Salman Rushdie’s gripping take on being stabbed
near-fatal stabbing in August 2022 and his arduous recovery. The first two are predictable: the author and his blade-wielding assailant. The third character turns this chronicle of violence into a surprisingly tender and redemptive story.Sir Salman was about to speak at a festival in upstate New York when a black-clad man charged the stage.
His first thought was: “So it’s you. Here you are." It was 33 years since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran had called for his death because of the alleged blasphemy of his novel, “The Satanic Verses". It was more than 20 since he moved to America after years of police protection in Britain.
Now the half-expected, still-astonishing assassin was upon him. “I raise my left hand in self-defence. He plunges the knife into it."And into his neck, face, abdomen and eye—15 wounds in a 27-second frenzy.
Violence, he notes, is confounding to its victims: “Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible." But he was alert enough to think this was the end. In a book that is both passionate and illusionless, he is clear there was no out-of-body experience: “My body was dying and it was taking me with it." He seemed unlikely to survive but was stitched and stapled together. His blinded eye bulged from its socket “like a large soft-boiled egg".Only after a few weeks did Sir Salman see his disfigured face in the mirror.
When he left hospital there were more scares and treatments and nightmares. He dreamed of the blinding of Gloucester in “King Lear"; he thought of the knife that kills Kafka’s protagonist in “The Trial". Among the supporting cast in “Knife" is the knife itself—at once a cold, sharp object and a metaphor for hatred, fanaticism and life’s ruptures.Intermittently he thinks of
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