Few novelists will ever go through what Salman Rushdie had to endure for a decade, starting in the late 1980s. His book, The Satanic Verses, provoked death threats and even a fatwa, issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, who did nothing less than call for Rushdie's assassination. He deemed the book to be an irreverent depiction of Muhammad.
But time heals all things — even fatwas.
And now, Rushdie is on the road, promoting his latest book, Quichotte: A Novel, which some have called a Don Quixote for the modern age. Its publication date is Sept. 3. He'll make one of his first stops in Dallas, as the inaugural speaker for the new season of Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art on Sept. 5. His appearance, however, will take place at Moody Performance Hall.
When it comes to his stormy past, "As you can imagine," he says on the phone from London, "it was pretty horrible. One of the things I discovered about myself, which I would not have believed about myself, is that I somehow was able to deal with it, to get through it and come out the other end — and not be crazy."
For one, The Satanic Verses endowed the 72-year-old author with an international reputation. And now, with Quichotte, he has written "a picaresque novel, a comedy, a sort of dark comedy, about what's going on these days. I suppose the simple thing to say is, there's such a disagreement about reality nowadays.
"About what is true and what is false. One man's truth is another man's lies. And that creates a difficulty. Because the realist novel was based on a kind of agreement between the writer and the reader about what the world was like. That's no longer the case. Reality is fragmented. It has become very disputed and contentious."
For Rushdie, it required a whole new way of doing things. "This book plays all kinds of games with reality," he says, "as my way of trying to approach it."
In lavishing praise on Quichotte, The London Times called it "a satire on Trump's America." Rushdie, who now makes his home in New York, has heard the stories about some Americans responding to Trump's policies by wanting to flee — to another country.
But when it comes to England, where Rushdie lived for years, "You don't want to come here right now," he says. "I landed here in the middle of a constitutional crisis, with [Prime Minister Boris] Johnson's decision to shut down Parliament to prevent it from having any opinion of what he's about to do."
The whole country, he says of England, "is in a state of real agitation and turmoil. Nobody seems able to have any idea of what's going to happen."
So, he says, "Here, too, is a turbulent and broken country."
Details
Salman Rushdie will speak about his new novel, Quichotte, at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 5, at Moody Performance Hall, 2520 Flora St. in Dallas. He is the inaugural speaker for the new season of Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art. For additional information, including ticket prices, click here.
