Emma Brockes interviews Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway’
... Rushdie isn’t persuaded that solipsism on the left contributed to the rise of Trump, nor that economic disparity was the only cause. “I had a lecture gig in a city called Vero Beach in Florida: big audience, older people, quite affluent, very well educated, and almost all Trump voters,” he says. “Not at all the cliche of the ignorant blue-collar Trump voter. These were people with college degrees who’d had highly paid jobs, many retired, readers.” When the author mentioned climate change, he says, “this gentleman – they were all very courteous – disagreed with me and he said: ‘When you say that all the scientists agree on this, that’s not true.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, it is true actually.’ And he said: ‘No it’s not.’ And I said: ‘Sir, we can’t go on like this, it’s silly. But let me put it to you this way: if you say the world is flat, it doesn’t make the world flat. The world doesn’t need you to agree that it’s round in order to be round, because there’s this thing called evidence.’”
Did he get the impression these positions were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? “Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.”
I once sat next to the Trumps at a Crosby, Stills & Nash gig. Donald Trump knows all the words to ‘Woodstock’! Rushdie has been in the US for more than 15 years, but he is still on the outside, a survivor, or beneficiary depending on your view, of a double displacement, first as a child moving from India to England to attend boarding school and then as an adult, when he left London for New York in 2000. It is a gift, he says, “to feel really connected to three places”, and it has nourished his fiction.
The 70th anniversary of partition this year reminded one of the startling effect of Midnight’s Children when it was published in 1981, Rushdie’s second novel that is still unmatched for exuberance and a sense of talent unleashed. His third novel, Shame, cemented his reputation, since when he has produced novels ranging wildly across the spectrum between here and there, now and then, fantasy and reality. Fury, Rushdie’s 2001 novel, was a less intimate portrait of New York than The Golden House, his panoramic social novel of the city. While his two sons, Zafar, who is in his late 30s, and 20-year-old Milan, both live in London, Rushdie feels his roots in the US have deepened enough to get inside the city with something like the assurance with which he tackles London and Mumbai. (His youngest son, meanwhile, is threatening to move in with him in New York, as 20-year-olds will, reminding Rushdie that “children take up a lot of time and brain space”. He smiles. “But on the other hand, there are rewards.” ).. read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/02/salman-rushdie-interview
Did he get the impression these positions were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? “Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.”
I once sat next to the Trumps at a Crosby, Stills & Nash gig. Donald Trump knows all the words to ‘Woodstock’! Rushdie has been in the US for more than 15 years, but he is still on the outside, a survivor, or beneficiary depending on your view, of a double displacement, first as a child moving from India to England to attend boarding school and then as an adult, when he left London for New York in 2000. It is a gift, he says, “to feel really connected to three places”, and it has nourished his fiction.
The 70th anniversary of partition this year reminded one of the startling effect of Midnight’s Children when it was published in 1981, Rushdie’s second novel that is still unmatched for exuberance and a sense of talent unleashed. His third novel, Shame, cemented his reputation, since when he has produced novels ranging wildly across the spectrum between here and there, now and then, fantasy and reality. Fury, Rushdie’s 2001 novel, was a less intimate portrait of New York than The Golden House, his panoramic social novel of the city. While his two sons, Zafar, who is in his late 30s, and 20-year-old Milan, both live in London, Rushdie feels his roots in the US have deepened enough to get inside the city with something like the assurance with which he tackles London and Mumbai. (His youngest son, meanwhile, is threatening to move in with him in New York, as 20-year-olds will, reminding Rushdie that “children take up a lot of time and brain space”. He smiles. “But on the other hand, there are rewards.” ).. read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/02/salman-rushdie-interview
