Salman Rushdie: Joseph Anton

Joseph Anton: A Memoir is Salman Rushdie's autobiography during (what became known as) the Satanic verses controversy or the Rushdie affair. In short, Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses (1988) caused violent reactions in the Muslim world and Iran's leader issued a call (fatwa) on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them (the author, his publishers, editors and translators) without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims. What intrigued me to the book was not the political or religious controversy but the thriller aspect: How was Rushdie hidden effectively from his countless pursuers for thirteen years? Were there any near misses? Did he have family and social life during this period? Was he able to work?

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India in 1947 and came from a well-to-do family that had made its fortune in the textile industry. Although a declared atheist, Rushdie studied history and religion at the University of Cambridge. His first novel, Grimus (1975) went by unnoticed, but his second, Midnight's Children (1981) won the Booker's prize in 1981. It was followed by Shame in 1983. Then came The Satanic Verses. Rushdie has said to an interviwer that I expected a few mullahs would be offended, call me names, and then I could defend myself in public... I honestly never expected anything like this. Although it was only a novel, Muslims' response went far beyond gatherings and into violent protests (where several people died), book-store bombings in US and Europe, the killing of the Japanese translator and the near fatal injuries of various others.

Plato's Great...Great Grandchildren

I met Nick last week at a friend's party. We talked about this and that for a while until I noticed that his big smile never left him. At such hard times, how did he manage to keep on smiling?

“It's finally official,” he told me. “Seventy years ago, the registrar made a mistake. My real family name is Paleologos, not Paleologou, as we are called.”

“Can a single letter make such a big deal?”

“A huge one. You see, my family's origin is from a village close to upper Kardamili in Mani. And that's where the brother of the last Emperor of Byzantium hid from the Turks and settled down. The dynasty of Paleologos was the longest in Byzantium. I must be their direct descendant!”

Reader, I am not a young man any more so I have watched myself bleed many times. And even though I don't suffer from colour blindness, I can't be certain if my blood colour is closer to pink than black. There is one thing however I am damn sure of: not once did it appear to be blue. Unlike smiling Nick I have no claims to royalty. But ever since I was in high school, I had this bug inside me. Where did I come from?

The Secret of Good Dialogue

Fictional characters communicate mostly with dialogue to further the plot of a novel. Good dialogue is cherished by intelligent readers because it convinces them that they are observing the story rather than being told by the author. Good dialogue can quickly define characters and further the plot with little or no description. It sounds real--we feel we are there. And yet if we examine how close to reality the aspects of a good novel are, we would discover that although characters and plot may be hugging reality, good dialogue is almost always far away!

Reader, you'd probably think I've gone bananas. You know that most of last century's important writers, people like Hemingway and J D Salinger, listened in on various characters to get things right. So how can good dialogue in fiction be further from reality than both plot and characters? I know it sounds absurd, but it is true. If you want to see this for yourself, take the trouble to record with your cellphone a few everyday conversations. When you play them back, you will discover that they consist mostly of unnecessary words, incomplete sentences, a drifting subject, and echoes of questions or words. Real dialogue lacks interest.

Even if you remove the echoes, rambles and unnecessary words from real dialogue, most readers would still find it boring. Sol Stein, in his masterful Stein on Writing (1995) says that the basic difference between real and fictional dialogue is that real dialogue is “direct” whereas good fictional dialogue is “oblique”. In other words in real conversation we directly answer questions whereas in fiction, characters obliquely answer them to arouse interest.

How to "Create" Characters

An author writes a novel to tell a story but it's the people in the novel that must make the story happen. For example, if a theft is going to take place, one of the characters must be the thief. Most novels have two or three basic characters and perhaps half a dozen secondary ones. So the author must bring into existence thieves and murderers, nuns and adulterers, post-office clerks or bank managers to breathe life into his story. Notice I said “bring into existence” and not “create”. The difference is subtle, but it's what separates the great works of literature from the trash that eventually finds its way to the recycle bin.

Good authors don't create characters. They observe them in every day life and copy them. How else could it be? How would they know how thieves behave and interact with others if they haven't met any? If they created a thief and gave him characteristics that they think a thief should have, readers who have met actual thieves in their lives would not believe in him. Sooner or later word would get around and the book would be forgotten. Authors write fiction but we can only enjoy the story if we feel that the characters are real, if we can believe in them. And if the author has not copied his characters from life but created them, he might as well send them to Mars!

Now reader you probably think that I am putting you on. Isn't everyone saying that authors “create” characters? I mean the first thing we read in any novel, usually under the copyright statement, is that the characters are the product of the author's imagination and that they bear no relation to any living persons. Right? Hogwash!

Body Language in Literature

Body Language is a form of human non-verbal communication accomplished by a series of body postures, facial expressions and eye movements. We subconsciously know if someone is happy or sad, bored or excited, thrilled or sleepy just by looking at him. Even though an estimated 60-90% of all human communication consists of body language (verbal is only about 7%), we were ignorant of this language until the late 1960's when the first course appeared in an American university.

In spite of our academic ignorance, a number of professionals had managed to control their body language on a practical level for specific ends. Good actors for example, took the appropriate body postures and facial expressions to effectively communicate the feelings of the character they portrayed to their audience. Successful salesmen also used body language to gain the trust of their customers. So did swindlers and politicians. A good speaker knew when his audience was bored so that he could change his pace or his subject to reestablish the communication.

PureText and Other Free Goodies

We do it every day. We copy text from a document or a web page and paste it to another document for whatever reason. It's immediately apparent that the copied and the original text's fonts, their size, the line spacing and all the other goodies that determine how text appears on a page are all different. If we wish to incorporate the copied text to our present document form we must correct it. This is not a difficult process but if you do it a number of times you will become exasperated. Years ago you would have ripped the page off your typewriter, crumbled it and threw it into the trashcan. But in this age of computers crumbling laptops could prove awfully expensive. So what do you do?

"PuretText" is a tiny (28 kB!) computer program you may run in your Windows computer. It sits on your task bar. You copy anything you wish from anywhere and click the PT symbol on your task bar. This changes whatever is on your clipboard to pure text. When you now proceed to paste it to where you want it, presto! It immediately matches the form of the rest of your document. Life is good again. And like most good things in life, PureText is free (without any small print, advertising or what have you). Just visit the PureText home page above to learn to use it and download.

The Mechanics of Good Dialogue

I once took my car to an insurance evaluator. He walked around it in semi-darkness and immediately told me all the details of every collision I had been involved in. He knew exactly what to look for and how to interpret it.

In the same way you can open a novel in a random page, look at the dialogue, and say with some certitude how well the particular author handles dialogue without even reading the dialogue itself. Good dialogue in a novel can easily be distinguished by its mechanics. Here are three things you have to look for to spot bad dialogue:

a) The emotions of characters are described.

Does the author find it necessary to tell you that John is angry, happy, sad, astonished or surprised after someone said something? Then you are reading bad dialogue. In good dialogue, the author doesn't have to describe the emotions of the characters involved. The words in the dialogue should carry the emotions of the characters to the reader. And the reader will evolve his personal take on the character. Good dialogue allows the reader to feel the speaker's or listener's emotions.

Skyfall—A Highly Distinctive Blend From a Fifty-Year-Old Vintage

Skyfall, the twenty-third James Bond film which started playing this month, has wisely kept the trademarks of the fifty year old series while at the same time invested weight and complexity to its characters and story. The result is not just one of the best Bond films ever made, but a fine movie, period.

When Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, resigned from his job in naval intelligence at the end of the war he promised to his friends that he would “write a spy novel that would be read as literature”. Although Eric Ambler had made this leap before the war, Fleming didn't manage it. Casino Royale, the first James Bond adventure published in 1952, did have a number of interesting characters, but it was closer to pulp than literature. The Bond adventures that followed it did little to close the gap. The cinematic James Bond was even further down the line. His first adventures were a clever mixture of reality and fantasy, but in just a few years reality had gone out the window and given its place to outright male fantasy. The movie Bond was mostly an adult fairy-tale figure who moved on the fine line between absurdity and over the top. There were a couple of small detours towards reality (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, License to Kill) but that's exactly what they were—detours.

The Ultimate Escape Story

I have just three entries in my shortlist for the ultimate escape story. If you prefer fact to fiction, the real story of how 76 allied prisoners of war managed to escape from a Nazi top security prison camp in Germany in 1944 is tops. Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape (1951) contains real life resourcefulness, team-work and bravery that lead to tragedy. If you lean towards fantasy, you can't beat James Bond's offbeat escape from a cell, deep inside Dr No's lair. In chapters 17 and 18 of Ian Fleming's Dr No (1958), James Bond has to go through an obstacle course set-up along a shoulder wide shaft that terminates with a face-off against a carnivore in a sea pool. But if you want to read a classic short story of sheer ingenuity that narrates like a mystery then this has to be Jacques Futrelle's The Problem of Cell 13 (1905).

Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912) was an American journalist and mystery writer. He worked for a number of newspapers including The Atlanta Journal, the New York Herald, the Boston Post and the Boston American. He resigned from journalism in 1906 to devote himself to writing fiction. He published over seven books and many short stories. He is best known for his character Professor Augustus S.F.X Van Dusen, also known as “The Thinking Machine”. In 1912, after an extended trip to Europe where he made his works known, he returned home aboard the RMS Titanic. Unlike the fantastic escapes in many of his stories he simply perished after forcing his wife to take her seat aboard a lifeboat without him. He is best known for his short story The Problem of Cell 13, which is included in many lists as one of the best mystery stories ever written.

Can Sentence Length Induce Emotion?

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought. It begins with a capital letter and ends with a dot which we call a period or full stop. This dot, and most punctuation marks, were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, around 200 BC. It didn't originally indicate the end of a sentence but the place someone who was reading out loud could pause to breathe. Somewhere in elementary school, we were all told that whenever we reach a period, we should take a deep breath, and I think we mostly do!

You might think that nothing could be further from the truth. To begin with, you don't normally read out loud. You can hardly remember who your elementary school teacher was, much less what she had said. And breathing is a necessity of life that usually occurs without much thought. So how can periods possibly control your breathing when you read to yourself? Nonsense right? Dead wrong! The average reader has somehow been trained by experience to take a full breath every time he reaches a period. Try reading a long sentence that has no commas (without thinking about it), and you'll think that you are asthmatic. You'll practically gasp for breath, almost choke. But where as a poor author by improper use of the period may suffocate his reader, a good one can use the period to affect his emotional state!

Love and the Great Illusion

It had never occurred to me until I read it in E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927). Novels differ from life in two major ways. First they have a plot, and second, boy and girl always live happily ever after. Think of a novel, in a vague sense, and you can almost always think of a man or a woman who strive to be united, and by the end they mostly succeed and live happily ever after. Think of your own life, generally, and you are left with a very different and a more complex impression. So why is it that love is so prominent in novels (and movies) and why does it last forever?

Humanity is defined by two major instincts: survival and perpetuation. They literally drive us. Take them away and we perish. Today our lives are secure from danger and for most of the adult population, marriage places a barrier on falling in love. We are seemingly in equilibrium but we are not. Survival and the sexual instinct—and the emotions we associate with them: fear and falling in love—are well embedded in our genes. The less they appear in everyday life, the more we desire them. And if we are imaginative and too lazy to bungee jump or start an extramarital affair, we turn to literature (and the movies) to extinguish our desires. And by the same token, an author's mind constantly wonders over fear and falling in love for the same reasons. We all need a love story to fuel our sexual instinct and so the author and his reader meet on the printed page and love becomes prominent in literature.

The Ultimate Sex Scene

He (Rhett Butler) swung her (Scarlett O'Hara) off her feet and into his arms and started up the stairs. Her head was crushed against his chest and she heard the hard hammering of his heart beneath her ears. He hurt her and she cried out, muffled, frightened. Up the stairs he went in the utter darkness, up, up, and she was wild with fear. He was a mad stranger and this was a black darkness she did not know, darker than death...

They say that these two paragraphs in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind are arguably the most famous sex scene in English (language) literature. Simple words are used and there are no explicit or anatomical details. A sure sign of sophistication, most critics or editors have argued.

Reader I have a confession to make. When I first read this scene I got more anxious than aroused. Was there something wrong with me? Was I a latent homosexual taken out of the closet by Margaret Mitchell's sophisticated language? Had I wasted my valuable adolescent allowance buying Playboy when I should have bought sophisticated literature? I tried to control my breathing and reread the two famous paragraphs. And then I knew what was wrong.

Susan Cain: Quiet

Susan Cain's best seller Quiet (2012) is a book that examines the differences between introverts and extroverts and how they communicate between themselves and with each other. It is easily the best psychology book I have read in the past ten years because it has helped me to better understand myself and the world around me.

Susan Cain is a Princeton and Harvard lawyer who gave up her profession in 2005 to research and write this book. Beyond examining the most important books and research papers available, she has also talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of pertinent people about the subject. She starts by explaining how Carl Jung's Psychological Types (1921) first popularized the terms introvert and extrovert and proceeds to a short test of twenty questions to help you determine what you are. Although no all-purpose definition is available, introverts generally feel right with less outside stimulation, they would rather sip wine with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle or read a book as opposed to getting a bang from meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes and cranking up the stereo. They work slowly and deliberately, they focus on one task at the time, they dislike conflict and are relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame. Note here that introvert is not a synonym for hermit, shyness or misanthrope. Extroverts tend to prefer talking to listening, add life to a party, become assertive and dominant and prefer conflict to solitude. I had bypassed many a dinner invitation (in fact dinner itself) for a good book so I knew I was an introvert although the extent surprised me: I scored 95%. It turns out that a third to a half of the human population is made of introverts, so we are hardly a minority!

An Eye for an Eye?

Fantasy Land is my novel of revenge, or more precisely, of a revenge that is planned but not carried out. And this seems to be the chief objection of some of my readers, as expressed to me in person or by mail. They claim that they were not emotionally justified by the result. Reader I know that when someone slaps you in the face you want to slap them right back. But let me explain to you why this is not the wisest course to follow.

Revenge or retaliation is the infliction of deliberate harm on somebody in response to a harm they have done to you. Revenge is basically an emotional response to being hurt, and being an emotional response, it goes way back to primitive man. It was, and is, common to most societies emerging from savagery and tribalism toward some sort of civilization.

Two important documents of the ancient world (both about 700 BC) show us that retaliation was a justifiable as well as an advisable course of action back then. In the Hebrew Book of Exodus, (21:23-25) we read that “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” This line, often quoted, in essence justifies revenge.

Where do Fiction Authors Write?

I admire Hemingway's writing and his iceberg principle. I know he hung out in a bar in Havana and I would have loved to meet him for a quiet chat. I have heard that he wrote standing up. Now that's kind of weird, but whether you are standing up, sitting or lying down, writing is hardly exciting to watch. Reader I will readily agree with you: observing someone write is undeniably boring. What's important is the process in the author's head and what's even more important is his work. Where this process takes place is immaterial. Still, it is one of the questions that have plagued me since adolescence.

Why is it important to me? Do I want to have a mental picture? Do I desire to mimic? Or is it something beyond that? The bottom line is I don't care why it's important to me, so why would you? What's interesting is that this meaningless question, or its answer has been associated with most authors I know. I was on a bus tour of Edinburgh the other day and as I was staring out the window our tour guide pointed out a tea and coffee shop called The Elephant House. Now what exciting thing could have happened there, in the midst of historic Edinburgh? A meeting of great politicians or the planning of a revolution? “That's where J K Rawling wrote her first Harry Potter book,” said the mechanical voice. You see? My curiosity is hardly unique.

Eric Ambler: From Pulp to Literature

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is not only “unquestionably our best thriller writer”, as Graham Greene said, but also the master of the modern thriller when it involves international intrigue and espionage. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene ran the course on the sidelines but Ambler ploughed head on. Within a few years he not only bridged the gap between serious literature and the pulp thrillers of John Buchan and Sapper but significantly overlapped it.

He was born in London, studied Engineering at London University but settled on a career as an advertising copywriter. He travelled extensively in Europe and became a full-time writer in 1937. Between 1936 and 1940 he wrote six critically acclaimed novels of intrigue which took the thriller from pulp to literature. He served in the British army (1940-46) as a film-maker with the likes of Peter Ustinov and John Huston. After the war he wrote screenplays for various films including The Passionate Friends, The Cruel Sea, A Night to Remember, The Wreck of the Mary Deare and Mutiny on the Bounty (uncredited). He married Joan Harrison, Alfred Hitchcock's screenwriter, and created an American TV show of his own: Checkmate. He also wrote twelve more highly acclaimed novels (most of which were filmed as movies or mini TV series) and five more in collaboration with Charles Rodda. He won countless literary awards including four Gold Daggers and an Edgar.

The Blueprints of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a great American short story writer and poet. Most people know him for his tales of mystery and the macabre but he was so much more than that. He was a master of innovation and most of his short stories became the prototypes for several genres or important classical works.

He was born Edgar Poe in Boston. His father abandoned his family a year later and his mother died when he was two. John Allan acted as a foster parent but he disowned him when Poe incurred large gambling debts after he registered at the University of Virginia to study languages. He enlisted in the American artillery to support himself and later as a cadet at West Point but resigned to follow a career in writing. He worked as a magazine editor, literary critic and publisher and was one of the first Americans who tried to make a living out of writing alone resulting in a financially difficult career. He secretly married his 13 year old cousin Virginia and because she suffered for many years from tuberculosis, Poe turned to drink. His poem The Raven became a popular sensation and made Poe a household name overnight. After Virginia's death his behaviour became erratic until his death in the streets of Baltimore under mysterious circumstances.

The Hook

The first few sentences of a novel must lure the reader away from the real world we all inhabit and into the imaginary world of the author. It is part of the author's art to make this transition as quick and as pleasant as possible. That is why a novel's beginning cannot just lure, it has to “hook”. 

Now reader I know that you are not a fish. You might think that this is unnecessary. After all, millions of people have read and enjoyed Umberto Eco's Name Of The Rose and in doing so had to plough through the first ...hundred and eighty tedious pages before they were actually hooked. But if you are not a masochist, wouldn't you prefer to be hooked into a book quickly and consume it rather than labour through it? Say for example that you are standing in a bookstore or a library and you see an interesting title and like the cover. Now if you know nothing else about the book, if you haven't read any raving reviews or listened to admiring words of mouth, you would probably start to read it. How long would you give the author before you decide to take the book home or put it back on the shelf? A few pages? Most people would just read a few sentences. So those opening few lines have a commercial as well as a practical purpose. And that's why most authors take care on how they start. 

Characters in Fiction

A novel's primary purpose is to tell a story but people make the story happen. In real life, each of us is entirely unique; we are far too complex to understand or describe. In literature, characters are abbreviated to what is necessary for the story. E. M. Forster in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927) divides the characters we find in fiction into FLAT and ROUND.

FLAT characters (also called humours, types, or caricatures) in their purest form are constructed around a single idea or quality. If, for example, in all dialogue and narration of a novel, all we learn about George is that he hates his mother, then George is a flat character. He might never actually utter the words “I hate you” to his mother, but if in all his dialogue, action and thoughts he has no existence outside that phrase, no private life like the rest of us, no other pleasure other then hating his mother, then George is as flat a character as he can be. In fact he is not a character but an idea personified. Anything more we learn about George, his physical description, his hobbies, his relationship with other people, etc, work to make him more round.

Jane Austen: Emma

Jane Austen's Emma (1815) is not as accomplished as Pride and Prejudice but it is one of her better novels.

The twenty-one year old title character is described in the first sentence as handsome, clever and rich and a little later (on chapter 10) she confesses to a friend that she has “very little intention of ever marrying at all”. This appears to be terribly upsetting as we know Jane Austen's novels are virtually about women in quest of a marriage with financial security. Otherwise, we are in Austen's world. We get acquainted with a number of characters and join their dinners and dances, eavesdrop on their conversations and take walks or picnics in the country. We find out how they dress, what they eat, how they talk and think. Men “of advantage” occasionally disappear for business and their women have precious little to occupy themselves with. Servants are the silent majority. I don't remember a significant dialogue with any of them or a single name being given. I think that today's authors are far more generous with things because sometimes they do give the brand of a car or a vacuum cleaner.