By Peter Craven
MEMOIR
Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder
Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, $36.99
On August 12, 2022 – more than 33 years after the Ayatollah Khomeini imposed a fatwa on him – Salman Rushdie was attacked by a 24-year-old man with a knife as he prepared to deliver a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State. In the 27-second assault, he suffered “blows to my neck, chest, eyes, everywhere”.
Knife is his account of how he lived to tell the story. It is a work of extraordinary power: moving, ghastly and full of impassioned self-scrutiny and the most vivid anecdotal panache. It is the work of a supreme storyteller who takes upon himself the burden of telling what happened and how he recovered.
Salman Rushdie acknowledges the audience at the Book Fair in Turin, on May 10.Credit: AP
“Why didn’t I fight?” he asks bewildered. “Why didn’t I run?” His friend, Henry Reese, though in his 70s, did fight the assailant with a courage he dismisses as mere instinct. So did members of the audience.
Rushdie became haunted all over again by the opening line of The Satanic Verses, the novel that had irked the ayatollah: “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” Well, Rushie didn’t but for a couple of days, it was a close-run thing. His agent, Andrew Wylie, wept but added, “eventually you’ll write about this, of course”.
Knife by Salman Rushdie.
Well, thank God he has. His life had been going so well. He had married African-American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths and his family was so relieved that they had T-shirts made with the word “Finally” on them.
Griffiths was terrified he was not going to survive the attack and chartered a plane at vast expense to spend what she was led to believe could be his final hours with him. Rushdie was in great pain and the opiates he was fed led to extraordinary dreams of cities and visions of great buildings made up of alphabets.
Knife is, in its way, a beautiful book about literature even though it gives plenty of detail about the horrors of catheters, misplaced drugs that might cause strokes, prostate fears, a hand that won’t work and the problem of what to do with a dead and swollen eye.
There is a lovely account of his friend, the dying Martin Amis (“more frail, skinnier”), who says that he expected Rushdie to be altered but then realised “he’s equal to it”. Rushdie’s comment is “which may not be true, but was kind”. He wonders if it’s really true that what does not kill you makes you stronger, but is loving to Amis: “So bravo, bravo, dear friend. What you have made will long endure.”
Rushdie declares, sanely enough, that writing is writing, therapy is therapy, “but there is a good chance that telling the story would make me feel better”.
He writes a somewhat recessed chapter in which he imagines meeting with A, as he calls his would-be assassin, who knew little about him apart from a glimpse on YouTube and the condemnation of some imams. He imagines A saying to him, “even a little devil is a devil”, but his assailant is colourless, loveless, virginal, a dead loss in his characterisation.
In the context of his survival, Rushdie writes about Raymond Carver’s remark that the 10 years he lived after being told that his cancer diagnosis meant he had only six months left had been “pure gravy”. So Rushdie and his wife relish his own “gravy”.
And he remembers the people who blamed him for the fatwa, including Hugh Trevor-Roper and Germaine Greer. But he doesn’t acknowledge – seems never to have – the vehement support Fay Weldon gave him.
Rushdie is seductive when he refers to “Joyce’s mammoth effort to create on the page the syntax of our sleeping minds” and his own dreams are vivid and terrible. He saw King Lear as a 15-year-old schoolboy, already familiar with the blinding of Gloucester (“Out vile jelly”), but writes: “I was dreaming it now.”
And he tells of when Samuel Beckett was stabbed in the chest in Paris in 1938 by a pimp called Prudent and later met him and asked him why. “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Je m’excuse.” (I don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.) He thinks: “If Samuel Beckett could confront his pimp, then I could damn well confront mine.” But then it seems less necessary. What would he say? “I don’t forgive you and I don’t not forgive you.”
Rushdie realises that the book he has envisaged writing “about a mysterious and enigmatic college”, which has drawn him to re-read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Kafka’s The Castle, is, in fact, the book he is writing.
He considers famous blinded figures, but the figure who comes to his mind, most glamorously in the context of a cricket-loving subcontinent, is Mansoor Ali Khan, the Nawab of Pataudi, who lost the sight in one eye in a car accident but went on to captain India. It’s a great story and an appropriate one for this awful but beautifully shaded, dramatised book.
The past came screaming down the crazy staircase of the years but Rushdie has turned the experience into a book of wisdom. If you want a book with the imaginative power of fiction and the irreducible power of the actual, Knife will work with its magic and compel assent with its realism. Martin Amis was right about Rushdie and the atrocity: he’s equal to it.
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