Book Review: Knife by Salman Rushdie

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“Knife” is Salman Rushdie’s memoir following the traumatic onstage knife attack on his life on August 12, 2022, while he was giving a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution.

Buy “Knife”

As mentioned, “Knife” is Salman Rushdie’s memoir following the onstage knife attack on his life on August 12, 2022, while he was giving a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution. In this memoir, Rushdie recounts that tragic day and the aftermath of that brutal attempt. He details his recovery and heals through language and the love and support of his wife, family, and literary friends.

Perhaps unconventional, “Knife” is my first time reading Salman Rushdie but certainly not my last!

Rushdie does a terrific job reclaiming his story and his life after the attack. Already, his physical rehabilitation is a massive achievement, but his rendering of the account is also truly admirable.

Although he gives a ventriloquist-like voice to his Assailant, it is apparent to me that Rushdie is aware that real-life stories and misadventures require a certain attunement. One that grounds rather than sensationalizes:

I do not want to use his name in this account. My Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation …

I have found myself thinking of him, perhaps forgivably, as an Ass. However, for the purposes of this text, I will refer to him more decorously as “the A.” What I call him in the privacy of my home is my business.

This “A.” didn’t bother to inform himself about the man he had decided to kill. By his own admission, he read barely two pages of my writing and watched a couple of YouTube videos of me, and that was all he needed. From this we can deduce that, whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses.

I will try to understand what it was about in this book. (p. 5)

What I’ve come to realize after reading this memoir is that Rushdie presents as a strong character and a person with great personal and moral integrity. He’s truly unapologetic despite the fear, agony, and trauma he endured from the nearly lethal attack.

Here’s a man going to bed. In the morning his life will change.

He knows nothing, the poor innocent. He’s asleep.

The future rushes at him while he sleeps.

Except, strangely, it’s really the past returning, my own past rushing at me, not a dream gladiator but a masked man with a knife, seeking to carry out a death order from three decades ago. In death we are all yesterday’s people, trapped forever in the past tense. That was the cage into which the knife wanted to put me.

Not the future. The revenant past, seeking to drag me back in time. (p. 11)

Here’s a man who refuses to sink into victimhood and simultaneously an author who refuses censorship and dangerous attacks on freedom of speech. Let’s not forget that this memoir is timely in our misinformation era.

“We need to document this.” That was perhaps my first coherent thought. I wasn’t sure how Eliza would react to the idea, but she immediately, and emphatically, agreed. “This is bigger than just me,” I said. “It’s about a larger subject.”

What I meant, of course, was freedom, whatever that much-battered word now meant. But I also wanted to think about miracles, and about the irruption of the miraculous into the life of someone who didn’t believe that the miraculous existed, but who nevertheless had spent a lifetime creating imaginary worlds in which it did. The miraculous—as well as the A. and his victim—had crossed a state line. It had traveled from Fiction into Fact. (p. 60) 

Furthermore, I also enjoyed Rushdie’s reclaiming of the knife — at once political and personal, as an object and a symbol, as terror and metaphor.

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. Here I am, you bastard, the knife whispers to its victim. I’ve been waiting for you. You see me? Im right in front of your face, I’m plunging my assassin sharpness into your neck. Feel that? Here’s some more, and some more after that. I’m right here. I’m right in front of you.

According to news reports, the A. had twenty-seven seconds with me. In twenty-seven seconds—if you happen to be in a religious frame of mind—you can recite the Lord’s Prayer. Or, eschewing religion, you could read aloud one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the one about the summer’s day, perhaps, or my own favorite, number 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, octave and sestet: that’s how long we had together in the only moment of intimacy we will ever share. An intimacy of strangers. That’s a phrase I’ve sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader. (p. 15)

The previous passage, in contrast with the following, presents Salman Rushdie’s final reestablishing as the victor rather than the victim, eloquently done through his weapon of choice: language.

Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, make it mine. (p. 85)

I will be reading “Victory City,” his latest novel first, followed by “The Satanic Verses,” the novel that provoked the fatal fatwa against Rushdie many moons ago.

I didn’t see their faces and I don’t know their names, but they were the first people to save my life. And so that Chautauqua morning 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—the capacity in Shakespeare’s lago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity”—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. (p. 14)

I wanted to say: I believe that art is a waking dream. And that imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal. No, I don’t believe in miracles, but, yes, my books do, and, to use Whitman’s formulation, do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I don’t believe in miracles, but my survival is miraculous. Okay, then. So be it. The reality of my books—oh, call it magic realism if you must—is now the actual reality in which I’m living. Maybe my books had been building that bridge for decades, and now the miraculous could cross it. The magic had become realism. Maybe my books saved my life. (p. 63)

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