Photographs by Sibylla Herbrich
If Salman Rushdie seems, seven years after the fatwa, to be emerging from his underground exile, it is a cautious coming out. On his recent U.S. book tour to promote "The Moor's Last Sigh," his first novel since the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced him to death in 1989 for allegedly defaming Islam in "The Satanic Verses," he has appeared on the "Phil Donahue Show" and on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." He has given semi-public readings and attended private parties in his honor all over the country. But he still travels with bodyguards and no one, even the journalists who are scheduled to interview him, knows where he will be in advance.
While he was in San Francisco, the U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass threw a literary party attended by nearly every famous writer in town, from Alice Adams and Czeslaw Milosz to Richard North Patterson and Bharati Mukherjee, as well as celebrities such as former California governor Jerry Brown, singer Linda Ronstadt and actor Robin Williams. But the guests were informed of the party's location only on the day of the event. Likewise, the SALON interviewer and photographer were told to meet Rushdie's Pantheon publicist at a cafe a couple of blocks from the bed-and-breakfast where he was staying, and were screened by a phalanx of serious-looking bodyguards before they were allowed to enter his room.
Though he is an affable interview subject and a famously brilliant conversationalist, the 48-year-old Rushdie is tired of talking about the fatwa. And he is impatient with suggestions that his new novel, a wonderfully playful family epic told by a descendant of the explorer Vasco da Gama who was born with a strange condition that makes him age twice as fast as everyone else, is a metaphor for his situation. "The Moor's Last Sigh" is his best novel yet, the wordplay brilliant, the ideas rich and provocative, the story a page-turner. Rushdie is relieved and delighted to be writing novels and to be socially active again, however circumscribed his participation must necessarily continue to be.
Next page: The Rushdie interview
