demanding that London withdraws the knighthood. (More on the demonstration and more pics on the Pemuda PAS Willayah blog.)*

Maybe those of us in favour of Rushdie receiving the award should write a letter of support and deliver it in similar fashion!

Though something tells me that the IHT and other international news agencies wouldn't be interested in a group of people who weren't propagating an intolerant stereotype for convenient western consumption.

Postscript:

This is an interesting opinion piece about Rushdie's knighthood in the New Straits Times by the vice-chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia, Dzulkifli Abdul Razak. He points out:

... to knight or not to knight is a sovereign prerogative of the nation concerned. It is not an international recognition and as such need not overtly concern any outsider. ... (but) to protest or, worse still, to riot is a misplaced action. The question is this: Why did some Muslim communities react the way they did?

This needs to be raised now so that Muslims are not constantly subjected to harassment each time a nation decides to do something that is not to their liking. Otherwise, this would eventually render the community to be somewhat like a Pavlovian dog that "salivates" at will.

Postscript:

How very ironic that a comment (politely worded, considering) that I left on the PAS Pemuda blog this morning got wiped off. I pointed out that I found their cry of "Destroy Britain" deeply offensive, Any remnant of respect I might have had for this organisation is now in the dustbin.

Much Ado About Rushdie

I was on a BBC radio programme recently, in conversation with a certain Minister of a certain Religious Affairs Department of a certain Muslim country. The topic of the debate was, of course, the recent furore over the award of a knighthood to the British author Salman Rushdie. In the course of the programme, a number of listeners called in to add their opinions to the debate, with a considerable number of Muslim callers from Europe and North America decrying what they saw as the amateur theatrics of some hot-headed Muslims who had gone on the warpath, condemning Britain, the Queen of England, the West, the ubiquitous global Jewish-Zionist conspiracy, et al. for this affront to Islam…

Farish Noor gives his take on Rushdie's knighthood.

Meanwhile, Boyd Tonkin in the Independent welcomes back:

... the pious fact-resistant bullies who never read the man they still want dead, the shameless political spivs on a vote-hunt and (worst of the lot, because they would once have known better) the screamingly self-righteous leftist academics who parade their ignorance and malice in sub-literate tirades.

And Tonkin reckons that:

Almost the only good thing to emerge from this dismal reprise is a terrific spoof protest invented by the Hindustan Times of Mumbai. Its cod report discloses that an association of people not born at 12 has mounted a campaign against Midnight's Children as a "wilful act of provocation that has hurt the feelings of those who were born at other times of day". "By honouring Rushdie, the Queen has insulted the more productive hours of the day." Moreover, Rushdie himself was not even born at midnight: "He is full of self-hate and has crossed over to the other side to belittle all of us."

Amen!

Rushdie didn't need this honour to confirm the fact that he is one of the most important writers of our time and has significantly changed the literary landscape. But now he's been offered it, he should be allowed to accept it in peace.

Furor Over Rushdie's Knighthood

Oh dear. What has Mr. Rushdie's knighthood sparked off?

Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq (son of Zia) made a statement condoning suicide bombing, and students in the city of Multan, burnt effigies of the Queen and Rushdie on the streets.

(Of course lah, it's always the effigy burner who grab the headlines even if there are only 100 of them and the rest of the country's population and indeed other Muslims in every corner of the globe stays completely out of it: such is the way of the news ... focus on the loony element and declare them representative of the whole.)

Rushdie, celebrating his 60th this week must be pretty scared that he is facing the kind of threats that sent him into hiding in the late '80's, while apparently the committee that forwarded his name for knighthood did not consider the political ramifications but rather decided on the award for literary merit.

Here's what International PEN has to say about it.

Arise Sir Salman!

Salman Rushdie is to receive a knighthood in the Queen's birthday honours list for his services to literature, Buckingham Palace announced today.

Rushdie said in a statement:

I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honor, and am very grateful that my work has been recognized in this way.

The Times of India has the story.

(And thanks Chet for the newsflash!)

Setting the Rushdie Straight

Camilla Gibb dropped me a line yesterday re. the quote about Rushdie which I had picked up from Raman's website. She is clearly upset that one small comment was taken out of context and somewhat sensationalised, and would like to set the record straight:

My goodness – the passion that my comment elicited on your site! I had no idea. I’m glad to see such passion alive in Malaysia, but I do have to say that not only was my comment a cheeky aside in the context of a talk about other, and I hope, much more important things, it was hardly original. To suggest that Rushdie’s career in some way benefited from the exposure of the fatwa against him has been said many times before. I do have problems with his work, but that is another issue and quite frankly, simply one woman’s opinion.

There's no doubt about it, Rushdie does elicit strong feelings, and no doubt we'll go on debating whether we love him or hate him, and whether he is a great writer or not. But then that's the fun of it.

Thanks for writing, Camilla, and I do hope that this puts things right!

Four-Letter Words and Festivals

I feel churlish for grumbling about ANYTHING in regards to the recent literary festival (KLILF) after reading Mr. Raman's v. nicely written rant about the problems faced in making it happen.

Four weeks before the event we have thirty participants and zero sponsors. Only the registration fees paid up. There was no coverage in any of the media. I am wondering if we will have enough money to print fliers. Posters? Too late for that. We must push ahead. "Don't worry, it will fall in place." Right.

If we want events to happen at all, we must support them.

And talking about newspaper coverage, I noticed that the Sunday Times last week didn't have a single feature on the festival. How sad is that? (I blogged some time back about the lack of support from the newspapers for the first festival.)

Raman also picks up on a couple of the most controversial things writers said at the festival. Camilla Gibb had me gasping too when she called Salman Rushdie "a mediocre writer" (sacrilege! declare a fatwa!).

Postscript:

Thoughts about KLILF on other blogs, to give you a vicarious peep.

Lydia has lots of photos and interesting accounts of the sessions she attended with Tash Aw, Randah Abdel-Fattah and Brian Castro. (I am so sad that I could not attend the presentations she describes, particularly Brian Castro's which Mercy and Saras felt was one of the best of the festival.)

I love Dollygirl's take, particularly on the weird questioners and the loveliness of Tash. Karcy give the festival a thumbs up but laments the slice of cake that got away. Owen had to read the first few lines of Lolita in front of everyone in Tash's Session, and then got blown away by Zephaniah.

Kak Teh had a good time. Madcap Machinist gets poetic as he is wont to do. There are more great photos from Adam, and amazing, moody black and whites from Sharil Nizam.

And Tarlia got Tash Aw to pose with her little yellow ducky! Here are her accounts of Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.

Postscript 2:

Message from Raman:

We are thinking of putting up a slideshow online with photographs taken by participants. A participant's point of view, you could say. Please send us photos of you with your favourite writers, or of your favourite funny pictures (or not), or whatever you think might be of interest to others. Please send them to ikanperak@gmail.com which allows larger attachments (but not more than 10mb). You can also drop off a CDRom with your photos here at Silverfish if you wish. We cannot use all the pictures, of course, but we would like a good spread.

First Books That Bombed

Some writers, like Stef Penney, make it big with their first novels. A surprising number of "big name" writers had first novels which totally bombed. John Walsh and Guy Adams list a few in the Independent, including Helen Fielding, Dan Brown, Salman Rushdie ... and surprise surprise ... Anthony Burgess. I had always thought Burgess' first novel was Time for a Tiger but it turns out to have been A Vision of Battlements. (What??)

Just as well their publishers gave them a second chance!

IMPAC at Length

The longlist for the IMPAC Dublin Prize (the world's most financially rewarding literary prize) has just been announced, and this year 138 novels nominated by 169 libraries from 129 cities in 49 countries. The Guardian reports that:

... on a list dominated by literary big-hitters, including Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee, André Brink, Margaret Atwood and Nadine Gordimer, two acclaimed novels stand out for the sheer number of nominations they have received. Kazuo Ishiguro's take on the cloning debate, Never Let Me Go, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker prize, is the librarians' favourite with 18 nominations. Ian McEwan's Saturday, a tale of one extraordinary day in the life of a London brainsurgeon, garners 12 nominations, from Moscow to Tallahassee. John Banville's stylised Booker-winner, The Sea, is also a popular choice, while Zadie Smith's Orange-winner, On Beauty, which is partly set in Massachussets, receives support from Boston. ... Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore is in the running with 12 nominations and support that extends from Brazil to Belfast.

You might remember the controversy last year about some libraries nominating their compatriots rather than voting for the best fiction worldwide, which is surely in the spirit of the thing. The Guardian doesn't see it that way:

...this is part of Impac's charm. Where else would you come across a first novel from a Kathmandu author, Echoes of Pain by Ravi Thapaliya, (nominated by the national library of Nepal)?

You can read the longlist in its entirety and browse information on the nominees here.

Now then, what novel do you think our very patriotic National Library here nominated? Were you right? Were they right?

Midnight's Children Banned ... and a Hundred Others

Breaking news from Raman - Salman's Rushdie's Midnight's Children, possibly the most important novel of the last fifty years, is now banned in Malaysia:

... some barely literate little Napoleon - to borrow Pak Lah's term - sitting behind a KDN desk in Johor Bahru has decided that the book is not suitable for Malaysians

And it gets worse:

We spoke to the distributor of this title. He confirmed that all Salman Rushdie books are now getting the 'treatment'. He related how he tried to ship in the hardback edition of Shalimar the Clown, and was told that it was 'restricted'. He didn't argue. He says he never argues, because he wants the rest of the shipment to go through. This is how all Malaysian (and Singaporean) shippers are treated. If they decide to argue, every single one of the hundred odd boxes will be detained for 'further inspection', if not ripped open right there on the tarmac. If a complaint is made 'further up', this treatment can be expected for every subsequent shipment. It is not surprising then that distributors prefer to suffer in silence.

Raman has also posted up a list of over 100 banned books (from just one distributor, note!) and proposes a rather nice little party game you can play with it. Which is really the only way to cope with all this silliness. But he's right - the laughter quickly gets replaced by outrage ... and then with a deep deep sense of sorrow.

And then, I have to be honest here, with the thought who wants to live in a country where books are banned?

Update:

Meanwhile ... Midnight Lily gets enraged on behalf of Dorothy the Dinosaur. Eyeris records a conversation between KDN officers as they sort through the books, Sashi says "Bullcrap!" Suanie says WHAT?!?!?!??! WHY?!?!?!??!, while Minishorts decides to lament and worry. Sharanya says Oh. My. God. and ponders the threat Sponge Bob Squarepants poses to society. And Whereinsoever ponders the apparent contradiction between announcements of reading campaigns and book-bannings.

Let's hope someone is listening!

Related Posts:

Index: On Censorship