Stories Within Stories

Halfway through Lisbon, Voltaire's characters start doing something strange: they stop running and start narrating. Let me tell you my story, says Cunégonde. Salman Rushdie knows this trick from the inside: the nested tale, old as the fables of India, alive as recent Spanish cinema, a device he has used himself. He takes it apart here: the showman's veiled reveal, the melodrama Voltaire steals and elevates, the love story the book tells and undermines at the same time. Then he tells you what the telling is really for. His answer comes from his own life, from the hardest year of it.