Knife by Salman Rushdie

I had the great fortune this year to attend a lecture featuring Salman Rushdie as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Rushdie was on a book tour promoting his latest work, The Eleventh Hour, a quintet of stories and his first fiction piece since the attack on his life. In line, waiting to get into the venue amid very visible and ominous security, the lady in front of me asked if I had read his book Knife. I told her I had not, and she said, “you simply must, it still haunts me.”

On the morning of August 12, 2022, Rushdie was standing on stage a the Chautauqua Institution preparing to give a talk on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm when a man leapt from the audience and proceeded to stab him multiple times leaving him blind in one eye and critically injured. When he arrived at the hospital, the trauma team did not think they wield be able to save him. Knife is Rushdie’s examination of this attack and his efforts to reclaim a normal life.

The night of the lecture, I was impressed by Rushdie’s courage at taking the stage again in a similar forum as his attack. I can’t imagine that many people would be willing to continue doing something like that after such a traumatic incident. Shortly after Rushdie was settled in his seat that night, there was a disruptive loud bang from the back of the theater. Many nervous glances were shared among the audience, but Rushdie barely took notice, only turning his head slowly to his right.

I was most impressed by Rushdie’s humor and genuine good nature that night. If anyone has the right to be angry at the world, bitter because of his situation, and otherwise just not a happy guy, it would be Rushdie. He’s lived most of the last thirty years of his life in seclusion because of the fatwa ordered against him and nearly lost his life just three years ago. But the entire evening he was jovial, witty, and engaging with stories from his literary and personal life.

In the book, Rushdie explores the attack and most importantly his own resilience. The vibe of the book can best be summed up by a line describing Rushdie’s experience of going out to eat at a restaurant for the first time after the attack. “After the angel of death, the angel of life.” — MJD

Excerpt:

I am trying to remember if I ever felt angry in this days. I was in the extreme-trauma ward at Hamot for eighteen days — eighteen of the longest days of my life — and as I was trying to put myself back in that room I can recall feeling weak, determined, exhausted, stunned, sick, groggy and, in the company of Eliza, Zafar, and Sameen, also loving and loved. I don’t remember anger. I think that anger felt like a wasteful luxury to me. It wasn’t useful, and I had more important matters to attend to. I didn’t think very much about the man whose actions had put me on this place, or about the men whose murderous ideology inspired him to act as he did. I thought only about survival, by which I meant not only staying alive, but getting my life back, the free life I had so carefully built over the last twenty years. p. 72

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