A report of a brutal attack and a determined recovery

“On August 12, 2022, at a quarter to eleven on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and nearly killed by a young man with a knife shortly after I came onstage at the Chautauqua Amphitheater to speak about the importance of keeping writers out of harm’s way.”

With this very powerful first-person account, Salman Rushdie begins his latest book of memoirs, Knife, which was published just a few months ago. Twenty-five years later, he won the Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers Award for his novel Midnight’s Children, and several of his fifteen novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Rushdie also has a collection of short stories, a memoir, a work of reportage, and three collections of essays to his credit. However, he is best known for the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini for blasphemy after the publication of The Satanic Verses more than thirty years ago. Yet despite living in the institution for three decades because he was unsafe in his own country, the revenge and violence took their final toll on August 12, 2022, when an unknown man attempted to murder him with a knife on stage where he had participated in a week of events at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York entitled “More Than Shelter: Redefining the American Home.”

This horrific act of violence shocked the literary world and beyond. Now, a year and a half after the incident, Rushdie writes his memoirs in unforgettable detail, reliving the traumatic events of that day and their aftermath, as well as his journey to physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his now African-American wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his worldwide readership.

The book is dedicated to the men and women who saved his life. The text is neatly divided into two parts, each with four paragraphs. Part I, entitled “The Angel of Death,” begins with the chapter “Knife.” Rushdie describes that beautiful August morning in detail, telling us how the violence closed in on him and his reality fell apart. Perhaps not very surprisingly, he didn’t know what to do in the few seconds he had. So he tells the rest of the incidents in collage form, piecing together bits of memory with other eyewitnesses and news reports. The bystanders also acted according to their best nature, and so that morning he experienced “the worst and the best of human nature almost simultaneously.” Rushdie concludes this chapter by telling his readers that he no longer felt the slightest urge to defend The Satanic Verses or himself. “Let me say this right from the start: I am proud of the work I have done, and that includes The Satanic Verses in particular.” The only problem was that the incident of his attempted murder dragged “that” novel back into the history of scandal.

The second chapter, “Eliza,” tells us details of how Rushdie met the African-American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, a complete stranger to him, through Mr. Norman Mailer, and how their friendship grew stronger day by day until they married in secret, realizing that theirs was not a relationship of competition but of mutual support. They showed that even in this time of attention-seeking, it was still possible for two people to have a fairly open, happy private life, until the stabbing incident changed everything. Section three, entitled “Hamot,” contains Rushdie’s detailed description of spending eighteen days in the hospital’s critical trauma unit, but also how being able to do a few simple everyday things by himself lifted his spirits enormously. After eighteen days there, it was time for him to leave.

In the fourth section, titled “Rehab,” Rushdie recounts the optimism that coursed through him. During his sleepless nights in rehab, he often thought a lot about the knife as an idea. As he talks about various occasions in which the knife is used, he realizes that the knife is a tool and it gains meaning through the use we make of it. It is morally neutral, and the misuse of knives is immoral. He then explains that language was also a knife for him and he would use it to defend himself. Besides the rehabilitation of the body, there is also the rehabilitation of the mind and soul. The chapter ends with his rehab period over and him being able to return to the world after more than six weeks in two hospitals.

Part II, entitled “The Angel of Life,” is also divided into four sections and shows how Rushdie found the strength to get back up in the end. The first section, entitled “Homecoming,” begins with him describing his plan to leave Rusk at 3 a.m. as quietly as possible and return home through the empty night city so as not to catch anyone’s eye. It was a profound emotional experience and he felt “instantly 100 percent better and healthier. I was home.” He felt he had come out of the long tunnel of hospital visits and returned to the general population. It was here that he made the decision not to remain a mere victim but to answer violence with art: “Hello world, we said. We’re back, celebrating the survival of love after our encounter with hate. After the angel of death, the angel of life.”

In the sixth chapter, “The A,” he addresses his murderer, and it is here that Rushdie shows his greatest imagination. In it, he has recorded a detailed conversation that never took place between him and “a man I met for only 27 seconds of my life.” After introducing several intertextual references to other authors and situations, Rushdie states in the fourth and final session of his imaginary conversation, “You don’t know me. You’ll never know me.” After the imaginary conversation is over, he no longer has the energy to imagine the murderer, just as he never had the ability to imagine him.

At the beginning of the next section, entitled “Second Chances,” Rushdie explains that when he recovered from his physical and psychological wounds, he was by no means sure that he would emerge from the experience stronger. He was simply glad to emerge from the experience alive. The big news for him, however, was that after six months of doing nothing, the urge to write did indeed begin to flow again. However, he found it difficult to write at any time about PTSD, especially when his hand felt as if it were “in a glove” and “the eye… is an absence with a tremendously strong presence.” He made a ten-day visit to London, and when he returned to New York, he thought it was quite clear that his second chance at life should focus on that: love and work. But there were also various Muslim voices celebrating what had happened to him. So he ruminates at length on how, alongside private pleasures, he had to fight the strife that had plagued his life – the strife about God. He never felt the need for religious belief to understand and deal with the world, and so he explains: “My godlessness remains. This will not change in this life, which gives me a second chance.”

The title of the final section, “Closure?”, ends with a question mark. In it, he writes that his own anger had faded and felt trivial next to the anger of the planet. He understood that three things had happened that had helped him on his journey to process what had happened. The first was the passage of time, and while time may not heal all wounds, it definitely numbed the pain and his nightmares disappeared. The second was therapy, and the third was writing this book. These things did not give him “closure,” and he felt that he was no longer sure he wanted or needed to confront and address A. in court. He writes that the “Samuel Beckett moment” no longer felt essential to him. Overall, this autobiography is a moving memoir of literature’s ability to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, and art.

The simple but very attractive cover of the book is a unique selling point and shows once again what a superb storyteller Salman Rushdie is. His fame may have waned somewhat with his last releases, especially since Joseph Anton: A Memoir did not make much of an impression on readers, but Knife has brought back the powerful and erudite Rushdie, who rose like a phoenix from the ashes and revealed his erudition without being provincial. The book is a captivating book, a real collector’s item and is recommended even to the general reader, even those who find his writing style too highbrow and full of intertextual references. You will have no trouble understanding the “free-associative way” in which the mind of this 75-year-old writer works even today.

The reviewer is a critic and translator and former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Shantiniketan.