Nerves of steel
Review by Nick Duerden
Ever since Salman Rushdie was attacked with murderous intent two years ago, the entire world, it seems (or at least the media), has craved all the details. These details are now provided, often graphically, in Knife, a memoir of the day he almost died.
“On August 12, 2022, in upstate New York,” Rushdie writes, “I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.”
By this stage, Rushdie, then 73, had been living under a fatwa for 33 years, ever since the 1988 publication of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which was believed by some Muslims to be blasphemous – a crime deemed to warrant his death. His 2012 memoir of this time, Joseph Anton (the pseudonym he adopted for his own safety whenever out in public), recounted what it was like being on a Most Wanted list, but by the 21st century he had perhaps reasonably thought the worst was over, and that normal life could resume. Not so.
Knife is essentially reportage, Rushdie recounting the event, the agonising physical and emotional fallout, and then reliving it.
The attack, lasting 27 seconds, left him with injuries across his chest and neck. In hospital, where he’d remain for several months, his fifth wife Eliza by his side, he notes that his eye “was hugely distended, bulging out of its socket and hanging down on my face like a large soft-boiled egg”.
Throughout the account, he refuses to name his attacker, calling him only “The Ass”, a 24-year-old American of Lebanese extraction who has never read The Satanic Verses but had seen Rushdie speak on YouTube and thought him “disingenuous”. This claim would confuse the author to maddening degrees throughout his slow rehabilitation. If the fatwa wasn’t his motivation, how on earth could simply being “disingenuous” be? He loses the eye.
Early on, his agent suggests, “You’ll write about this.” How could he not? It’s good material.
Yet sometimes in the book, it feels as if he is struggling to know quite what to say, and how to say it.
He tries to contextualise the attack by contemplating the appearance of knives in art – Roman Polanski’s film Knife in the Water; the butcher’s knife in Kafka’s The Trial – but this brings him little peace. Elsewhere, he ponders how so many of his friends of similar vintage – Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Hanif Kureshi – are also having brushes with mortality, albeit for different reasons. If nothing else, he feels less alone.
In her recent book American Mother, Diane Foley, whose son was murdered by Isis in 2014, recalls meeting his killer in prison to ask: why did you do it? Do you feel remorse? These are hypnotic encounters, riveting to read. Here, Rushdie imagines a conversation with his attacker, attempting to psychoanalyse and out-intellectualise him, referencing Shakespeare and taunting him by asking the difference between “a virgin and an incel”. But even this fantasy fails to satisfy. “F**k you,” he imagines “The Ass” telling him.
Rushdie has never written quite as directly as this, or emotionally. He emerges as stoic, droll and astonishingly brave. “There are moments when these events are painful to set down,” he says. They’re painful to read, too, but necessary. As simple testimony, it makes for an incredibly compelling reading experience.
The aim of the attack was ultimately to silence him. The aim failed. Salman Rushdie is a writer. The pen proved mightier than the sword after all.