Rushdie Discusses New Short Novel

Acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie offered his thoughts on the writing craft to a packed audience Thursday night at the First Parish Church in Harvard Square.

At the reading and subsequent question-and-answer session, sponsored by Wordsworth Books, Rushdie read a chapter of his new novel, Fury, to a near-capacity crowd of nearly 500 who welcomed him with warm, prolonged applause.

Fury is the fictional story of former professor Malik Solanka, who flees to New York City to escape his own demons. His hobby is his animated doll, Little Brain, who meets the world’s great thinkers in a successful television show.

In New York Solanka rages, blacks out, and becomes involved with two women, Mila, (short for Milosevic, “no relation”) who looks like Little Brain, and the beautiful freedom fighter Neela.

When asked about the basis of the novel, Rushdie allowed that much of the material had been drawn from the real-life experiences of himself and close friends.

“It’s completely biographical. Everything in it happened,” he joked. “It shouldn’t be a novel, sorry.”

In subsequent questions, Rushdie went on to speak about his writing style, saying that he had not set out to write Fury but that it had come upon him while he was in the midst of another book—and that he was quite happy with the result, especially given that it was a shorter book than normal for him.

“I’ve been trying to write a short book for a while,” he said, adding that he felt the sign of a good author was brevity and that usually only bad writers needed 900 pages to tell their stories. “Good writers keep it short.”

He said, however, that he prefers the novel genre to short stories, since although he admires story writers, his novels are but many short stories wrapped together to tell a larger picture—a style he says many great writers before him have followed.

“I’ve always thought that Shakespeare was a novelist, but that he was around before there were novels,” Rushdie said.

In closing, in response to a question about his role in the recent movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, where he played an arrogant author named after himself, Rushdie joked that his brief appearances surpassed that of stars Renee Zellweger and Hugh Grant.

“I felt I held the film together, although I thought Renee and Hugh were good too,” he quipped.

Rushdie said the part had been hard to play since it required him to portray himself as sneering and arrogant, two traits he normally lacks.

“I kept trying to be nice, but the director would yell at me ‘Sneer,’” he said.

Rushdie, a native of India, is the author of more than a dozen best-selling novels including The Satanic Verses, for which former Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini Rushdie condemned him to death in 1989 for its alleged attacks on Islamic religion. Rushdie went into hiding for several years after a reward of a million dollars was offered for his murder.

—Staff Writer Garrett M. Graff can be reached at ggraff@fas.harvard.edu