BOOKS: Worlds Apart

IT HAS BEEN ALMOST SIX YEARS SINCE Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini put a price on the head of Salman Rushdie for allegedly blaspheming Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses. Since then the world has grown ever more complacent about Rushdie's predicament even as he has done his share of -- entirely justified -- complaining and hectoring; the author now resembles, in some minds, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, a man doomed by an unwitting offense to go on talking about his fate to any listener he can corner.

The nine stories Rushdie tells in East, West (Pantheon; 214 pages; $21), however, shed remarkably little light on his personal travails. True, one of his narrators remarks in passing, "And fictions, as I have come close to suggesting before, are dangerous." If anyone has earned the authority of that observation it is Rushdie, but here he seems more interested in the sheer fun of making things up.

He allots three stories each under the rubrics East and West. The first group, set in his native India, consists of simple village anecdotes, reminiscent of similar work by the contemporary master R.K. Narayan. The Western stories display a deft but slightly arid Postmodernism, particularly a Tristram Shandy-esque retelling of Hamlet.

The final three stories, combining East and West, are the book's best: quick, penetrating and often amusing glimpses of the immigrant experience in London. This is the subject Rushdie treated so brilliantly and, as it turned out, so dangerously in The Satanic Verses. No one writes more convincingly of the tug between old and new, home and the allure of the unknown. Since these stories cannot make things worse for Rushdie than they already are, he has, on the page, the luxury of total freedom.

P.G.