Salman Rushdie Blends In at Times Festival of Books

Is Salman Rushdie going Hollywood?

The Booker Prize-winning author of “The Satanic Verses” and “Midnight’s Children,” best known for surviving a death sentence from Iran, made an unexpected visit to the Times Festival of Books at UCLA on Sunday, where he dropped hints that love and perhaps literature could keep him in Southern California.

Before addressing a lunchtime crowd of 900 on the last day of the two-day festival, Rushdie revealed that he is spending more time in Los Angeles, where his companion, the Indian actress Padma Lakshmi, lives. Rushdie had agreed late last week to stand in for E.L. Doctorow

on one of the author’s panels.

“I move back and forth between New York and here,” he said. “Now that I spend more time here, I am getting to know it.

“Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I don’t feel odd,” he added. “Everyone here is as odd as me in different ways.”

The Indian-born author last year announced his relocation from London to New York City. He said Los Angeles interests him, because migration is central to the life of the city and to his own work. He also mused extensively about his interest in film, his experiences as a college actor at Cambridge, and his recent role as himself in the hit movie “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” in which both lead actors ask the author where the bathroom is.

“I did want to be an actor. . . . I grew up in a movie city,” he said. “Bombay makes more movies than Hollywood. . . . I think it was as important to my education as a writer to go to the cinema as to read books.

“It’s a very difficult thing, the Hollywood novel,” he mused. ‘There are a number of examples, and they are more or less not very good.” He said he is reluctant to “add to that heap.”

In 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued an edict imposing a death sentence on him for alleged blasphemies in “The Satanic Verses.” For years, Rushdie had round-the-clock security and moved secretly around Great Britain and the world.

Iran, eager to improve relations with the West, disavowed the order in 1998. And the author, an avowed “social animal,” has been more visible. He did a book reading in Los Angeles two years ago, and this year was seen at a U2 concert in Anaheim and a black tie dinner to honor Debbie Reynolds.

On Sunday, he wandered through the book festival without noticeable security, and shrugged off a question about his safety. “That’s an ex-subject,” he said.

Rushdie, 53, has completed work on his eighth novel, to be published by Random House in September.

“It’s a very, very contemporary novel about New York; it takes place right now, mostly on the Upper West Side,” said Rushdie, who added that some of the characters and “back story” are Indian.

Some of the characters will be recognizable. “People always seem to recognize themselves in my books, especially people I’ve never met.”

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* AUTHORS RELAX

Royce Hall offers free food and a quiet moment at book fair. E1