Knife by Salman Rushdie
A recovery memoir told with a novelist’s flair.
Rushdie writes his way through the horror towards peace of mind.
On August 12, 2022, author Salman Rushdie was stabbed within an inch of his life. His assailant hadn’t read Rushdie’s novels, but held radicalized beliefs and thought Rushdie a ‘disengenuous’ type.
Knife is Rushdie’s response to the attack. It’s his strike back. His move to regain narrative control, focus attention away from the bad guy, and talk himself through the fear and pain towards recovery of mind and body. He’s answering violence with art.
The description of the attack is heart-wrenching, reported in clinical, chilling prose. With a fireman’s thumb in his neck and his legs in the air to bring blood to the heart, his urgent thought was that someone tell his wife and sons. The bodily humiliation of surrendering yourself to medical care is something I think all mothers can relate too.
The attack had an unusual consequence. It forced the outing of his marriage, a year earlier, to poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. After the description of the attack itself, Rushdie’s account moves to the story of their meeting and marriage. Honey, Baby, Darling, love, love, love. There is a lot of sweet talk; a lot of emphasis on their mutual affection. In these sections, Knife seems less a recovery journal and more a document to convince the public of their love match.
I enjoyed Rushdie’s thoughts on private versus public religion, the freedom of art, and his discussion of whether or not to let the knife attack influence his writing. In Knife, he is using language as his knife, both to reclaim his life and to jab at his attacker.
Knife is the account of a vicious attack and Rushdie’s subsequent year of recovery. It’s his attempt to write through the horror, process it, and find something that might be closure on the other side. It’s raw and moving, and he lets a thirty-year-old anger simmer beneath the words.
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