Rushdie sees literature capturing insanity of times

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Sir Salman Rushdie speaks at Pantages Playhouse Theatre. (BORIS.MINKEVICH@FREEPRESS.MB.CA)

ONE of the world's great novelists proved Thursday night that he keeps his head in the real world, not a stuffy garret.

Sir Salman Rushdie entertained a crowd of more than 700 admirers at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre when he delivered the Winnipeg Arts Council's 25th anniversary lecture.

Speaking without notes at a lectern for 60 minutes, the acclaimed Indo-British writer offered a persuasive argument that literature is the best tool to capture the insanity of our times.

"It feels like a looking-glass world, where things that seem improbable become real," said Rushdie, 62, who was born in India but spent most of his life in England.

"The world is not journalistic, the world is fictional."

His first Winnipeg visit got off to a rocky start when he made a couple of American references as indicative of events in "this country."

"You're in Canada!" several audience members shouted.

"How stupid of me," he responded. "I knew that. Maybe it is different here."

He made up for his gaffe a half hour later when, discussing how writers make inept politicians, he said, "I won't say anything about Michael Ignatieff. Hello, Michael, my old friend."

The current leader of the federal opposition and Rushdie moved in similar highbrow circles in London.

Rushdie later referred to the work of Chicago novelist Saul Bellow, "a Canadian writer."

Though Rushdie's extemporaneous talk touched on several serious political topics, his overall tone was light-hearted.

He told an amusing anecdote about rock band U2 lead singer Bono and even made several quips about his "little dispute" with Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

"Let me point out that one of us is dead," he said. "You know that little thing they say about the pen being mightier than the sword. You don't mess with novelists."

He took no questions after he concluded his lecture, but signed books in the lobby for at least 30 minutes. The evening began with the performance of a short choral work composed in his honour by Winnipeg's Randolph Peters, followed by a formal introduction by WAC chairwoman Moti Shojania.

Rushdie has published almost 20 books of fiction and non-fiction since 1975.

Born in Bombay to Shiite Muslim parents and raised in England, he won the Booker Prize in 1981 for his novel Midnight's Children, an epic about India's transition from British colonialism to independence.

He has been a public figure since his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, was deemed blasphemous and resulted in a fatwa -- a judgment in Islamic law (in this case a death sentence) -- against him by Khomeini, Iran's spiritual leader at the time.

The fatwa is still technically in effect because Khomeini died without rescinding it. But after many years of living with police protection, Rushdie now moves about with relative freedom.

WAC's executive director, Carol Phillips, said that Rushdie requested nothing in the way of extra security for his Winnipeg appearance.

In 2007, he began a five-year-term as writer in residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. Since then, he has lectured in Edmonton and Ottawa, among other North American cities.

On Oct. 15 Rushdie spoke in Chicago, where he received the Chicago Public Library Foundation Carl Sandburg Literary Award.

The U.S. magazine Foreign Policy recently listed him as one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 23, 2009 B1