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Author describes his new novel "The Enchantress of Florence" and how the book brings together cultures of the East and the West. (2:58)
 

Full Interview (12:07)
 

Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Salman Rushdie back to this program. The acclaimed author of books like "Midnight's Children" and "The Satanic Verses" is out with his latest. It's a novel called "The Enchantress of Florence." Salman Rushdie, nice to see you again, sir.

Salman Rushdie: Hello, and how are you?

Tavis: You've been all right?

Rushdie: Yeah, I've been doing well, thank you.

Tavis: Wonderful. I get the sense that it must be your love of history that challenges you to bring us these disparate historical moments and try to weave them together in a nice narrative.

Rushdie: Yeah. You know, history is what I studied at college.

Tavis: Exactly.

Rushdie: I always have loved it and I remember I had the wonderful history professors who really excited me about the past, you know. So I've found since then that, when I became a fiction writer, I still had that interest in really trying to see how human individuals with their private lives do against the background of history. You know, are we able to affect our times or do the times just make us? You know, that dialog between private people and public life, you know, is something I've been interested in.

Tavis: I don't know if this question makes any sense. Let me ask it anyway. Do you think that, at our best, we measure up to history?

Rushdie: Oh, at our best, yeah. I mean, at our best, we make it, you know. I'm a child of the 60s, you know. I believe we can change the world (laughter). But this was an extraordinary moment in the history of the world because it's really when the world was going through maybe as big a change as it is now because this is a moment when the East and the West are really getting to know each other. They're sort of beginning to engage with each other thoroughly for the first time.

Meanwhile, you know, up on the western horizon across what was then called the Ocean Sea, there's this thing bubbling up called the New World. You know, it's a kind of really great revolution in the way people saw each other and saw the world.

Tavis: Because you are a student of history - I want to come back to the book and bear down more on what the book is about in just a second - but because you are a history buff, when you get tickled by an idea for a book like this that's gonna take us back into history, how do you know that the story you want to tell, the moment in history that you have chosen, works for us, that we're gonna get it, that we're gonna understand it, that it makes sense for us in a contemporary setting?

Rushdie: Well, the answer is that it's the same thing for a novelist. It's the same thing whether it's set yesterday or four hundred years ago. You got to find people that your readers are gonna care about. You know, you've got to find -

Tavis: - characters.

Rushdie: Yeah, because the novel always has to start with the human being. You know, as long as you've got a story to tell about a person or a group of people that you think are interesting and that you can interest people in, it frankly doesn't matter whether it's set down the street or four hundred years ago.

Tavis: All right. So to "The Enchantress of Florence," tell me who the characters are that we come to care about in this text.

Rushdie: Well, the title character - it's about an Indian princess who gets taken captive by a rival warlord and then gradually moves across the world. He gets defeated by the King of Persia, she falls in love with him, then she falls out of love with him. Then she falls in love with an Italian soldier of fortune who's working at that moment for the Turks, for the Ottomans. They fall in love, she goes back with him to Italy and creates all kinds of trouble, and she's probably a witch. And then -

Tavis: - (Laughter) You said that so easily, "She's probably a witch."

Rushdie: She's probably a witch, and then fifty years later, actually where the book begins is where this young man, this handsome, young European-looking guy, arrives at the Court of the Great Emperor of India, the Emperor Akbar, with this strange story to tell about how he claims to be descended from her. He claims that after she got to Italy, she gave birth to him.

So it's a hell of a claim because, if he's right, he's saying that he's a prince of the Mughal Dynasty and therefore entitled to a place at the Royal House. And if he's lying, he might easily find his head parting company from his body, you know. So it's telling a story and it's very high-stakes poker.

Tavis: Every writer, certainly every novelist, has his or her own way, his or her own process. What's your process? How do you make this stuff up?

Rushdie: Well, I started out really just thinking, "Here's an interesting moment," as I said, when the East and West are first discovering each other. If I can find a story that brings them together, that would be good. Then I thought, as far as I could see, there was no story at all about travelers going from the East to the West. There was a bit of traveling the other way, you know, but nothing going from India to Europe.

So immediately when nothing has happened, that's for a novelist, a goldmine. Let's make the thing happen that didn't happen. So then I thought, well, okay, so if there's a traveler coming from India to the West, who should it be? I thought if it's a woman, it's kind of even stranger because it was not an age when it was so easy for women to move in that way. So then I thought, okay, it's gonna be a woman finding her way from the East to the West and then who is she? Then I had to go find out who she was.

Tavis: It's not just, to your earlier point, it seems to me at least as a reader, it's not just the characters that get us, but more expressly, it is connecting to the humanity in those characters that get us. The humanity that we connect to in the book is what?

Rushdie: Well, you know, human beings haven't changed that much, you know. I mean, at our best, we are still capable of the same kinds of loyalty and sacrifice and love and so on, and at our worst, we are still capable of the same kinds of brutality and cynicism and so on. So actually, one of the great discoveries for me is that, you know, human nature is a great constant and, if we are human beings today, it's not so hard for us to understand our ancestors four hundred years because they behaved exactly the same way we do, at their best and at their worst.

So this also was a time of terrible warfare, terrible brutality all across the world, but this also was in both India and Europe a kind of golden age. This was an age when art, architecture and music and actually philosophy was at a kind of height. Many of the things we now think about as valuable, like the idea of ourselves as sovereign individual selves, those ideas were being invented at that time, you know. So you're watching, if you like, the modern world being born.

Tavis: To your point, Salman, about the - if I may put it this way. To your point about the constancy of humanity, the constancy of the human spirit, that we haven't changed that much for all these many, many years, is there a constancy that you have discovered that you have to have in your books no matter what the subject is? Are there certain things that we -

Rushdie: - keep coming back?

Tavis: Exactly.

Rushdie: Well, I think you can't, in the end, escape your imagination. You can only write the books that you can write, you know. And all that comes out, of course, of the whole life experience that you've had, everything that's ever interested you as a person. So, yeah, there is stuff I keep coming back to. One of the things - well, two things.

First of all, I think almost all my books have at their center very strong female characters. I think the reason for this is I grew up in a family completely composed of women, you know. I had no brothers. I had three sisters. Even the larger family of uncles, aunts, cousins, etc., the women outnumbered the men by like three to one. So I felt that I grew up in this world of very tough, very argumentative, very passionate, able, kind of ornery women, you know. That's really been something I think that a lot of my work has come out. So that's one thing.

The other thing is this interest of joining the East and the West because actually they're joined inside me because of the kind of life I've led. So in a sense for me, it's not just an outside thing. It's not just thinking of Eastern culture over there, Western over there. For me, it's inside.

Tavis: The value beyond the page, the value of combining, connecting East and West for us as human beings is what?

Rushdie: Well, because we don't any longer live in neat little boxes. You know, once upon a time you could live in a city in a Western town and really who cares what's happening somewhere else in the world? And the same would be true if you were growing up in the Far East. Now the world is so small that all our stories connect up, you know, that the boxes we live in open up into the boxes everybody else lives in.

So I think it's unusually valuable nowadays, I think, for me to try and find stories which show how the world joins up and to show what are the consequences of it joining up for good and ill. You know, sometimes it's exciting and liberating and enriching, and sometimes it's disturbing and worrying and kind of even frightening, and you have to look at all of that.

Tavis: To your former point that we, in reading your books, always come back to the strong, able women in the book. It's one thing to write about that because it is the experience of your life and your upbringing, but there is also a value in that, I would think, which is your women readers get to see strong, able women in the books. But I don't get the sense that you think it's some duty you have to do that.

Rushdie: No, I don't write out of and I've never written out of duty. It's just the women in my head. I've known a lot of women who would be in that category of women, you know. You know, you have to able to write weak characters too. You can't only have dynamic, strong, overpowering, heroic women. Sometimes you have to have failures, you know, amongst your characters, so you need that just for diversity. But I'm very attracted to women who are not simply helpless, you know, who try to shape their lives rather than just have them shaped for them.

Tavis: What keeps you writing or what keeps you coming back? I ask that because you have been so celebrated for your previous works. There are certain people and I don't cast aspersion on them, but there are some people, when in the course of their life, their career, their work, they hit their mark. They slow down because they know that they're gonna be regarded, they know that their legacy is well and good and safe. Why keep coming back and subjecting yourself to what critics might say about your work?

Rushdie: I don't know, it's what I do, you know. I mean, what would I do with my time? You know, if a carpenter makes a great table, he doesn't think, "Okay, I've made a great table. I don't need to ever make a table again." You know, he makes the next table. That's sort of what I think. I think, for me -

Tavis: - you could pursue something else other than writing.

Rushdie: I could, I could. But I think, for me, it's always been the thing I've used to kind of respond to the world I live in, you know. It's for me the kind of person I'm able to be when I'm at the desk and concentrating and immersed in my story. I think of that as my best self, you know. I'm happiest to be that person, so why would I stop?

Tavis: I get the sense just between the two of us that acting wouldn't altogether turn you off, though (laughter).

Rushdie: No, no, no (laughter). It was my other fantasy. Actually, when I was a kid, when I was at college and immediately afterwards, I actually did more acting than writing back then and it was my other plan. But I guess this one didn't work so badly.

Tavis: You've made a few cameos here and there.

Rushdie: Yes, I have. I just was in Helen Hunt's last movie and so on. You never know. There's one or two other offers bubbling away, so who knows?

Tavis: I can tell you this. They did a great job on the design of this book.

Rushdie: It's a beautiful thing.

Tavis: It looks good. It even feels good.

Rushdie: Yeah, yeah. You know, I think it's really important to have books these days that look beautiful, you know, because it's a hard world out there for books. If a book is attractive to pick up, I think it makes a big difference. I think they've done a great job.

Tavis: And as one who has succeeded at this thing called writing, to your point, because I was just in a conversation about this the other day, that the book world really is suffering right about now. Advice for publishers?

Rushdie: Oh, you know, I think be more choosey is what I would say. I mean, there tends to be a sort of scatter-guard approach to publishing. There's a zillion books out there. It's very hard for readers, I think, going into a bookstore to know what to choose and why and so on. I think there's just too much out there and a little more selectivity might actually help.

Tavis: The new book by Salman Rushdie is "The Enchantress of Florence." He is, of course, previously the winner of the Booker prize. Mr. Rushdie, nice to see you.

Rushdie: Thank you.

Tavis: Glad to have you here.