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Salman Rushdie’s Knife is not for the squeamish. Describing intimately the horrific assault by Hadi Matar on 12 August 2022, the 76-year-old Indian-born British-American writer recollects that his “ruined eye” was “hugely distended, bulging out of its socket and hanging down on my face like a large soft-boiled egg”.
Rushdie was, we now know, stabbed 15 instances in 27 seconds (in the proper eye, neck, left hand, liver, stomach, face, brow, cheeks, mouth and chest) whereas on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State, the place he was on account of ship a lecture, as he says in the opening sentence of his new memoir, “about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm”.
The e book, subtitled Meditations After an Attempted Murder, comprises newsworthy revelations, together with that he was so “transfixed” by the sight of his oncoming attacker that he made no try to flee or battle him off; that two days earlier than the assault, Rushdie had skilled a premonitionary nightmare about being in a gladiatorial area the place a person was stabbing down at him with a spear; that, “to his knowledge”, at the very least six assassination plots towards him had been foiled by the British intelligence providers – the US-based writer is nonetheless given 24-hour safety by the Metropolitan Police when he visits his household right here.
Although the account of his violent ordeal is dramatic – masking not solely the assault itself however the 18 days of intensive care and the months of painful rehabilitation – the e book is additionally a nuanced meditation on life, demise, the significance of artwork, and the chilling day by day actuality of violence. Reading the e book in the instant aftermath of the knife assaults in Sydney – and aware that, in the UK alone, there have been greater than 50,500 stabbing offences final yr [2023 figures from the Office for National Statistics] – it’s unsettling to ponder Rushdie’s comment that “a knife attack is a kind of intimacy”.
Rushdie’s assault was, nevertheless, distinctive. The acclaimed writer of greater than a dozen novels, together with the Booker-winning Midnight’s Children, had lived in concern of a lethal assault since his 1998 novel The Satanic Verses prompted Iranian chief Ayatollah Khomeini to situation a fatwa calling for his homicide. Rushdie’s 2012 memoir Joseph Anton was “third-person-ish”, however Knife is a first-person autobiography, as a result of “when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.”
Knife is additionally an “eye” story, devoted to “the men and women who saved my life” after Matar’s blade pierced Rushdie’s optic nerve. The memoir opens with an outline of the “last thing my right eye would ever see”, a determine dressed all in black “coming in like a squat missile”. In reference to the fatwa, Rushdie additionally calls him “a murderous ghost from the past”.
Rushdie is wealthy in his imagery. He was “rooted to the spot like a rabbit-in-the-headlights fool” and admits that, when the match 24-year-old assailant rushed in the direction of him on the stage, he “just stood there like a piñata and let him smash me”. He admits that he is “embarrassed, even ashamed, by my failure to fight back”.
The trial of Matar, who was finally subdued due to the pure heroism of strangers in the viewers, had been on account of begin in January, however was postponed due to this memoir. Matar has pleaded not responsible to prices of second-degree tried homicide and second-degree assault, and Rushdie believes the trial will start in September.
Rushdie, who was knighted in 2007 for providers to literature, admits the e book is an try at “trying to understand what it was about”. Matar, a lone radicalised fanatic who had been plotting the assault from the basement of his household dwelling in New Jersey, is central to the account, however Rushdie refers to him solely as “the A” (in the e book and in conversations with journalists) and is clearly bemused that his attacker had not even been born when the fatwa was declared. “My Assailant,” he writes in Knife, “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.” Rushdie additionally refers to Matar’s motives as “banal” and describes him as being “hapless” and “not of high intelligence”.
Early in his restoration, Rushdie admits, he needed to satisfy Matar for an trustworthy dialog about the assault. “I wanted him to look me in my (one remaining) eye and tell me the truth,” he stated. On the recommendation of his spouse Eliza and shut mates, he deserted the thought. This nagging want to find what had motivated such a younger man to assault with such frenzied malice is maybe the inspiration for the oddest – and least potent – part of the e book: an imagined dialog, over 4 conferences at Chautauqua County Jail, through which sufferer and attacker discuss over a metallic desk. “So what was the reason?” Rushdie asks.
The dialogue feels pressured. “F*** you, Mr Smartypants,” the A tells Rushdie, when he thinks he is being patronised. It permits Rushdie to speak about their “profound conjoining” and chew over the teenager’s want to be an “executioner”. Rushdie baits him about his lack of a girlfriend, quotes Jodi Picoult at him, and discusses the deserves of the Call of Duty online game. When the A tries to finish the chat, Rushdie says he has management and is the one who will “put the words into your head”.
The e book is perceptive and filled with drollery, and maybe masks that this is nonetheless a profoundly wounded man making an attempt to work by means of his personal PTSD. The chapter hardly squares with Rushdie’s assertion that Matar is “simply irrelevant to me”. It is doable that he is taking refuge in humour, however this reader was extra taken with the writer’s use of his personal sharp irony to take aside his aggressor (he says, for instance, that Matar’s determination to kill him appeared “undermotivated”, on condition that it gave the impression to be based mostly on little greater than discovering the writer “disingenuous” after watching a YouTube video and having “barely read two pages” of The Satanic Verses).
Rushdie goes on to put in writing that he needs “My Samuel Beckett moment”, reflecting on the proven fact that in 1938, the Irish Nobel Prize winner Beckett was stabbed in the avenue by a pimp and later confronted his assailant when the case got here to trial.
Beckett is amongst dozens of literary references, which embody Coleridge, Shakespeare, Gabriel García Márquez, PG Wodehouse and Virginia Woolf. At one level he says that, like King Lear, he fears he is “not in my perfect mind”, which is hardly shocking when you think about that he had to deal with accidents that required the stitching up of his tongue, the painstakingly intrusive care of the “monstrosity” eye – he now wears a black lens on the proper aspect of his glasses to disguise his sightless eye – and the agony of the cuts to his proper cheek that left saliva “oozing out” for weeks afterwards. He was additionally left with partial paralysis of his decrease lip, and accidents to his hand that left him with no feeling in the center two fingers.
When his thoughts took flight, it did so in recollections of Georges Méliès’ 1902 science-fiction traditional Le Voyage dans la Lune, and musings on the proven fact that the identify of the three-time Grand National winner Red Rum is “Murder” backwards. He additionally makes an surprising Mandalorian joke, and says his restoration was boosted by watching Lionel Messi win the World Cup.
Despite the carnage enacted on Rushdie’s physique, his thoughts stays indefatigably sardonic. He likens the removing of his ventilator to taking out an “armadillo’s tail” and makes jokes about fluid draining and being handled by Dr Pain. He vividly recreates the agony of getting a genital catheter inserted (“Nurse Bladder with her Bladderometer”) and is humorous, if that’s doable, about his post-attack “likely cancer” prognosis, which fortunately proved false. His account of a prostate examination is summed up with “Aaagh. Double aaagh. Even more aaagh.” Rushdie additionally admits he was anxious about the harm to his Ralph Lauren swimsuit. It takes a specific amount of candour to confess that you just took the “talking gig” in the first place as a result of the “sizeable fee” would assist pay for a brand new dwelling air-conditioning system.
The e book examines our inevitable extinction, as human beings, from no matter “exterminating angel” destiny brings, and delivers an eloquent view of his personal “near-death experience” (there was nothing supernatural about it, Rushdie insists). Just as considerably, although, it analyses the battle between the forces of fanaticism, bigotry, violence and hatred and people of affection, friendship, artwork and freedom. The focus of that collision was the knife coming into his physique, explains Rushdie. The knife assault and his restoration provide a stark reminder of each the finest and the worst of human nature, and the e book fulfils his goal to take cost of what occurred on that horrible day and “to answer violence with art”.
For all the mindless hate at the coronary heart of the story, this memoir is additionally a love story. Rushdie is intensely transferring when he writes about his fifth spouse, the American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who went by means of her personal terrifying ordeal having to witness his battle for survival in Hamot Hospital. The second when she sobs “My husband’s home, my husband’s home” is sufficient to convey a tear to any reader’s eye.
‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’ is printed by Jonathan Cape, £20
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