Non-fiction – paperback; Jonathan Cape; 224 pages; 2024.
When Sir Salman Rushdie, an Indian-born British-American novelist, was recovering from the violent knife attack that almost ended his life (aged 75) in 2022, he told his agent and friend Andrew Wylie he wasn’t sure he’d ever write again.
“You shouldn’t think about doing anything for a year,” Andrew told him, “except getting better.”
“That’s good advice,” I said.
“But eventually you’ll write about this, of course.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m not sure that I want to.”
“You’ll write about it,” he said. [page 86]
And so it proved. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is a first-person account of Rushdie’s experience surviving an attempt on his life 30 years after a fatwa was ordered against him.
It is deeply personal and told in such a compelling, forthright style that I read the entire book in one sitting.
(At this point, I confess that I have never read any of Rushdie’s fiction but am very much aware of his history because I was a part-time bookseller when The Satanic Verses was released. At the discount book store where I was employed — the now-defunct Libro Books at 191 Bourke Street, Melbourne — we kept the book under the counter and exercised much caution whenever anyone enquired if we had it in stock. I suspect I was far too young and naive to understand the implications of this.)
Attempted murder
In Knife, Rushdie recounts events leading up to the attack — on stage just as he was about to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York — and what happened in the aftermath during his long recovery.
“A gunshot is action at a distance,” he writes, “but a knife attack is a kind of intimacy, a knife’s a close-up weapon, and the crimes it commits are intimate encounters” (page 15).
The actual attack took just 27 seconds but left life-changing injuries.
I never saw the knife, or at least I have no memory of it. I don’t know if it was long or short, a broad bowie blade or narrow like a stiletto, bread-knife-serrated or crescent-curved or a street kid’s flick knife, or even a common carving knife stolen from his mother’s kitchen. I don’t care. It was serviceable enough, that invisible weapon, and it did its work. [page 7]
The most striking thing about Rushdie’s story is not that he survived (which, by all accounts, is miraculous) but that he is not bitter or angry about what happened and bears no malice toward his attacker. Despite losing the sight in one eye and the full use of his left hand and suffering numerous wounds to his neck, face and upper body, he is extraordinarily sanguine about it all. His pragmatism, I suspect, comes from living most of his adult life under threat of assassination.
A premonition
Funnily enough, Rushdie, who is an avowed atheist and does not believe in premonitions or fate, claims that two nights before the actual attempt on his life he had a dream “about being attacked by a man with a spear, a gladiator in a Roman amphitheatre”.
There was an audience, roaring for blood. I was rolling about on the ground trying to elude the gladiator’s downward thrusts, and screaming. It was not the first time I had had such a dream. On two earlier occasions, as my dream-self rolled frantically around, my actual, sleeping self, also screaming, threw its body — my body — out of bed, and I awoke as I crashed painfully to the bedroom floor. [page 7]
He told his wife — the American poet, novelist and photographer Rachel “Eliza” Griffiths — he did not want to go to Chautauqua. Still, he did because he knew tickets had been sold and that his “generous” speaker’s fee would “be very handy”. (Ironically, he was speaking about “the importance of keeping writers safe from harm”.)
The book charts his hospitalisation and long recovery and details the ongoing security concerns he faced when he was finally discharged. This is antithetical to his way of living in America — highly visible and “normal”, achieving “freedom by living like a free man” — after decades of high-security detail and vigilance in the UK. It’s a difficult pill to swallow because he feels guilty subjecting Eliza to this kind of life.
Love letter to his wife
It is Eliza who is the central focus of Rushdie’s narrative. The book is not merely a memoir; it is a beautiful love letter to her — they had been married for less than a year when the attack occurred. (This is his fifth marriage; the previous four all ended in divorce.) The story is imbued with love, gratitude and kindness for Eliza, but also for his two adult sons, his sister and her children, all of whom live in the UK.
There’s also much affection for the literary community which rallied around him, including his good friends, Paul Auster and the late Martin Amis, who were experiencing their own health issues at the time of Rushdie’s attack.
Perhaps the only aspect of the book I was unsure about is the chapter titled “The A” in which Rushdie imagines what he would say to his would-be assassin if he was given the chance. In his attempt to “consider the cast of mind of the man who was willing to murder me”, he interviews him in his prison cell. The conversation, which is probing but empathetic, says more about Rusdhie than his assailant…
Knife is an extraordinary book. It’s frank and warm and incisive — no pun intended.
Further reading/viewing
If you wish to know more about the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death issued in 1988 by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, and how it came about, I recommend this excellent 2009 BBC documentary, Salman Rushdie & the Satanic Verses Scandal, which you can view in full on YouTube.
And this weekend, Rushdie’s wife has written a piece about the attack, published in The Guardian, which presents her version of events. It is deeply moving.
Reading Matters 