The book I am currently reading
I recently visited the old mansion where Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks was set, that great house with the words “Dominus providebit” inscribed over the front door, and was immediately inspired to download the novel on to my iPad and plunge in. The pleasure of re-reading Buddenbrooks was so deep that I resolved to embark on a year of re-readings, which is why I now find myself about halfway through the first book of Don Quixote, in the terrific Edith Grossman translation. This is proving to be a more complicated encounter. On the one hand, the characters of Quixote and Sancho Panza are as beautifully realised as I remember them, and the idea of a man determinedly seeing the world according to his own vision, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, feels strikingly contemporary. On the other hand, how many more times are the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance and Sancho going to get beaten up and left in pain in various roadside ditches? The “greatest novel ever written” – I voted for it myself once – turns out to be just a little bit repetitive. To make the reading easier, I’m breaking it up and reading other books by other authors after every couple of hundred pages of Cervantes. At present, that interposed book is David Grossman’s wonderful A Horse Walks into a Bar.
The book that changed my life
Truthfully, the books that changed my life were books I wrote myself, not books I read. When Midnight’s Children was published in 1981 I was hoping that a few people who were not friends or relations of mine might read and like it. I was completely unprepared for what happened. It gave me the life I had always wanted, a writer’s life, and for most of the 1980s I lived that life with real gratitude and happiness. Then in 1988 another book changed my life in another way. But in spite of everything that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses I remain proud of it. And strangely I’m grateful for it, too. Its troubled pathway has taught me a lot about how to live, and what to live for.
The book I wish I’d written
There are too many of these, of course, but if I have to choose one, then (today, anyway) I’ll choose Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Transformations have been important in my own work, but the transformation of poor Gregor Samsa is the archetype of this kind of story. His own deluded conviction that it will somehow be all right and he will return to being the person he formerly was is painful to read, and his rejection by everyone close to him even more painful. It’s also short. Five hundred pages of the sad case of the giant bug would probably be unbearable. Fifty pages … unbeatable.
The book that influenced my writing
When I was starting out, long before I published anything, I fell under the spell of Pynchon’s mammoth novel Gravity’s Rainbow. I wrote an entire draft of a novel called The Antagonist, set mainly in Ladbroke Grove, which was such an obvious pastiche of the mighty Tom as to be unpublishable. Fortunately, I worked this out in time, and never submitted it. The typescript now languishes among my papers in the archives of Emory University in Atlanta, where scholarly masochists can read it, if they must. These days I have, I think, shaken off Pynchon’s influence. However, thanks to a favourable review I wrote of one of his later novels, I was able to meet the famously invisible man. I had dinner with him at Sonny Mehta’s apartment in Manhattan and found him very satisfyingly Pynchonesque. At the end of dinner I thought, well, now we’re friends, and maybe we’ll see each other from time to time. He never called again.
The book that is most underrated
Juan Rulfo’s only novel, Pedro Páramo, is recognised as a classic in the original Spanish, but many English-language readers seem unaware of it. This is the novel Gabriel García Márquez read so many times he claimed to have memorised it, and in Rulfo’s phantasmal Comala we clearly see the origins of Macondo.
The book that changed my mind
I can think of books that made little explosions in my mind, showing me literary possibilities I hadn’t dreamed of until I read them. James Joyce’s Ulysses was one such book. Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions (Ficciones) was another, and three stories from that collection, “Death and the Compass”, “Funes the Memorious” and “The Garden of Forking Paths” have never left me, and still help me to think about what I’m doing, or might do, or should never try to do.
The last book that made me cry
I don’t cry when reading. Watching movies at home alone is another story.
The last book that made me laugh
Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. That, or PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters.
The book I couldn’t finish
The humiliating answer I’m always obliged to give to this question is Middlemarch. I know, I know. I’ll try again.
The book I’m most ashamed not to have read
Writer friends speak to me constantly of the joys of Anthony Trollope, but I haven’t discovered them. That’s quite a lot of books to be ashamed of not having read.
The book I most often give as a gift
I don’t have a book that I regularly gift, I’m afraid. The last book I gave as a gift was a first edition of The Negro Mother, and other Dramatic Recitations by Langston Hughes.
The book I’d like to be remembered for
Readers’ responses to the novels I wrote for my sons, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and its sort-of-sequel, Luka and the Fire of Life, have brought me so much happiness that it would be great if they were the ones that survived.
- The Golden House by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape, £18.99). To order a copy for £12.82, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
