Salman Rushdie in L.A.
The 'Satanic Verses' novelist, a onetime resident whose new novel is 'The Enchantress of Florence,' returns to the place that still frolics in his imagination.
THE NOVELIST Salman Rushdie was sitting in bustling Kings Road Cafe, sipping an iced coffee and discussing the strange fad for surf music in '60s England -- "a country where there's not much surf" -- and his days renting a room above a hip Chelsea boutique during the Summer of Love. As he was making a point about the epic beauty of the Cornwall coast, an excited, mostly bald man with a thick Iranian accent bounded forward and extended his arm.
"I want to shake your hand," the man shouted into the West Hollywood coffee shop. "My countrymen don't like you -- but I like you!"
The two shook, and as the Iranian quickly disappeared outside, the author went on, talking about the old rivalry between the Beatles and the Beach Boys, about George Harrison's dedication to Indian music and his "incredible aptitude for the sitar."
It was all in a day's work for Rushdie, a man who loves telling stories and leaping borders between East and West, and for whom a random urban encounter no longer provokes fear but a gentle laugh about the absurdity of fame.
Would he have been happier as a well-regarded, obscure literary writer rather than an international celebrity?
"I think you make the best of what you get," he said in his plummy accent, wearing a dark blue suit and gesturing donnishly. "And it's really easy for me to shut it out. Like most novelists, I developed early on quite strong habits of concentration, and even a requirement of solitude. Every day I just go to a room, shut the door and work. And the fame thing feels very trivial."
The author was touring behind his dreamlike new novel, "The Enchantress of Florence," set in 16th century Italy and India. The book has received mixed reviews: Some found it showy and self-conscious, although John Sutherland wrote in the Financial Times that if the book "doesn't win this year's Man Booker I'll curry my proof copy and eat it."
During a few hours he spent near the Kings Road apartment he once shared with model and actress Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie did not come across as either a distinguished literary figure -- Rushdie's swirling 1981 Booker-winner, "Midnight’s Children," is arguably the greatest British novel of the last few decades, and he was recently knighted -- or a man who'd once had a price on his head. He was more like a good-humored, slightly star-struck visitor to L.A., happy to be back among old haunts.
