Rushdie vents his fury on U.K. again

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, AUG 28. More than three years after he moved to New York sneering at Britain's literary climate, Mr. Salman Rushdie seems to have lost none of his contempt for its vacuity and in remarks that are likely to further inflame the considerable anti-Rushdie sentiment here, he has attacked the rise of ``cultural conservatism'' in a country where he did some of his best writing. In an interview to The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, he said if he did not have a small child living in Britain he would be visiting this country even less. ``They don't like writers in England, unless they are not dangerous'', he declared, still ``distressed'' by some of the things people said about him many years ago. ``I feel there is a kind of person they invented for me to be. Arrogant, self-absorbed. I am not arrogant. I think I am probably not a bad writer and I am proud of my work and serious about it - that could add up to arrogance. But if you are any good as a writer you have to look out to the world as well as in to yourself. How can you be self-absorbed?''

Mr. Rushdie, whose new novel ``The Fury'' has been greeted with widespread indifference and - to rub salt into the wound - excluded from the Booker Prize longlist, stuck the knife into the current lot of British novelists dismissing them as the ``Nick Hornby world''. Mr. Nick Hornby has been the flavour of the season this summer and his novel ``How to be Good'' is very much on the Booker magic list.

``It is cultural conservatism that now wants to celebrate very ordinary stuff...I'm bewildered by how much of this work is celebrated,'' he said. According to the interviewer, Ms. Susan Chenery, Mr. Rushdie listed ``every best-selling writer in the country'' as an example of the ordinariliness of the current British fiction. His attack reminded her of the row he triggered in 1997 when he called John Le Carre' ``an illiterate pompous ass''. For those intimidated by the bulk of Rushdie's novels, there is good news - he now intends to write ``shorter books more often''. The Fury, at 259 pages, is perhaps his shortest novel and he says that he was ``possessed by it'' as he wrote it. ``I was working on a different book when this book showed up. I don't actually know where it came from. I would just sit there and the stuff would come out that just shocked me'', he said. While its length might please the more impatient of his readers, they might wish that he had rather written a book that was less transparently autobiographical and more classically ``Rushdi- an.'' Mr. Rushdie admitted that The Fury was an ``extended love letter'' to his latest companion, Ms. Padma Lakshmi who, he swears, is a traffic-stopper. ``I have seen Ms. Padma cause a traffic accident which was very funny to watch'', he said and while he is clearly smitten by her there is a downside of living with someone so much younger, and pretty. The press, he says, has become ``very odd'' since he got this ``very good looking woman standing next to me.''

``I have suddenly become this very ugly, short, fat and bald guy...standing next to this long, gorgeous, young creature...'', he said. But he loves his current state of bliss and in a way he regards his relationship with Ms. Padma Lakshmi as an echo of his Indian past. ``She grew up in Madras, I grew up in Bombay. She comes from a Brahmin Hindu background, and I come from a Muslim background, so in a way they are opposites. But it is nice to have somebody who understands the echoes. It gives us shorthand and the essential thing, which is the secret language.'' So, is Rushdie finally home?

Meanwhile, Mr. V.S. Naipaul has reacted to Mr. Rushdie's new novel saying: ``It might one day come to me. I will not pursue it.''

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