Salman Rushdie’s Fantastical American Quest Novel

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2019

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, talks with Salman Rushdie about “Quichotte,” his apocalyptic quest novel. A few years ago, when the four hundredth anniversary of “Don Quixote” was being celebrated, Rushdie reread Cervantes’s book and found himself newly engaged by a much improved translation. He immediately began thinking of writing his own story about a “silly old fool,” like Quixote, who becomes obsessed with an unattainable woman and undertakes a quest to win her love. This character became Quichotte (named for the French opera loosely based on “Don Quixote”), who is seeking the love of—or, as she sees it, stalking—a popular talk-show host. As Quichotte journeys to find her, he encounters the truths of contemporary America: the opioid epidemic, white supremacy, the fallout from the War on Terror, and more. “I’ve always really liked the risky thing of writing very close up against the present moment,” Rushdie tells Treisman. “If you do it wrong, it’s a catastrophe. If you do it right, with luck, you somehow capture a moment.” At the same time, the novel gives full rein to Rushdie’s fantastical streak—at one point, for instance, Quichotte comes across a New Jersey town where people turn into mastodons. Treisman talks with the author about the influence of science fiction on his imagination, and about his personal connection to the tragedy of opioids. Rushdie’s much younger sister died from the consequences of addiction, and the book is centrally concerned with siblings trying to reconnect after separation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production
0:05.7	of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.8	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:11.4	I'm David Remnick.
0:13.0	Salman Rushdie is one of the most revered novelists working today.
0:17.1	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.
0:26.7	The attempts on Rushdie's life that followed only seemed to have heightened his resolve to go on writing.
0:32.5	In a 2012 essay in The New Yorker, he wrote Art is Not Entertainment. At its very best, it's a revolution.
0:39.7	His new book is called Kishat. It's funny, it's fantastical, and it's even a little bit apocalyptic.
0:46.5	The name Kishat starts with a cue, like Quixote. And like Cervantes' Don Quixote
0:52.0	published more than 400 years ago, it's the story of a kind of quest.
0:56.5	Salman Rushdie sat down with the New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.
1:01.2	Hi, Saman.
1:02.3	Hi. Nice to be here, Deborah.
1:04.7	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
1:12.8	back and reimagine that story? Well, it was just a happy accident, really. What happened is about
1:19.4	four and a half years ago, something like that. I read Don Quixote again for the first time since I was
1:26.3	20, you know, and the thing that had happened in the interim
1:31.0	was that the translation was much better now. You know, there was this brilliant Edith Grossman
1:35.7	translation. So I really enjoyed the return to the book. And almost immediately, my character kind of popped into my head, who obviously
1:47.8	has in common with Don Quixote himself that they're both silly old fools. My Kishat invents for himself or brings in,ures into being for himself a son whom he calls Sancho.
2:06.7	So there's that, which obviously I owe to Sermantis.
	...

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