The Work Survives

Salman Rushdie, who survived his own death sentence, on what a dictator can and cannot kill.

23 seconds, in their own voice

We still have García Lorca, and we don’t have the Falange. Stalin destroyed the life of Mandelstam because Mandelstam wrote a funny poem about his mustache. We still have Mandelstam. So the work survives. The writers sometimes don’t.

Rushdie has loved Voltaire’s Candide since he was sixteen. In his final episode, he arrives at the question under the whole book: what happens to writers who laugh at power? He never mentions his own story. He doesn’t have to.

That’s one minute of sixteen episodes of Salman Rushdie on Candide, opening this fall at Rebind Classics.

The full series

16 episodes · Salman Rushdie on Voltaire’s Candide

Sixteen, in French Class. Rushdie met Candide at sixteen in French class and never got over it; his opening case is that in a book built from real war, plague, and cruelty, the laughter is the most honest thing in it.
Paradise, Lost. Rushdie reads the castle of Westphalia as a paradise built for demolition, then names the question under the deadpan war: if goodness protects no one, what actually decides a life?
The Earthquake Argument. The earthquake was real, and Rushdie sets the joke against the catastrophe that shook Europe's faith, reading Voltaire's furious poem against providence aloud before the Church stages its remedy for earthquakes: an auto-da-fé.

Show all 16 episodes

Stories Within Stories. Rushdie knows the nested tale from the inside, and when Cunegonde says "let me tell you my story," he tells you what the telling is really for, out of the hardest year of his own life.
The Old Woman Knows the World. Rushdie reads the old woman's outrageous history the way he first did at sixteen, one scandalous line of Italian underlined, then follows it where it truly goes: why, after everything, she chooses to keep living.
The New World Is the Old World. They cross the ocean and the Old World is on the dock to meet them; Rushdie watches the sweet hero's body count climb and explains why the best education in the book comes from the hired help.
Why Would You Ever Leave?. Rushdie takes up the question the book plants in El Dorado, why anyone would leave the one happy place on earth, and answers through Thomas More, Wakanda, and Toni Morrison, then through Bombay, London, New York, and what home means to a man who has had three.
The Mutilated Slave. The page where the laughter goes quiet: Rushdie stays with the slave who names sugar's true price, then remembers arriving at an English boarding school at fourteen, a boy from Bombay who had never been anybody's stranger before.
Martin, or the Problem of Evil. Rushdie follows the problem of evil from Voltaire's sinking ship to Shakespeare's Iago, then does the unexpected with Martin's bleak hawk: he agrees with it, and refuses to leave it bleak.
Angry Laughter. Rushdie reads Paris as Voltaire with the gloves off, con men, rigged card tables, and a great actress thrown into a lime pit, while confessing the acting life he never let himself have and naming the one cameo he still mourns.
Power Disappoints. An admiral executed for losing a battle, a senator numb to everything he owns, six kings with no thrones, every one of them real (Rushdie checked): Voltaire's coldest argument is that power doesn't just corrupt, it disappoints.
Not Irrevocably Dead. The dead keep coming back, and Rushdie asks why the book barely bothers to make it plausible, an answer that runs through a man who is only mostly dead and the modern physics now siding with the philosopher Voltaire set out to humiliate.
The Women in the Book. Rushdie asks why we trust the old woman on sight, starts his answer in his grandmother's house in India, and follows the women of Candide to a verdict on Voltaire: he gives them no agency, and all his sympathy.
The Blot on the Book. Rushdie loves this book, which is what makes this episode honest: the antisemitism, the racial caricature, the casual homophobia, all quoted straight, and the question of what to do with a book you love whose author said things you cannot forgive.
Realism Is Unrealistic. Rushdie's quarrel with fiction's most respectable word: realism is a handshake Voltaire tore up long before the modernists, and when he opens the workshop to show what actually pulls a reader through a novel, the professors will not love the answer.
Cultivate Your Garden. The book spends thirty chapters arguing and then recommends you stop, and Rushdie refuses to answer its last question in the abstract, whether to engage with the world or tend what is yours, answering instead out of a life that engagement nearly ended.

Get first access and the founding rate

The whole library opens this fall. This list gets in first, at the lowest rate we will ever offer, locked in for as long as you stay.