Rushdie

LONDON -- Author Salman Rushdie, whose controversial novel, "The Satanic Verses," inspired outraged Iranian Muslims to put a $6-million price on his head, apologized Saturday for the "distress" his work has meant "to sincere followers of Islam." But after a series of conflicting statements by the official Iranian news agency, IRNA, it appeared that the novelist's apology would not satisfy Iran's spiritual guide and supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Five days ago, Khomeini called on Muslims worldwide to track Rushdie and his publishers down and "kill them so that no one ever again would dare to insult the sanctities of Muslims."

In the late 1970s, long before he penned "The Satanic Verses," before he sparked a global uproar between Islamic fundamentalists and free-speech advocates and became a marked man, before he turned into a celebrity man of letters who dates models and starlets, Salman Rushdie was just the failed author of a sci-fi fantasy. An obscure Indian expat living in England, he had only that first novel, "Grimus," under his belt when he turned his attention to his homeland. While studying at Cambridge he had met E.M. Forster, the venerable British author of classics like "A Passage to India" and "A Room With a View," and the elder novelist had encouraged him to write about the subcontinent.

Hundreds of authors marched outside the Iranian Mission to the United Nations in New York today, and some of America's top writers, vowing not to show fear "in the face of intimidation," read excerpts from Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses." The members of the National Writers Union, on the sidewalk across from the mission, carried signs saying, "Free Speech Is Fundamental" and "Hands Off Our Constitution." "I write controversial books.

Salman Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning 1980 novel "Midnight's Children" is many things - ambitious, chaotic, fantastical, mythic - but generic it isn't. Which makes the long-awaited film version a real head-scratcher, a pretty but staidly linear epic drained of the novel's larkish, metaphorical sweep, and a collection of multi-generational love stories lacking their originally eccentric, fizzy charm. It was perhaps a fool's errand to try to tame Rushdie's stylistically bold, time-juggling bildungsroman, which weaves India's 20th century growing pains with those of the magical, telepathic children born at the moment of its independence (midnight, Aug. 15, 1947)

Rushdie's words are Challenged hotly, While Armour's rhymes Are certainly notly. MILE WELDS SANTA ANA

I was extremely distressed to see a remark of mine taken out of context and used as my "reaction" to the Islamic brouhaha over Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses." (" 'The' Book Sells Out at County Bookstores," Orange County section, Feb. 24). Considering the length of time that I spent talking to your reporter, I find it absolutely inconceivable that my indignation over Khomeini's call for Rushdie's murder would be reduced to an ironic comment I made about the London Times best-seller list.

In a (March 15) letter, Irfan Mirza states, "Wishing malice on someone, as the word curse implies, is not in keeping with the good-natured spirit of Islam." Khomeini put a bounty on Sal-man Rushdie's head, allowed hostages to be taken in Iran and did not stop cries for "death to the great Satan" (the USA). Other Moslems took hostages in Lebanon, torturing one to death. Other Moslems killed Marines in Beirut, while still others put bombs on airliners killing innocent people.

"Your sentences are so long," said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn't quite mean it as a compliment. The copy editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes on-screen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn't want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn't have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may...

Susan Sarandon and hotelier Andre Balazs sit side-by-side watching Pasadena's 16-year-old Olympic pingpong prodigy Erica Wu battle her opponent in a heated game of table tennis. Their eyes follow the tiny white ball, back and forth, back and forth. A breathless announcer in a tacky gold jacket tells the crowd, “It takes a royal couple like Andre and Susan to make this thing happen! I've never seen this in the history of table tennis!” Indeed, this is a rare moment for pingpong, which until a few years ago was associated with dank basements and cheap beer.

For lovers of good literary controversy, Salman Rushdie is the gift that keeps on giving. A few months after the publication of Rushdie's memoir “Joseph Anton,” the New York Review of Books (where they specialize in this sort of thing) published a takedown of Rushdie , written by the British novelist and journalist Zoe Heller. Heller accuses Rushdie of being disingenuous when he says in his memoir that he had no idea his iconoclastic 1989 novel “The Satanic Verses” would set off such a violent and vicious controversy--more than 50 people were killed and the Iranian regime declared a fatwa against him. Rushdie  told The Times in an interview this summer that he was “naïve” about what the reaction to “The Satanic Verses” would be. Baloney, says Heller.

This is Salman Rushdie's season of peacemaking. No, the great Indian British novelist hasn't forgiven the Iranian authorities who leveled a "Rushdie must die" fatwa against him back in 1989 for the perceived blasphemies in his novel "The Satanic Verses. " Nor has he made peace, as far as we know, with his second wife, Marianne Wiggins, who is the subject of a most unflattering portrait in Rushdie's new memoir, "Joseph Anton. " But in that same book Rushdie did, in effect, apologize at length to his third wife, Elizabeth West, for the poor judgment he showed in leaving her for his fourth wife, Padma Lakshmi, the statuesque beauty he first met under the Statue of Liberty.

In the 1990s, he was the world-famous novelist few people officially laid eyes on. Of Salman Rushdie's dozen-plus novels, it was "The Satanic Verses" (1988) that raised a hue and cry and sent him undercover: Its supposedly sacrilegious portrayal of the prophet Muhammad brought Rushdie a fatwa, a death sentence, from Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (it was lifted in 1998). The writer came to L.A. to accept the Library Foundation of Los Angeles' literary award and to talk about his new memoir of his underground years, "Joseph Anton.

Salman Rushdie has published a new book, the memoir "Joseph Anton," which describes his ordeal after the publication of "The Satanic Verses" and the fatwa issued against him. I interviewed Rushdie at the London Hotel in West Hollywood for a profile in Sunday's Arts & Books section. Here are additional excerpts from our conversation. Hector Tobar: How is it that you came to write “Joseph Anton” in the third person? Salman Rushdie: I tried to write it in the first person and I hated it. It felt self-regarding and narcissistic.

Yes, it was Emmy night, but the most gorgeous thing in town on Sunday was in downtown, not in Hollywood: the Los Angeles Central Library , a national historic landmark and, on Sunday, the site of the "concrete carpet. " Along the Maguire Garden reflecting pool below the library facade, Library Foundation supporters -- wearing, admittedly, far fewer spangles than the star crowd sweating on the red carpet in Hollywood --  gathered to celebrate the foundation's 20th anniversary.

I wholeheartedly agree with Yoder's assessment of the philistinism displayed by the Bush Administration. What the Rushdie affair has taught us (and tragically, Salman Rushdie himself) is that whether it's the Iranian, Indian or American government, it's all one global political fraternity. They may be competing, but in the end they all follow similar rules and rites. RASHMI SADANA, Santa Monica