10 Questions for Salman Rushdie

By Lev Grossman

If Salman Rushdie hadn't been sentenced to death by Ayatullah Khomeini and if he weren't chummy with the likes of Kylie Minogue, he would be famous merely for being one of the world's greatest living writers. He chats with TIME's Lev Grossman about his new novel, Shalimar the Clown (coming in September), the crisis in Kashmir, the nature of tragedy and the future of the Klingon race.

ISN'T IT AN EXTRAORDINARY ACT OF EMPATHY TO WRITE A NOVEL ABOUT A MAN WHO BECOMES A MURDERER AND A TERRORIST?

Yes, well, he started out as a very nice boy.

DON'T THEY ALWAYS.

And he becomes less nice along the way. I wanted characters that you couldn't simply put into a kind of good or bad slot, you know? That you'd have to think about what your relationship with them was.

SHALIMAR IS A VERY FUNNY BOOK, BUT IT'S NOT A HAPPY ONE, IS IT? INDIVIDUALS STRUGGLE AGAINST HUGE POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL FORCES, AND THE FORCES PRETTY MUCH WIN THE DAY.

Well, for the most part I think it is a tragedy, this book. At the level of the characters, it is a story about a betrayed love, a broken love that can't be fixed. And in the same way, I think the culture of Kashmir, which was a harmonious culture of different communities, has also been broken in a way that almost certainly can't be fixed. It seems to me that the nature of true tragedy is when something is so badly broken that with the best will in the world, you can't put it back together again and what was broken has to stay broken.

WHAT, IF ANYTHING, SHOULD THE WEST BE DOING TO HELP IN KASHMIR?

The mutual distrust between India and Pakistan is very great, and it may well be in the end impossible to reach a genuine detente without some third-party intervention as a mediator. The essential thing is to demilitarize the area. While you've got 900,000 Indian troops and 700,000 Pakistani troops plus the jihadis in the area, it becomes impossible to see anything that one could recognize as peace showing up there.

ISN'T THERE A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT THAT HOLDS THAT NOVELISTS SHOULDN'T GET THEIR SOFT, DELICATE FINGERS DIRTY WITH POLITICS?

This is not my school.

I'VE NOTICED THAT ABOUT YOU. WHY NOT?

Well, I'd say they're not exactly political books. They're books about the intersection of private lives and public affairs, and they ask, in a way, time-honored novelistic questions of: To what extent are we the masters of our fate? To what extent do we make our lives, and to what extent are our lives made for us by forces beyond our control? I think the thing that has shifted in the modern era is that the balance of those two elements has been weighted more heavily on the side of loss of control. Our characters are no longer entirely our destinies. When those planes ran into those buildings, it didn't matter what the character of the people inside was.

I THINK IT'S A FEDERAL REGULATION THAT I HAVE TO ASK YOU, WHAT IS THE STATUS OF THE FATWA AGAINST YOU?

The status is, I haven't required any kind of security for whatever it is now, getting on seven years. So it's in the past, is my view, and certainly I've made a very big effort to turn the page. It already had nine years of my life. I'd quite like the rest of my life to be about something else.

THERE'S A LINE ABOUT KLINGONS ON THE VERY FIRST PAGE OF SHALIMAR. AREN'T YOU WORRIED THAT A POP REFERENCE LIKE THAT WILL DATE THE BOOK?

It might. You never know what lasts. A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve. I have a suspicion that Klingons might be more enduring than we suspect.

SPEAKING OF KLINGONS, WASN'T YOUR WIFE [ACTRESS AND MODEL PADMA LAKSHMI] ON AN EPISODE OF STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE?

Yes, she was. She was an alien empress of most of the universe, I think. The episode was all right. Next Generation was the one that I liked best.

ME TOO, BUT I'M SURE YOUR WIFE WAS MAGNIFICENT.

Yes. She was born to be empress of the universe.