Rushdie’s work continues to divide

The publishing of Salman Rushdie's new novel The Enchantress of Florence may be literary London's event of the week, but it is his 1988 book The Satanic Verses that is once again creating controversy. In Potsdam, a town close to Berlin, the Hans Otto theatre is putting on a dramatisation of the work that provoked the ire of Islamic hardliners and earned Rushdie a fatwa.

Director Uwe Laufenburg feels that, with copies now in public libraries around the world, it is safe enough to put on the play and present the work to a new audience. But the security authorities in the historic German town are wary about the dangers of the play's eight-week run (pictured in rehearsal), and already Turkish actor Oktay Khan has had to pull out after he was threatened for taking part. In 1991, Hitoshi Igarishi, who was translating the novel into Japanese, was stabbed to death.

Meanwhile, early reviews for The Enchantress of Florence are mixed, to put it mildly. A historical work which swings between Renaissance Florence and the Mughal court of Emperor Akbar in the majestic Indian city of Fatehpur Sikri, the novel has provoked admiration and scorn. Writing in the Guardian, Ursula K Le Guin called it a "brilliant, fascinating, generous novel". She concluded: "East meets west with a clash of cymbals and a burst of fireworks. We English-speakers have our own Ariosto now, our Tasso, stolen out of India. Aren't we the lucky ones?"

Nirpal Dhaliwal was less effusive. He wrote in the Evening Standard that reading the work was "like being cornered by a drunk and over-excited Stephen Fry. This is most acute when the subject is sex." Dhaliwal criticises Rushdie's "banal naval-gazing" and his failure to see the complexities of India because of "his romantic whimsy".

Last word to Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times. He wrote: "Sadly, by the time you reach the end of this novel with its garish banalities and depthless sensationalisms, what you're most aware of are the 1,001 ways in which it would have been more profitable and enjoyable to pass the time." As ever, Rushdie is divisive.