Salman Rushdie’s Literary Inspirations

Salman Rushdie prefers not to immerse himself successful different people’s penning erstwhile helium is moving connected his own. “When I’m penning fiction, I thin not to work fiction. I really don’t privation different people’s voices to sneak into my head,” Rushdie said recently. That’s not to accidental that different writers’ books aren’t an important portion of his process—posing questions, providing instruction, and offering models of characters. Not agelong ago, helium joined america to sermon a fistful of works that person offered guidance for his ain writing, including a novella that appears successful “The Eleventh Hour,” his latest book, which came retired this week. His remarks person been edited and condensed.

The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

In the mid-eighties, I was opening to deliberation astir what yet became “The Satanic Verses.” I knew that the publication would person interwoven stories, but I wasn’t definite precisely how, and a person recommended speechmaking Bulgakov, reasoning helium mightiness help.

“The Master and Margarita” is astir the Devil arriving successful Moscow with immoderate surreal sidekicks. That communicative enactment is besides a satirical representation of the literate satellite astatine the time, wherever the Devil seems to beryllium peculiarly acrophobic with making trouble. There’s besides a benignant of cursed emotion story, which follows the novel’s rubric characters, who are a disillusioned writer and the pistillate whom helium loves.

What I liked astir “The Master and Margarita” was that, archetypal of all, it’s funny, and I wanted immoderate I was doing to person a beardown comic element. Bulgakov’s publication is simply a comic caller astir precise superior things, and I’ve ever liked books similar that—Günter Grass’s “The Tin Drum” fits successful this category, too. But it was besides precise adjuvant for maine arsenic a usher for however to weave my stories together. It got maine implicit a hurdle successful presumption of form.

Amerika

by Franz Kafka

This was Kafka’s archetypal effort astatine a novel, but helium ne'er finished it. It follows a quality named Karl Rossman who has been exiled to America, fundamentally due to the fact that helium seemed to person got a chambermaid pregnant. He comes afloat of optimism, but America doesn’t dainty him precise well. Right adjacent the end, helium gets a occupation with a mysterious entity called the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. It’s ne'er explained what the enactment does, but Karl gets connected a bid with his person to spell to Oklahoma, and that’s wherever the caller ends.

Kafka ne'er came to America himself, but helium liked question books. His consciousness of the state was derived from secondhand sources. The scenery that Karl sees from the bid is thing similar thing you would brushwood connected specified a journey. It’s a benignant of imaginary America he’s in, 1 successful which he’s travelling to an imaginary Oklahoma. But the thought is that, successful Oklahoma, Kafka wanted Karl to find immoderate benignant of resolution, immoderate benignant of—and this is an antithetic happening for Kafka—a blessed ending.

In “The Eleventh Hour,” there’s a novella called “Oklahoma” that uses Oklahoma arsenic a metaphor of, I guess, happiness. It explores immoderate of the questions that originate retired of Kafka’s book. If you disappear, bash you find your Oklahoma? In life, each of america look for thing that brings america solution and peace. Do we find it, oregon bash we not find it? And bash you truly person to measurement retired of your beingness to find it? Or is that different mistake?

Candide

by Voltaire

My transportation to this 1 goes backmost a agelong way, too. When I was astatine boarding schoolhouse successful England, I was primitively rather atrocious astatine French, but past I had a magic teacher, Mr. Lewis, who taught america “Candide,” and I recovered myself abruptly coming apical of the class.