Yes, Rushdie Again

In Warsaw (he does get around, doesn't he?) Salman Rushdie recently said that he was using his education as a historian in writing a new novel that is partly set in 16th century India and Italy: "The 21st century is so horrible that it is really quite nice to spend my days in the 16th century. Anything was better than now." However, "I used to write much more in a day than I write now, but it was much less finished. When you are young, the battle is for control, when you are older, the battle is for energy."

And in Frankfurt, Amit Chaudhuri gives a thought-provoking interview on the state of Indian writing in English today: "Rushdie represents a kind of hallucinatory cliff behind which we cannot see, almost like an obstruction we've created -- we cannot see what was there before him. There are continuities going back beyond Rushdie, though Rushdie is an interesting and forceful occurrence." (Get ready for a rude rejoinder from the man himself, Mr Chaudhuri.)