Writing the Ending Before the Beginning
It is unusual, this book [The Moor's Last Sigh], in that it represents the first time I have managed to end a book exactly where I thought I would end it. This time I was absolutely certain of the final note, which was very freeing because it meant I could fool around as much as I wanted and compose this great arc of a novel as long as I never lost sight of the fact that I had to go there.
–Me, quoted on Salon.com, January 25th, 1996
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Loretta Fisher says:
Oh, those Satanic Verses!
The first time I read Salman Rushdie was when I was 15 years old. I was a sophomore in high school in my small hometown of Rifle, Colorado. I had been sent to the In School Suspension detention room for getting in a fight with another girl in my class. The ISS room had a row of desks, which were seperated by cubicle walls. Our teachers would send our homework to the ISS room for us to do. We were not allowed to talk for the whole day. I was there for a week, and could finish my homework in the first hour, so I brought a copy of The Satanic Verses to read for the rest of the day. (I had worked a part-time summer job at a local bookstore the summer before, and had picked up the book, solely for its blasphemous sounding title.) As I sat there reading it in ISS, the lady in charge of the ISS room came to scold me for not doing my homework. When I showed her that I had finished it, she scoffed at my reading choice. "How old are you?" she asked me. "Fifteen," I said. "You're too young to understand that book," she said, her nose high in the air.
I think of that day now whenever I see a Salman Rushdie book.
Alexander Besher says:
While in Tokyo as a
While in Tokyo as a university student, before deciding to become a writer, he met a very magnetic English woman at a wood-block print shop who wanted the last copy of a Kuniyoshi print that he had just purchased. He let her have it, and thus developed a life-long friendship with the young feminist magical realism writer Angela Carter who was going through her Japanese Heathcliff phase before becoming known to the world. He visited her two decades later in London not long before she passed into S & M Nirvana and still misses her, her death being the cruelest blow that she dealt him.
http://www.redroom.com/author/alexander-besher/bio
daniel curzon says:
settled down or not?
DANIEL CURZON
I am happy that things seem to have settled down
for Mr. Rushdie. Have they?
Dennis Shay says:
You're my hero on two counts
Sir Ahmed,
Hours of reading pleasure incarnate! In my humble opinion, The Moor's Last Sigh is your best to date. Though Midnight's Children and Satanic Verses are just a hair behind it. In your loquacious writing style, even your maundering divergences are no step down in this reader's enjoyment.
Ah! But your creative excellence aside, you stand a giant, a champion for the West. One lone individual pursued, you mooned the Muslim hierarchy, hell! the entirety of Islam, for ten years, in the face of its egregious fiat for your execution. Confessing my naivete, I didn't give you a tinker's chance of surviving. It just shows to go you!
Dennis Shay
Dennis Shay says:
Best of the Bookers X 2 = genius
Salman,
Today is July 10, 2008. You've just been awarded the Best of the Bookers--for the second time and for the same book! Congratulations!
You were my hero. Now you are the Best of my Heroes--and for the second time also. (What a coincidence.)
Rosy Cole says:
Finish First
I'm a great believer in deciding the last line of your novel before you begin. It's a wonderful tool for keeping focused and raising morale during those passages that are, frankly, a slog. Analogous to buying a ticket for your destination before you set out on the journey.
Rosy Cole