Knife

May 13, 2024
Rushdie follows Victory City with a forceful and surprisingly good-humored account of the 2022 knife attack that nearly killed him. At a speaking engagement in Chautaqua, N.Y., a 24-year-old man Rushdie refers to only as “A” rushed the stage where he was speaking and stabbed him multiple times, including in the eye. Authorities swiftly connected the assault to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini after Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988. Rushdie chronicles the year following the attack, during which he recovered from liver damage, the removal of part of his small intestine, and the loss of his right eye. Though he writes of being plagued by nightmares and gory memories of the assault, Rushdie’s wit shines through (“Let me offer this piece of advice to you, gentle reader: if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut... avoid it”). Just as arresting is an imagined conversation with A, which sees Rushdie trying to parse his attacker’s religious convictions. By the time the narrative comes full circle, with Rushdie speaking on the same Chautaqua stage a year later, he’s opened a fascinating window into perhaps the most vulnerable period of his life. It’s a rewarding tale of resilience.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
The noted author recounts the vicious August 2022 assault that nearly ended his life. "To be born again...first you have to die." So speaks the protagonist at the opening of Rushdie's infamous novel The Satanic Verses, which has brought him so much trouble over the years. The alleged perpetrator of the 2022 attack, whom the author calls "the A"--it stands for many things, including Assassin and Assailant--was unfamiliar with the contents of the book, so that "we can deduce that, whatever the attack was about, it wasn't about The Satanic Verses." Ironically, the knife assault, which cost Rushdie the use of an eye and a hand, came at a conference devoted to "the importance of keeping writers safe from harm." Indeed, the audience saved him, restraining the attacker. For Rushdie, that moment speaks to the "worst and best of human nature," the urge to harm and the urge to protect acted out at once. The author's account is seldom harrowing. Instead, he writes with calm assurance about long weeks in the hospital--and, "because you have no alternative," the poking and prodding that come with it. He affectingly evokes the accompanying emotions, including the psychic emptiness that comes in the presence of death, which did not shake him from his atheism: "My godlessness remains intact. That isn't going to change in this second-chance life." What sustained him in recovery, he writes, was a blend of willpower, good medical attention, and, especially, love found late in life after years of living alone. Addressing "the A" in absentia at several points, he comes close to taunting. Art survives the artist even as his alleged attacker, locked in prison, will soon be irrelevant to the world; in this instance, the artist survives, too: "After the angel of death, the angel of life." A graceful meditation on life and death that captures Rushdie at his most observant and lyrical.

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