Book review: Ever the novelist, after reading an interview given by his failed assassin, Salman Rushdie notes that if he had submitted a book to his editor with a character whose motive for cold-blooded and well-planned murder was that he’d read a couple of pages of someone’s book and watched a few videos, the editor would have found the character unconvincing and asked the writer for better motives.
It is encouraging to read Rushdie being Rushdie again. For one chapter of his new book he conducts imaginary interviews with his assailant, hunting for his motives. He refuses to name him, calling him A for assailant, assassin or just plain ass. His imaginary conversations fail to find a motive.
Using the standard writer’s advice to start your book as close to the end as possible, Rushdie launches straight into the attack on August 12, 2022, just as he was about to begin a talk in front of a live audience at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. You may be unaware, as I was, of the ultimate irony that, as a former president of PEN America, he was about to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.
What followed was 27 seconds of violence during which Rushdie was stabbed 14 times – enough time, we are informed, to recite the Lord’s Prayer or read aloud one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. An intimacy of strangers, the author calls it, recalling that he has often used the same phrase for the happy union of author and reader.
He believes A “may have been happy during our time of intimacy. But then he was dragged off me and pinned down. His 27 seconds of fame were over. He was a nobody again.”
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is a remarkable book, both for its objectivity towards the subject matter, but also the humour and sometimes matter-of-factness that the author manages to inject into what must have been horrific, through both attack and recovery. His memory is vague in places but frighteningly specific in others. Having his clothes cut off him as he lay bleeding on the floor was linked with indignation about ruining his Ralph Lauren suit. He worries what will happen to his house keys in one pocket and credit cards in another. As someone says his legs need to be in the air to get the blood to his heart, he recalls lying there with no clothes and his legs in the air, feeling humiliated.
It was just the beginning. He describes what is to come: “In the next months there would be many more such bodily humiliations. In the presence of serious injuries, your body’s privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won’t sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body – to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness – so that you can live.”
Knife is constructed in two sections, “The Angel of Death” and “The Angel of Life”. Both have four chapters. We begin with the knife – the incident itself – and then pause to flash back to a love story. We hear about the relationship that blossomed with Eliza, Rushdie’s wife, the American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. It was a relationship that they kept hidden from the world, although they were married 11 months before the attack. What does come out so powerfully from the book is the depth of feeling and the bond that exists. It would be fair to say that she was the inspiration for, and the strength behind, the amazing recovery Rushdie has made. Their way forward is to live each day as fully as they can. The 27 seconds have left them with a philosophy of short-termism.
Books take time to reach the reader’s hands. In Knife, we hear about the final struggle of Rushdie’s friend Martin Amis, who died last May, and another struggle with cancer by Paul Auster, who died on April 30 but was still fighting when this book went to print. That Auster was only a year older, and Amis three years younger, than Rushdie adds to the poignancy of the story of recovery.
Underneath the narrative lurks the story of other personas, and not just the man who had been waiting 32 years for such an attack, following the fatwah over the content of The Satanic Verses. He talks about a phantom Graham Greene impersonating the author, but concludes with this wonderful summary of his own position: “Ever since 1989, I have felt uneasy about the other Rushdies circulating the world. I too am both ‘Salman’ and ‘Rushdie’. There is the demon Rushdie invented by, I have to say, many Muslims – this is the Rushdie the A believed he wanted to kill. There is the arrogant, egotistical Rushdie created by the British tabloids back in the day (this one appears to be taking a back seat). There is party-animal Rushdie. And now, post-August 12, there is a more sympathetically imagined ‘good Rushdie’, the near-martyr, the free-speech icon, but even this one has things in common with all the ‘bad Rushdies’: it has very little to do with Salman sitting at home, the husband of his wife, the father of his sons, the friend of his friends, trying to get over what happened to him, still trying to write his books.”
Unlike his earlier autobiographical memoir, Joseph Anton, this is an “I” story, because being stabbed 14 times “feels very first person”. It is also an “eye” story, because Rushdie’s right eye is lost forever. A millimetre deeper and the knife would have made contact with the brain. Early in his treatment, one doctor advised him, “You’re lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”
