Knife: Salman Rushdie's 'mesmeric memoir' of brutal attack

 When Salman Rushdie attended a literary event in upstate New York on the morning of 12 August 2022, it had been 33 years since the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa for his novel "The Satanic Verses". He writes in his new book that his first thought when he saw a masked man in black clothes running fast towards him was: "So it’s you. Here you are." His second thought was: "Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years?" 

The attacker – a 24-year-old extremist named Hadi Matar who had read just two pages of "The Satanic Verses" – managed to stab him about 15 times before being wrestled to the floor. The attack left Rushdie with a severed right optic nerve, a paralysed left hand and a dozen other serious injuries, said Boyd Tonkin in the Financial Times. Doctors initially believed he wouldn’t survive. But he did, and has now written this "fizzing, galloping memoir" about the ordeal. "Knife" is "not just a candid and fearless book but – against all odds – a defiantly witty one". Despite all Rushdie has endured – the decade spent in hiding from 1989, now this frenzied assault – he has survived, with his sense of humour intact.

Rushdie, now 76, recounts his recovery in "graphic detail", said Erica Wagner in The Daily Telegraph. After the attack, his ruined right eye hung down his face "like a large soft-boiled egg". "Dear reader," he writes, "if you have never had a catheter inserted into your genital organ, do your very best to keep that record intact." Through it all, he was buoyed by his wife, the writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he had married in 2021, said Blake Morrison in The Guardian. In the hospital, "she took charge, staying with him 24/7 and recording his recovery on a phone and camera". Doctors were amazed at his speedy progress – "a kind of magic realism, a miraculous return from Hades". This book is "scary but heartwarming, a story of hatred defeated by love".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Terrible as Rushdie’s ordeal was, I found "Knife" "meandering and frequently trite", said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. His writing can "veer into cliché", and there are frequent "hectoring lectures" of tangential relevance. In one "mortifying sequence", the blade becomes the narrator: "Here I am, you bastard… I’m plunging my assassin sharpness into your neck." 

Well, I think the book is a triumph, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. Along with "hair-raising descriptions of hardwon survival", there are "beautiful, philosophical passages about art, freedom and resilience". We should "rejoice in this mesmeric memoir", and be thankful for whatever Rushdie "has left to give".