Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024)

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Countless authors have written about death, even their own, but few have been able to document their almost deaths as publicly as Salmon Rushdie, who in August 2022 survived an assassination attempt at New York’s Chautauqua Institution (ironically, just as he was about to deliver a speech about the creation of safe spaces for writers in America from elsewhere).

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder gives the impression the acclaimed writer is almost disappointed by the mediocrity of his would-be assassin, a young man radicalized not so much by what Rushie had written, but what had been written about him.

For over a decade he would live incognito under the name Joseph Anton, evading assassination attempts and an ever-changing public opinion about whether his situation was self-inflicted, a period detailed extensively in his 2012 memoir of the same name. In many ways Knife feels like an extended epilogue to that book’s assumption, one long overdue but not unexpected, that an attack on his life was less hyperbolic but an inevitability written in the stars. The only questions were not if, but when. And by whom.

Rushdie’s isolation from society was, of course, precipitated by 1988’s ‘The Satanic Verses’, whose publication would stir considerable blowback in the Muslim community and even some Western critics, with Iran’s Ruhollah Khomeini decreeing the book blasphemous and issuing a fatwa – essentially a death sentence – against the author.

While Rushdie would survive the controversy surrounding his book, both physically and professionally, others associated with its publication would not. In 1991 Ettore Capriolo, the book’s Italian translator, was stabbed but miraculously survived. Rushdie’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was found stabbed to death just days later. In 1993 William Nygaard, the novel’s Norwegian publisher, was shot and seriously injured. Countless others, including bookshop owners, supporters, and bystanders, would suffer in the face of such intolerance,

Looking back at footage and interviews from that period now it’s astonishing just how many felt it was Rushdie’s own “arrogance” that led to his ostracism. Even more surprising is how seldom the book whose publication initiated all the ruckus (The Satanic Verses) is ever included in the ubiquitous “Banned Books” sections of local libraries and bookstore collections. Why is that?

Despite all this, Rushdie would evade assassination, though not wholly. Most of Knife concerns itself with the medical realities of recuperation after surviving such an ordeal, and those seeking lurid descriptions of his brutal attack, and subsequent recovery, will find much to indulge here thanks to his particular gift for language; he describes his ruined right eye as “hugely distended, bulging out of its socket and hanging down on my face like a large soft-boiled egg”.

Rushdie never names his attacker, instead spewing forth a litany of A alliterations (Assailant, would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions, an Ass, etc.) before settling on calling him “the A”. In reality the A’s name is Hadi Mata. Rushdie was 75 at the time, Mata just 24. The foiled assassination attempt lasted only 27 seconds, a brief encounter Rushdie calls an “intimacy of strangers”, the only such instance both will ever share together.

But that doesn’t stop Rushdie from imagining a series of speculative conversations between himself and Mata, allowing an indulgence he’s unlikely to have outside the pages of this book. He suggests A’s radicalization was mostly second-hand online, his ‘instructor’ Imam Yutubi praying on the weak and gullible. How does one appease the ignorant?

Knife is also a love story, detailing his meeting, courtship, and convalescence under Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ care. An accomplished artist in her own circles, she became his fifth wife and caretaker throughout, and whom Rushdie credits with initiating the idea of him documenting his recovery in a book in concert with his others, of stabbings, of violence, of hate, of both ignorance and intolerance; but also of love. Isn’t that always the case?

If Salmon Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder feels unresolved it’s likely, for all his reassurances, the author doesn’t seem to have fully moved past the incident that nearly ended his life. Which isn’t unreasonable. Its publication comes less than two years after the attack, the prosecution of his attacker still ongoing, and we can only speculate what the eventual legal outcome will be. For Rushdie, the attack left him both disfigured and shaken, but clearly not resolved to cowardice. “If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free”, he writes, as he must.