...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.
The subject—the idea for which Rushdie nearly died—is the freedom to say what he wants. It’s under as much pressure today as ever—from fanatics of every type, governments, corporations, the right, the left, and the indifferent. Rushdie survived, but he has too many scars to be certain that the idea will. This book is his way of fighting back.
The venerable Salman Rushdie is a vibrant and vigorous (if uneven) novelist, but his latest work of autobiography, though occasioned by great suffering, is meandering and frequently trite. And although Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder treats a dramatic attempt on Rushdie’s life, it is also surprisingly boring ... In one extended sequence about the mental state of his attacker—a fictionalized dialogue between the novelist and the would-be assassin—he makes good on this promise. But this exchange is isolated (and somewhat jarring) in a book that otherwise contains only a handful of well-rehearsed meditations on the plight of persecuted writers ... For the most part, the book is dryly documentary, an unembellished diary ... The best passages in Knife probe the emotional fallout of the attack—and double as considerations of brutality more broadly ... It is not that Rushdie has no larger points to make: It is only that these points are by now familiar and bear little relevance to the rest of his narrative. He is prone, for instance, to hectoring lectures on in the inanity of younger generations ... Unfortunately, perhaps even unjustly, the most acute agony does not always produce the most profound writing. Raw suffering must be reshaped, renovated into something more than itself. Rushdie’s memories as presented here are as unrefined and muddled as a casual conversation. Knife is not worthy of his best work or the pain that occasioned it, though his desire to memorialize his anguish is of course understandable.
Rushdie’s triumph is not to be other: despite his terrible injuries and the threat he still lives under, he remains incorrigibly himself, as passionate as ever about art and free speech as 'the essence of our humanity.' At one point he quotes Martin Amis: 'When you publish a book, you either get away with it, or you don’t.' He has more than got away with this one. It’s scary but heartwarming, a story of hatred defeated by love. There’s even room for a few jokes.
It’s the processing of the event by a writer like Rushdie which makes the book ... It’s fascinating seeing how a novelist processes the world ... This is a brave book by a brave man.
It is a brave and beautiful book that tells his story with a cathartic relish, no gruesome detail spared ... In truth, this book is as much a love letter to his wife—the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths—as it is a punch-back at his assailant ... If there is a weakness in Knife—a false note—it comes when he records 'a conversation that never occurred' between himself and A ... Mr. Rushdie’s Knife, in truth, is a sort of Occam’s razor—it is best when it is sharp and frank and direct. In his conversation with A., alas, it stoops to dullness. But the rest of the book is so very good that it is easy to look past that error in narrative judgment.
Knife is a rich, immersive, feisty account of his journey through darkness back to the light. Part thriller, part love story, part celebration of literature, it’s an incandescent book full of hair-raising descriptions of hard-won survival and beautiful, philosophical passages about art, freedom and resilience. And it marshals a remarkable range of literary and cultural references ... Rushdie stages one of the most all-encompassing and life-enhancing arguments for the power of art and literature ... Where he goes from here is anyone’s guess. But we should be grateful for whatever stories he has left to give and, for now, rejoice in this mesmeric memoir. Rushdie has not just enlarged literature’s capacities, he has expanded the world’s imaginative possibilities — and he has paid a tremendous price for it. We owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
Knife is essentially reportage, with Rushdie recounting the event, the agonizing physical and emotional fallout, and then reliving it ... Rushdie has never written quite as directly as this, or emotionally. He emerges as stoic, droll, and astonishingly brave. 'There are moments when these events are painful to set down,' he says. They’re painful to read, too, but necessary. As simple testimony, it makes for an incredibly compelling reading experience. The aim of the attack was ultimately to silence him. The aim failed. Salman Rushdie is a writer. The pen proved mightier than the sword after all.
The opening chapter, the description of the attack, the precise and harrowing clinical details of the damage to his physical body, unwind in spare blood-and-gore detail that would make Cormac McCarthy jealous ... The book then rushes to a rather pat conclusion. Yes, yes, happiness could reemerge after tragedy and pain. I don’t begrudge the author this message, or this ending, but I could not help but wonder if this swift return to regular life, to date nights and vacations, constituted a little bit of a narrative cop-out.
A summation of that terrifying period but also, to some extent, of a long, groundbreaking career ... The metaphors can become heavy-handed ... This is Rushdie on a smaller, more intimate scale than we’ve seen before. But compressed in this slim book, his perennial big claims resonate with even more force.
