A voice in my head whispered LIVE, LIVE
In a brave and compelling new book, Salman Rushdie describes the horrific knife attack which cost him the sight in his right eye
BOOK OF THE WEEK KNIFE: MEDITATIONS AFTER AN ATTEMPTED MURDER by Salman rushdie (Jonathan Cape £20, 224pp)
ON an August morning two years ago, the novelist Salman Rushdie, then aged 75, was on stage in upstate New York about to give a talk, the cheque for his appearance fee already snug in the pocket of his Ralph Lauren suit.
Then, terrifyingly, a black- clad stranger leapt from the audience to stab the author 15 times in 27 seconds, wounding his throat, liver, abdomen, left hand and right eye, which is now permanently sightless.
‘Live, live,’ Rushdie thinks, yet he notices, too, his absurd flutter of regret as life- saving medics cut up his suit. (As for the cheque — which had been earmarked for a replacement home air- conditioning unit — it’s still bloodied evidence of a crime scene.)
Knife isn’t only Rushdie’s finest book in years, it’s also his most enjoyable, perhaps surprisingly given the subject matter. The relentless level of human detail keeps you riveted to its intimate yet roomy recollection of the assault and its aftermath.
Demonised as a blasphemer for his portrait of Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had lived under the threat of death for a third of a century since Ayatollah Khomeini, then ruler of Iran, put a bounty on his head on Valentine’s Day 1989.
Rarely out of the spotlight, he has attracted almost as much attention for his serial remarrying and on- screen cameos in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Curb Your enthusiasm as for his prize-winning novels and tireless advocacy of free speech.
In Knife, he jokes that publishing a book is like getting undressed in public — and that’s exactly what he’s doing here.
Asked how much he weighs before being carried into the helicopter whisking him from the scene of the attack, he hesitates briefly, having long been ashamed that he had ballooned to 17 st.
he needed eight hours of surgery and two months of hospital care. his scarred torso, he tells us, resembles a subway map.
Part of his gut has to be cut out. A ventilator is yanked in and out of his gullet like ‘an armadillo’s tail’ — although it’s a cinch compared with the agony of a catheter when medication leaves him unable to pee. high on fentanyl and morphine, he hears ‘the night-howls of dying men in other rooms’ of an extreme trauma ward in Pennsylvania, his first stop after the attack.
The amount of blood encrusting his left palm takes nearly seven months to chip away. Staples in his face leave him unable to shave for months. Saliva oozes through a slit that’s been left in his cheek.
Rushdie skips nothing, filling us in on the not-inconsiderable logistical challenge of scrambling
his nearest and dearest to his bedside: a $20,000 private jet to bring his wife from New York; a week-long ocean crossing from London for his son, who is frightened of flying.
As well as the granular nittygritty, there’s an otherworldly quality to Knife, as befits this famed teller of magical yarns.
Prior to his stabbing, Rushdie reveals, he had been tortured by dreams of being set upon by a spear-wielding Roman gladiator. ‘ This is the literary device
known as foreshadowing’, he tells us.
A month before the attack, while holidaying in Italy, he had signed off on his 2023 novel Victory City, in which the main character is stabbed through the eyes (you couldn’t make it up).
Knife is also a love letter to his fifth wife, the writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who steered him through his successful recuperation.
When they met in 2016, he was so distracted by her beauty, he walked face-first into a glass door.
He recovered his composure later that night, when she told him she was glad that they had become friends. He replied: ‘I’ve got friends — this is something else.’ Smooth! Their relationship hadn’t been in the spotlight until the attack — when they got married in 2021 in her home state of Delaware, Rushdie had to spell his name for the registrar, who showed not ‘ a flicker of acknowledgement’.
Equal parts medical memoir, love story and manifesto for literary liberty, Knife also contains Rushdie’s 30-page imaginary dialogue with his attacker, Hadi Matar, then aged 24.
Rushdie’s decision to refer to him only as ‘the A’ — ‘My Assailant, my would- be Assassin . . . an Ass’ — must be legal precaution as much as literary flourish, given that Matar’s trial is yet to take place.
By far the book’s weirdest sequence, it leaves you — by design or otherwise — strangely feeling pity for ‘the A’, taunted as a lonely virgin, ‘big-eared, inadequately bearded’, a failure even at murder.
Rushdie’s subtitle calls the book ‘meditations’, which might seem a giveaway that, structurally, Knife is an itty-bitty hodge-podge.
As a late-life reckoning, it resembles recent novels by his pals Ian McEwan (Lessons) and the late Martin Amis ( Inside Story), whose last emails with Rushdie are recorded here.
But it’s also an act of defiance. You detect a quiet pride when Rushdie tells us his back isn’t scarred — he never turned away from his attacker.
And he certainly hasn’t lost his sense of humour. On a visit to the UK, he gets 24hour police protection. ‘Think of all the money we’ll be saving on Ubers,’ he jokes to his wife, who is uneasy at the prospect.
Reminding us how world leaders, including our very own Boris Johnson, lined up to pay tribute to him after the stabbing, he lets us know he hasn’t forgotten that the then-PM previously scoffed at the knighthood Rushdie had received for services to literature.
Yet even the grudge-bearing is genial in Knife, the work of a born raconteur relishing an undaunted ability to distil even his most nightmarish experience into suave anecdote.
Rushdie wants us to know he’s still out there, still keeping score — with a new Ralph Lauren suit, too, the end reveals — and slimmer into the bargain. But with a fatter cheque, I hope. God knows, he’s earned it.