Salman Rushdie’s Literary Inspirations

Salman Rushdie prefers not to immerse himself in other people’s writing when he is working on his own. “When I’m writing fiction, I tend not to read fiction. I actually don’t want other people’s voices to sneak into my head,” Rushdie said recently. That’s not to say that other writers’ books aren’t an important part of his process—posing questions, providing instruction, and offering models of characters. Not long ago, he joined us to discuss a handful of works that have offered guidance for his own writing, including a novella that appears in “The Eleventh Hour,” his latest book, which came out this week. His remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

In the mid-eighties, I was beginning to think about what eventually became “The Satanic Verses.” I knew that the book would have interwoven stories, but I wasn’t sure exactly how, and a friend recommended reading Bulgakov, thinking he might help.

“The Master and Margarita” is about the Devil arriving in Moscow with some surreal sidekicks. That story line is also a satirical portrait of the literary world at the time, where the Devil seems to be particularly concerned with making trouble. There’s also a kind of cursed love story, which follows the novel’s title characters, who are a disillusioned writer and the woman whom he loves.

What I liked about “The Master and Margarita” was that, first of all, it’s funny, and I wanted whatever I was doing to have a strong comic element. Bulgakov’s book is a funny novel about very serious things, and I’ve always liked books like that—Günter Grass’s “The Tin Drum” fits in this category, too. But it was also very helpful for me as a guide for how to weave my stories together. It got me over a hurdle in terms of form.

Amerika

by Franz Kafka

This was Kafka’s first attempt at a novel, but he never finished it. It follows a character named Karl Rossman who has been exiled to America, essentially because he seemed to have got a chambermaid pregnant. He comes full of optimism, but America doesn’t treat him very well. Right near the end, he gets a job with a mysterious entity called the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. It’s never explained what the organization does, but Karl gets on a train with his friend to go to Oklahoma, and that’s where the novel ends.

Kafka never came to America himself, but he liked travel books. His sense of the country was derived from secondhand sources. The landscape that Karl sees from the train is nothing like anything you would encounter on such a journey. It’s a kind of imaginary America he’s in, one in which he’s travelling to an imaginary Oklahoma. But the idea is that, in Oklahoma, Kafka wanted Karl to find some kind of resolution, some kind of—and this is an unusual thing for Kafka—a happy ending.

In “The Eleventh Hour,” there’s a novella called “Oklahoma” that uses Oklahoma as a metaphor of, I guess, happiness. It explores some of the questions that arise out of Kafka’s book. If you disappear, do you find your Oklahoma? In life, all of us look for something that brings us resolution and peace. Do we find it, or do we not find it? And do you really have to step out of your life to find it? Or is that another mistake?

Candide

by Voltaire

My connection to this one goes back a long way, too. When I was at boarding school in England, I was originally quite bad at French, but then I had a magic teacher, Mr. Lewis, who taught us “Candide,” and I found myself suddenly coming top of the class.