From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.
...candid, plain-spoken and gripping ... I’ve rarely read about worse physical trauma ... This is not, it must be said, the most elegant book. It does not have the emotional, intellectual and philosophical richness of the journalist Philippe Lançon’s memoir Disturbance (2019), about surviving the 2015 Charlie Hebdo magazine attacks by thugs claiming allegiance to Al Qaeda. But Rushdie was wise to largely stick to the details and stay out of his story’s way. To paraphrase Roy Blount Jr., I put this book down only once or twice, to wipe off the sweat ... Humor bubbles up organically from pain ... Knife is a clarifying book. It reminds us of the threats the free world faces. It reminds us of the things worth fighting for.
Knife is in part about—and in some sense itself is—a battle between the two most prominent Rushdies: Great Writer and Great Man, artist and advocate, private person and public figure. At its best, the book speaks to what it has been like for someone who thinks of himself as a writer by vocation and a free-speech activist by conscription to try to make art, not to mention a life, under extraordinary circumstances. At its worst, Knife can leave the reader feeling unsure of which Rushdie it speaks for, which Rushdie we should remember ... Like Joseph Anton, Knife is Rushdie’s attempt to deal with an absurd and traumatic event, 'owning what had happened, taking charge of it,' an endeavor to 'answer violence with art.' Unlike Joseph Anton, Knife is taut, readable, and, thankfully, not petty. The first chapter, in which Rushdie recounts the attack itself, contains some of the most precise, chilling prose of his career ... Indeed, Knife is at its strongest when Rushdie-the-novelist narrates the material of his own life ... The rest of Knife is less precise than the material about the A. The word meditations in the title may be a preemptive defense against the accusation that, as a complete work, Knife is somewhat inchoate. But the lack of clarity in Knife’s mission can feel distracting ... If Knife sometimes feels like it was hastened to press, if its conclusion reads like an epiphany forced on deadline, it’s probably because Rushdie, reasonably, wants to spend his remaining years on the struggle he actually chose, not the one he was coerced into.
Surprisingly upbeat for a book about being stabbed in the head. As a lifelong atheist, Rushdie doesn’t believe in miracles as such, but a sense of deep gratitude – to the cosmos, if not a deity – is palpable in these pages ... By the end of the memoir, we find him adopting a rather serene, so-be-it attitude to the whole business ... One wonders, for example, if Rushdie has a view on US academics being fired from their jobs for expressing opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza. On such questions, he is above the fray. It falls to a new, younger cohort of dissident writers and intellectuals to fight those battles.
