In the book, you allude to social media by saying that life has become a series of vanishing photographs posted every day.

I found out this is a room I really don’t want to be in. I suspect, the moment that it’s over, I’ll withdraw again. Though I have started again, at my publisher’s request, to give information about the book tour. And for a while I enjoyed it, and then I stopped enjoying the interaction.

Someone suggested I might enjoy it a few years ago so I tried it out and over a million people rushed in my direction and that was gratifying in a way. Yeah, I had a little flirtation with Twitter. But now, in the era of A.G., as you put it in the book, “The mob rules and the smartphone rules the mob.” “before Google” and “after Google,” and there’s a major plot point that the character is able to escape with her reputation intact, because an incident occurred B.G. And I wanted to write about “it,” rather than one of its byproducts. He’s not the cause of it, he’s an effect. But Trump’s name doesn’t occur in the novel and I didn’t want it to be there because I was writing about America, not about him. The monster is this information age we’ve created where a figure like Trump becomes possible. The reality show has taken over D.C., and we’re all stuck with it. And he’s a lonely man - he’s never married or had a child - and the kind of isolation caused by this information age was something I wanted to explore.Īnd then it’s just one step to our current political situation, where the president basically has the values of a reality show. I wouldn’t say he is an everyman figure, but he has something in common with most of us. Well, so many people seem to be living their emotional lives now through their relationship with TV characters or shows like The Bachelor. I began to feel a little like that myself. Certainly, when I was doing my due diligence for the book and watching all this reality TV, which he loves, I began to understand that it could drive a person crazy watching all this stuff. But we all have to swim in the same sea - in this media environment in which truth and lies blur and have become hard to distinguish. I wanted to make him fairly outrageously nutty, which I’m not accusing all of us of being. In the novel, Quichotte lives his life mainly through a television screen. With Quichotte already shortlisted for the Booker Prize (Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the same literary award in 1981 the author is perhaps best known for his 1998 book The Satanic Verses, which incurred the threat of a deadly fatwa on him for a time) and ensconced on The New York Times‘ best-seller list, Rushdie is currently on a cross-country book tour and called from Chicago in mid-September to discuss the book’s view of our times with The Hollywood Reporter.

Don quixote salman rushdie