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You are a human animal. You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Salman Rushdie,

the author of The Ground Beneath

Her Feet. And this time I want to talk to Rushdie about the emotions because this is a novel

of the passions. And for a Rushdie novel, it has, what would you call it, a qualified, happy ending.

But I wanted to talk to you about the problem of writing about

love with a narrator who seems essentially to have troubles believing in love.

Yeah, and he's a, Rai is a very, well, he's a very skeptical fellow. He's in that sense that the antidote, if you like, in the novel to the grand passions

unleashed between Ormus and Vina, the two musicians who become not only a band, but

an item.

And I felt I needed that antidote because the question is how to write about love in our

excessively hip and cynical and also excessively gushy and sentimental age, how to avoid all

those elephant traps and yet to deal with the thing, you know, the big thing, the grand passion, the

thunderbolt, the thing that happens if we're lucky once and for all and endures for all our

lives, all our life.

And I had to come up with a number of ways of thinking about that.

One was, in the case of Ormussen Vina, it's as if their love is so big that they don't know what to do with it.

So they, in a way, define the size of it by their strategies for messing it up.

...