Knife: Meditations On An Attempted Murder (2024)

Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder (2024)

By Salman Rushdie 

Genre: Surprisingly Lighthearted (at times) Trauma Memoir 

Recommended For: Someone Who Could Use Inspiration And Clarity From A Person Smart Enough To Know That Resolve Isn’t Meant To Be A Marketable Trait

I probably would have told you that Salman Rushdie shouldn’t know The Mandalorian exists. Maybe I’d be comfortable with him having a general awareness that there’s such a thing as a Baby Yoda. 

But when he quoted the Star Wars/Disney show in Knife, I did a little judgmental laugh. I think it was one of those laughs that you do when you’re uncomfortable and, in all likelihood, a little insecure. 

Rushdie is someone I had accepted to be an intellectual and somewhere in the classification of great and brilliant writer. The only other work I had read by him was Midnight’s Children, in my twenties, and I considered the elements of it that I actually understood to be so smart that I could only assume the parts I didn’t understand must be brilliant. He wasn’t a writer I talked or thought about that much, but I knew how he fit into my understanding of the world: He was massively talented at a thing (writing) that was also a huge part of my life. The concept of him being a Good Writer helps me to create a general framework that Good Writing exists.

I think this is how a lot of people who do creative things tend to think about other respected creatives. It’s probably just how most of us think of smart people in the abstract.

And then one of them will release a much-anticipated memoir and write, “As the Mandalorian of love would say: ‘This is the way’” about having a crush on their eventual wife, and he’ll make you feel like a pretentious asshole at best and a big ol’ fake at worst. 

Sometimes, we need our intellectuals to bring themselves and ourselves back to earth. Rushdie’s willingness to do it during the telling of his 2022 assassination attempt and subsequent recovery made something pretty clear from his point of view: Intellectualism is really not the point.

For those who don’t know, some context for why Rushdie is famous: His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was considered controversial for the way it portrayed the prophet Muhammad through magic realism, which led the Supreme Leader of Iran to issue a fatwa ordering Rushdie’s death. This effectively made him a target for murder by extremists living anywhere in the world. For some years after the fatwa was ordered he lived cautiously and reclusively in London, then he eventually shunned the idea of living in fear, moved to New York and lived in the public eye for many years, continuing his career as a writer while also becoming known as a fierce advocate for writers’ free speech protections. 

In 2022, in Upstate New York, Rushdie was walking on stage to participate in a talk about keeping writers around the globe safe from various potential harms when a man ran on stage and stabbed him dozens of times; in the chest, the hand, the stomach, the face (specifically the eye) - the man pretty much stabbed indiscriminately. 

One of Rushdie’s eyes has been removed, but he otherwise (miraculously) recovered. Knife tells that story. 

Surviving something that should have killed you makes you seem powerful, in some sense. And writing is a medium that we know Rushdie is great at. So, there’s at least some notion of truth or power or revelation or mystical quality you might think is possible to achieve through a book like this. 

But I suppose obviously (in retrospect, for me), the only thing that can be guaranteed to come out of a book that tells a story like this is vulnerability.

As you might expect, plenty of that vulnerability comes in the telling of the intense and emotionally draining physical therapy required to recover from these injuries (he injects a lot of lightheartedness into these anecdotes, which is both disarming and takes some getting used to if you expected a slightly more elegant work of literature).

More importantly, though, one of the 20th century’s most famous writers coming extremely close to death did not actually receive any crazy revelatory insight into the mysteries of the unknown or the point of life that he could in turn use his brilliant mind and skills to translate to us. If he had, you probably would have heard by now. 

Rushdie is in fact, just a dude. And he’s willing to show you that. He not only put his pants on one leg at a time, he could barely do that for many months during his recovery. He was sad and scared in the ways that you or I would have been sad or scared. He found his strength in the ways similar to how you or I would have (hopefully) looked to find strength in such a difficult position. He has written some good books, sure. But when he writes about meeting and falling in love with his wife, who is 30 years younger than him, you might think ‘Yeah, I bet.’ Again, he is just a dude, for better or worse. (To be clear, Rushdie and his wife went through something unimaginably scary and difficult and supported each other through it, so I think they have earned the ‘to each their own’ status).

There’s a lot of figuring it out on the page. There’s no believable peace made with his attempted killer, but he tries to use the pages of the book to get there, and he probably gets as close as any of us would. 

The part of the book where I felt like I was actually in strong, steady hands was when he wrote of his decision earlier in life to stop living in fear and to re-enter normal life despite the threat of the fatwa. He’s writing with conviction and personal logic about something none of us (I’m assuming) know anything about. It wasn’t just inspiring, it was evocative. It made you stop to think about possibilities and hypotheticals while putting yourself in his shoes. You couldn’t help but stop to remember that he was explaining this only two years removed from a gruesome attempt on his life. 

Rushdie didn’t write Knife so that you could feel like you are in steady hands though. I think we’re so often told that truth is powerful. What’s interesting to consider is that, sometimes, truth is just true. 

3 More Things You Can Read Today:

-Amanda Shires Tells Her Side of the Story After Divorce From Jason Isbell

-This album review of John Prine’s 2018 album, Tree of Forgiveness

-Ann Powers, on four redheads