Salman Rushdie interview
Salman Rushdie is interviewed in The Independent. His new book is The Enchantress of Florence but with Rushdie there is much to talk about.
Even if you try hard to treat the novelist as a professional author, not a symbol, a slogan or a cause, the buzz of fantasy kicks in. My particular Rushdie delusion endows him with the Jodha-like ability to materialise out of thin air. At a Booker Prize dinner in the mid-1990s, with the Iranian fatwa that followed The Satanic Verses in 1989 still a clear and present danger to his life, the shifty-eyed ox in a tux seated next to me promptly vanished as the first course arrived. The next time I turned my head, the target of several deadly serious assassination plots (and Ayatollah Khomeini’s judgement, remember, was suspended but not rescinded by Tehran in 1998) had slipped in to replace his ever-watchful bodyguard. Not long ago, I went to dinner at a friend’s, looked away to grab a crisp – and, abracadabra, there he suddenly sat.
