NEW YORK –
In Salman Rushdie’s first book since the 2022 stabbing that hospitalized him and left him blind in one eye, the author wastes no time reliving the day he thought might be his last.
“At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, a young man attacked and nearly killed me with a knife just after I came on stage at the Chautauqua Amphitheater to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm,” Rushdie writes in the opening paragraph of the memoir “Knife,” published Tuesday.
At just over 200 pages, “Knife” is a short work by the canon of Rushdie, one of the most exuberant and expansive contemporary novelists. “Knife” is also his first memoir since “Joseph Anton,” the 2012 publication in which he recalled the fatwa, the death decree, issued more than 20 years earlier by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran over alleged blasphemy in the Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses”.
Initially, Rushdie was forced into hiding and for years lived under constant protection. But the threat had apparently subsided and for some time he had been enjoying his preferred life of travel, social engagement and a free imagination, which were at play in such recent novels as “Quichotte” and “Victory City.”
As Rushdie observes in “Knife,” subtitled “Meditations after an Attempted Murder,” he had sometimes imagined his “public killer” appearing. But the timing of the 2022 attack seemed not only surprising, but also “anachronistic,” the emergence of a “murderous ghost from the past” returning to settle a score that Rushdie believed had long been settled. He refers to August 11, 2022 as his “last innocent night.”
But in many ways, “Knife” is as notable for the spirit it shares with his other books as for the blunt, horrific descriptions of the attack that did, and did not, change his life.
In the first chapter of the book, Rushdie praises the “pure heroism,” the physical courage of the moderator of the Chautauqua Institution event, Henry Reese, who grabbed the attacker. But if another kind of heroism is hope and determination (and humor) after trauma, then “Knife” is a heroic book, documenting Rushdie’s journey from lying in his own blood to returning to the same scene 13 months later and reach a state of “wounded happiness.”
Love and marriage
Part of the story of “Knife” is that Rushdie’s life, even during these last two years, is more than an act of murderous violence. He devotes a chapter to meeting and marrying poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who greeted him during a PEN America event in 2017 and revealed a “dazzling smile” that Rushdie couldn’t forget. She was in New York City when she heard about the stabbing and rushed to catch a private plane to be with him, as she was told it was unlikely she would survive.
“He was not dead,” Rushdie wrote. “He was in surgery.”
a deceased friend
While Rushdie was recovering, he learned that his dear friend and fellow author Martin Amis was seriously ill with cancer. Rushdie and Amis were part of a circle of talented friends in Britain that also included Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan. In what turned out to be a farewell email, Rushdie praised the “generosity and kindness” of Amis’s support after the knife attack and celebrated Amis novels such as “London Fields” and “Money.”
Amis died in May 2023.
‘The A.’
Rushdie’s accused assailant is Hadi Matar, but the author refers to him as “The A.”, short for “The Ass” (or “stupid man”). He allows his imagination to be spent in an improbable dialogue with the being he only knows for a transcendent span of 27 seconds. Why would he even pretend to talk to the possible murderer of him? “I’m not looking for an apology. I wonder how he feels now that he has had time to think things through,” Rushdie writes.
Matar’s trial was delayed from January after a judge ruled that he was allowed to search for the memoir manuscript and related materials.
The healing
He will leave the hospital, “get stronger in body and mind,” and return to the events he attended so frequently before, like the annual PEN America gala. He will be encouraged by messages of support, a “global avalanche,” not just from friends but also from heads of state, including President Joe Biden, who will issue a statement citing Rushdie’s commitment to “sharing ideas without fear.” .
The proximity of death, Rushdie writes, can make you feel “great loneliness.” The words of others “make you feel that you are not alone, that perhaps you have not lived and worked in vain.”