In "Joseph Anton," Salman Rushdie Revisits Death Threat In 1989 the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared that Salman Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses" was offensive to Islam and issued a fatwa against the author, sentencing him to death. For nine years Mr. Rushdie lived under the shadow of assassination, deprived of the freedom of ordinary life and made to fear for himself and his family. It was a nightmare weirdly like something out of one of his own surreal novels, and underscored the very themes he'd been grappling with for years in his fiction: namely, the emotional costs of exile and being cut off from one's past; the consequences of globalization and the cultural clash between East and West; and the increasingly phantasmagorical nature of contemporary history. A Memoir By Salman Rushdie 636 pages. Random House. $30. Mark Lennihan/Associated Press Security guards surrounded Salman Rushdie as he spoke at Columbia University in 1991. Now, with "Joseph Anton," Mr. Rushdie has written a memoir that chronicles those years in hiding - a memoir, coming after several disappointing novels, that reminds us of his fecund gift for language and his talent for explicating the psychological complexities of family and identity. Although this volume can be long-winded and self-important at times, it is also a harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie's work throughout his career, from the collision of the private and the political in today's interconnected world to the permeable boundaries between life and art, reality and the imagination. In the book's first few pages Mr. Rushdie suggests that his story was an opening skirmish in the battle against radical Islam and a kind of prologue to Sept. He likens it to the first bird that appears in Hitchcock's film "The Birds," a harbinger of "the plague of murderous birds" that will overtake a small California town in that movie. It was reported over the weekend that in the wake of Muslim outrage over a film insulting the Prophet Muhammad, a religious foundation in Iran has renewed the call for Mr. Rushdie's death and raised the bounty to $3.3 million arguing that if the author had been killed years ago, other insults to Islam would not have taken place. The original threat was renounced by the Iranian government in 1998. The title of Mr. Rushdie's new memoir - written, somewhat oddly, in the third person, perhaps to provide himself with a measure of detachment - comes from the alias he assumed when British police told him back in 1989 that he needed a pseudonym: the Joseph comes from Joseph Conrad, the Anton from Anton Chekhov. The protection officers issued to him by the British government soon took to calling him "Joe," an abbreviation he says he detested. What Mr. Rushdie - who was born in Bombay to a Muslim family - does most persuasively in these pages is convey to the reader a palpable sense of what the fatwa years were like: early on, his "constant need to find the next place to live," moving from one friend's home to another's, and later on learning to live in a rented house in close quarters with "four enormous armed men" (two protection officers, two drivers). Not only did ordinary enough needs - like getting his aching wisdom teeth attended to - require complicated, stealth operations, but all spontaneity was also swiftly sucked from his life: he had to schedule something as simple as a walk; he had to hide in a locked bathroom whenever a housekeeper came to clean. Needless to say, these circumstances took a toll on relationships and disrupted his ability to write. Mr. Rushdie's protection detail taught him the protocol of properly entering a room (scope out the scene and all available exits); the dangers of exiting a building and making it safely to a waiting car (that zone, it was explained, could never be sanitized 100 percent); and the art of "dry cleaning" - that is, using various countersurveillance tricks to ensure that he was not being followed. A visit to America to speak at Columbia University in 1991 quickly turned into a circus: it meant flying to Washington on a Royal Air Force flight, taking a private plane to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and being met by a nine-car motorcade with motorcycle outriders. Driven to New York in an armored white stretch limo, Mr. Rushdie was installed in the presidential suite of a hotel where there were "bulletproof padded mattresses covering all the windows" and "perhaps two dozen men holding gigantic science-fiction weapons scattered through the rooms."