Published almost two years after an attempt on his life, Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024), is a page-turner. On 12th August 2022 at a literary festival in the small town of Chautauqua in upstate New York, as Rushdie rose to speak about the US being a safe haven for exiled writers, a 24-year-old Islamic radical stabbed the author multiple times onstage. The memoir combines how the author processed the attack and the meticulous details of the recovery process. It is also a reflection on the role of love, art and family in his healing. 

Part of the virtuosity of the book lies in its structure and composition. It is written in the first person, a departure from his earlier autobiographical work Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012) about his life in hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, subsequent to the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.  

Part I deals with the incident and its aftermath and Part II with the recovery. Each chapter focuses on different aspects of the incident, the rehabilitation process and Rushdie’s relationships with his loved ones, especially his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths who has been essential to his recovery. Naturally, he is obsessed with his attacker, whom he calls ‘A’ (for assailant), whose motives he tries to ascertain in an entire chapter engaging in an imaginary dialogue with him. 

The knife remains a recurrent image and Rushdie returns to it throughout the narrative. He indulges in free association of the word knife, both in its literal meaning and metaphorical connotations. The knife is a tool but also an instrument of pain and torture. It is a metaphor for writing. “Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in the knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back,” he writes. Rushdie uses examples from literature and cinema that include knives in their title or subject matter. He discusses how it was used to attack the Irish writer Samuel Beckett and Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, both of whom, like him, survived the attacks. 

Art helps Rushdie understand, process and “repair” himself. In the early pages of the memoir, to comprehend the injury to his right eye, he conjures up the image of the final scene of the 1902 George Méliès film Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon). The emblematic image of the rocket embedding itself in the eye of the moon personified as a human face is reprinted in the memoir. The loss of his eye brings up another cinematic image from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist 1929 film, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalousian Dog), in which we see a knife cutting through an eye. Later in the memoir, to come to terms with losing vision in one eye, he quotes José Saramago’s 1995 novel Blindness, in which an unexplained epidemic of blindness in an unnamed city ends abruptly, and Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947) in which the plague “simply peters out”. Rushdie finds both endings unsatisfactory to understanding his own predicament. He writes, “Those of us who are blind, or, in my case, half-blind, know very well that blindness simply does not go away.” During his imagined conversation with A, Rushdie transposes Charles Baudelaire’s epigraph in his volume, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). The 19th-century French symbolist poet’s words Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable mon frère (Hypocrite reader, my fellow man, my brother) become Hypocrite assassin, mon semblable, mon frère on Rushdie’s page. He argues that like the would-be assassin who could have murdered him in the fallout of the publication of The Satanic Verses, A had failed to kill him because he “didn’t know how to laugh”. He cites an episode from French writer André Gide’s 1914 novel Les Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars) to discern how to approach his own “wielder of the knife”. In Gide’s novel, a character, Lafcadio, throws a man off the train for no reason at all. 

To deal with his own predicament, Rushdie imagines four fictional dialogues with A to comprehend his motivations and to work through his relationship with God and religion. As a secular Muslim, Rushdie tries to understand what led this young American Muslim to get radicalised. Although he states that they were not going to have “a literary conversation”, Rushdie does exactly that as he references writers and philosophers to make his points. He uses his own writing, both fiction and non-fiction, to justify the fact that far from criticising Islam, he tried to portray the religion compassionately in his work. Rushdie appears to want A to understand him and to know that many Muslim writers want to reclaim The Satanic Verses that had motivated A’s actions, and of which he had read only two pages, as a “capacious work of art”. Yet, Rushdie muses on the futility of his imaginary dialogues since A did not have the ability to really hear him. While this chapter provides an inventive interlude, the dialogues are sometimes patronising and self-congratulatory, although one could argue that given his close encounter with death, Rushdie has a right to some self-indulgence.

Most importantly, Rushdie spends a large part of the memoir writing about family and friends who helped him through the trauma of the attack and its aftermath. He devotes an entire chapter to his wife Griffiths, a gifted poet, photographer and videographer, whom he had met five years prior to the incident. “Then, cutting that life apart, came the knife,” which, he writes, shattered their idyllic existence. Griffiths helped document his injuries and recovery, and it is her resilience and love that helps him through the ordeal. He expresses gratitude for his beloved sister Sameen and his sons Milan and Zafar, who visit him in New York to help him through his recovery. His own suffering compels him to reflect on the travails of some of his writer friends—Martin Amis, who died after a long illness in 2023 and Hanif Kureishi, who lost use of his arms and legs after a fall in Rome in December 2022 and is now writing a blog about his struggles. He recounts a visit to his friend, the writer Paul Auster, who was suffering from cancer. Auster died on 30th April 2024, a few weeks after the publication of this memoir.

Strikingly, throughout the memoir, Rushdie keeps returning to India, the land of his birth, and we sense his hurt when he receives condolence messages from US President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and then Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, but no official message from the Indian government, whose Hindu nationalism he has criticised in the past. “India, the country of my birth and my deepest inspiration, on that day found no words,” he writes. Rushdie reminisces about his childhood in India, his troubled relationship with his alcoholic father who abused his mother, his schooling in London and Cambridge, his beginnings as a writer in London until his success with his first novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), and the different moments in his life when he has had to “reboot,” just as he is doing now. He is proud, however, that his latest novel Victory City, published in early 2023, was well received in India, only his second novel to have done so after Midnight’s Children. 

In the closing pages of the memoir, he confesses that his near-death experience has not changed his views on God, religion, the ills of white supremacy, religious sectarianism, historical revisionism and political authoritarianism that are now pervasive across the globe. He is especially perturbed by the use of organised religion that becomes “politicised” and “weaponised” and decides that his “godlessness” would remain “intact” in this “second-chance life”. He would not settle for a peaceful life, cultivating his garden à la Voltaire’s Candide, but continue to “remain involved”. In the final chapter of the memoir, he briefly stands before the prison walls where A is being held and revisits the scene of his almost-fatal stabbing in Chautauqua, this time with Griffiths, leaving with a sense of closure and “lightness”, ready to resume life.

Binita Mehta is professor emerita of French language, literature and culture at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, USA. She has published widely, most recently on French-language graphic novels. Mehta is often invited to participate on panel discussions and juries for Francophone and South Asian film festivals.