The clue is in the title: Knife is about the brutal attack on acclaimed author Salman Rushdie that blinded him in one eye and very, very, very nearly killed him.
“At a quarter to 11 on August 12 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheatre in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm,” he writes — with brave but delicious irony.
As one might expect from a Booker Prize winner (this literary prize was awarded to Rushdie in 1981 for Midnight’s Children), Knife is very well written, but it is also moving, witty, humorous, disarmingly honest and uplifting.
It’s ironic that having endured and survived a decades-long death decree from a demented Iranian cleric for the supposed sin of having written The Satanic Verses — a book some Muslims believe to be blasphemous — the Indian author was back to living a nearly normal life and was preparing to give a fairly routine lecture to a US audience when his assailant struck.
He writes of premonitions before the attack, and one gets the feeling that he had always feared that the freedom restored to him once the Mad Mullah’s death threats had been lifted were just too good to be true.
“It had been 33-and-a-half years since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s notorious death order against me and all those involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses, and during those years, I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way,” Rushdie recalls.
This book is not for the squeamish. It covers in some gory detail Rushdie’s time in hospital, where it took time for his many wounds to heal and where he learnt that he had permanently lost sight in one eye.
It covers his slow convalescence and the return to some kind of normality, with the support of family and friends, and most notably his wife, the novelist, poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Had many brave audience members not subdued Rushdie’s attacker and helped to stem the flow of blood, and had he not been rushed to hospital by helicopter, this book would never have been written. He was that badly injured.
Rushdie explains: “Later, when it was clear that I would live, the doctors’ relief was palpable too. ‘When they brought you in from the helicopter,’ said a member of the surgery team, ‘we didn’t think we could save you.’ They did save me, but it was that close. Another doctor said to me, ‘You know what you’re lucky about? You’re lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.’”
As well as being peppered with wit and irony, this is a very intimate book. We hear of the author’s delight when he could finally visit the toilet unaided, of his disbelief when he was at last allowed to look at himself in a mirror, at the pain and discomfort of being hooked up to a ventilator, having a catheter inserted, and having his eyelids sewn together.
His use of humour helps to make it all more human and prevents this book from lapsing into self-pity and depression.
I loved the levity with which he described his recovery in some of the many parts of his body that had been damaged by the knife attack.
Rushdie tells us: “The liver is an amazing organ. It regenerates. My liver regenerated and began to work properly. I was able to avoid turning yellow.
“My small intestine appeared to be functioning too, so the surgeons had done well. What makes hospitals happiest is when the patient says he is having bowel movements. Hospitals really don’t like it when your bowels are not moving and they give you medication that causes diarrhoea and you ask them to please stop and you promise in pleading tones that your bowels will move soon, they really will, and then, finally, they do move, and everyone cheers up.”
It is no surprise that the most disfiguring injury was the loss of an eye, and he is honest about the scale of life-changing suffering this caused.
“Even now, writing this, I still haven’t come to terms with the loss. It’s difficult physically — to be unable to see a whole quadrant of one’s normal field of vision is hard to handle, also to lose two-eyed perspective, so that when I try to pour water into a glass it’s easy to miss the glass — but it’s even more difficult emotionally,” we read.
It seems inevitable that Rushdie would write this book, and it appears that the experience was cathartic.
He explains: “I understood that I had to write the book you’re reading now before I could move on to anything else. To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art.”
Rushdie’s novels often involve wild fantasy, reflecting the literary heritage of his native India, and even in this very factual account, he indulges himself by devoting a chapter to an imaginary conversation with his would-be assassin.
It is perhaps of little surprise that this creep appears to have been radicalised during a visit to Lebanon, and it is even less surprising that he comes over in this fictional dialogue as rather thick, muddled and inarticulate.
“I have recorded a conversation that never occurred, between myself and a man I met for only 27 seconds of my life,” Rushdie writes.
Religion almost certainly played a part in motivating the attack, more than 30 years after the original Iranian death decree. Rushdie himself is not devout, and he writes of his concerns about the ability of religion to trigger fanaticism, hatred and violence.
“In my view, the private faith of anyone is nobody’s business except that of the individual concerned. I have no issue with religion when it occupies this private space and doesn’t seek to impose its values on others. But when religion becomes politicised, even weaponised, then it’s everybody’s business, because of its capacity for harm,” he suggests. And he should know.
Rushdie tells us this book is his way of “taking ownership of what happened, making it mine — making it my work. Which is a thing I know how to do.
“Dealing with a murder attack is not a thing I know how to do. A book about an attempted murder might be a way for the almost-murderee to come to grips with the event.”
This was, at times, an uncomfortable book to read, but Rushdie’s triumph was to write about his trauma with a minimum of self-pity. It is to his credit that with courage and humour he has blunted the knife and lived to tell the tale.
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