'Joseph Anton' begins in 1989, 'the year the world changed,' before flashing back to Rushdie's nominally Muslim childhood in Bombay.

When they demanded a code name to confuse potential assassins, Rushdie combined the given names of two favorite writers: Conrad and Chekhov. United Kingdom Special Branch officers took charge of his protection, dubbing their risky work Operation Malachite.

However, 'Joseph Anton' is the author's own riveting account of how it felt to be reviled and endangered by violent strangers because of a book that most had never read. Like the Dreyfus Affair, the Rushdie affair has inspired commentary both sympathetic and hostile. Anyone killing the author of 'The Satanic Verses' could count on a bounty of millions of dollars, as well as admission to heaven. 14, 1989, the Supreme Leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a valentine in the form of a fatwa: 'I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the 'Satanic Verses' book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Qur'an, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.' A native of India residing in England, Rushdie had no ties to Iran, but Khomeini's order made him the world's top terrorist target. Winning the Booker Prize in 1981 for his second novel, 'Midnight's Children,' enhanced Rushdie's literary reputation, but it was his 1988 novel 'The Satanic Verses' that catapulted him into celebrity, and forced him into hiding. Nevertheless, during the last decade of the 20th century, Salman Rushdie was not just a famous novelist he was more familiar to more people than even O.J. 'To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer,' he said. The once-famous novelist Gore Vidal maintained that, in an age in which fiction has lost its authority, 'famous novelist' no longer has meaning. By Salman Rushdie ( Random House 636 pages $30)

Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie