It’s rare that book news breaks into mainstream media headlines. Help me out readers – what comes to mind? For me there’s only a handful over the last twenty-odd years – the James Frey fiasco; the year no Pulitzer was awarded; the controversial publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman; Doris Lessing’s fabulous doorstep interview when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 (and the lack of agreement about whether Bob Dylan should have won the prize in 2017) and maybe, Margaret Atwood’s publication of The Testaments (because Americans were living a real-life Handmaid’s Tale in Trump’s first presidential term). But I think the most recent one was the shocking attempt on Salman Rushdie’s life at an author talk in 2022.
In Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Rushdie reflects on the event and the aftermath.
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State, preparing to give a lecture on (ironically) the importance of keeping writers safe from harm. Rushdie was chosen to speak on this topic as he’d lived under the threat of assassination since 1988, when he published his novel, The Satanic Verses. The novel prompted Ayatollah Khomeini, the then Supreme Leader of Iran, to issue a fatwa (and a US$3 million bounty) calling for Rushdie’s assassination. Rushdie was forced into hiding and lived with high security for many years, however, in the period before the stabbing he stated that his life had returned to ‘normal’ and that he was less concerned about his safety – ‘Then, cutting that life apart, came the knife.’
At Chautauqua, a masked man rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. Rushdie said that his first thought was, ‘So it’s you. Here you are.‘ What followed was a blur of people racing to his rescue.
I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason … and we also contain the antidote to that disease – courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.
Rushdie was seriously injured in the attack, ultimately losing an eye, and suffering severe wounds to his neck, chest, abdomen and thigh. Knife documents his long and slow recovery.
In the presence of serious injuries, your body’s privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won’t sink.
For me, the most interesting element of the book was Rushdie’s sense of ‘closure’, or rather, his acknowledgement that there is in fact no such thing. It’s probably more accurate to say that the memoir is Rushdie’s very exacting attempt to make sense of a traumatic event, and the telling of that allows him to ‘put it down’. (My therapy clients will often say they want ‘closure’ – it’s something I challenge because I’m not sure it’s achievable, but I do think we can ‘put things down’ – they are still there, but we are not burdened by the weight).
…a beast of my very own, insisting on being reckoned with. This book is that reckoning. I tell myself it’s my way of taking ownership of what happened, making it mine – making it my work. Which is a thing I know how to do. Dealing with a murder attack is not a thing I know how to do.
and
Maybe this is what ‘closure’ means for me: an acceptance of reality, and forward movement through that reality.
The chapter focused on Rushdie’s imagined conversations with his would-be assassin lost me a little, purely because they were imagined and perhaps I wanted something meatier at that point (it was then that I hit the internet, searching for an update on the assassin’s trial).
It’s hard to believe that someone can write so elegantly about such a traumatic event, but so much of this book is just that – elegant:
A gunshot is action at a distance, but a knife attack is a kind of intimacy, a knife’s a close-up weapon, and the crimes it commits are intimate encounters.
3.5/5
Of partner Eliza, who is an acclaimed poet and author, Rushdie says:
I learned that she was also an exceptional photographer and a great dancer, her crab cakes were the stuff of legend, and she could sing. Nobody has ever wanted to hear me sing or watch me dance, or to eat my crab cakes. As a person who can only do one thing, I was in awe of her multiple talents. It became clear to me that this was not a relationship of equals – rather, it was one in which I was by some distance the less equal party. Even better than that: it was a relationship not of competitiveness but of total mutual support. Happiness.
