KNIFE

The noted author recounts the vicious August 2022 assault that nearly ended his life.

“To be born again…first you have to die.” So speaks the protagonist at the opening of Rushdie’s infamous novel The Satanic Verses, which has brought him so much trouble over the years. The alleged perpetrator of the 2022 attack, whom the author calls “the A”—it stands for many things, including Assassin and Assailant—was unfamiliar with the contents of the book, so that “we can deduce that, whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses.” Ironically, the knife assault, which cost Rushdie the use of an eye and a hand, came at a conference devoted to “the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.” Indeed, the audience saved him, restraining the attacker. For Rushdie, that moment speaks to the “worst and best of human nature,” the urge to harm and the urge to protect acted out at once. The author’s account is seldom harrowing. Instead, he writes with calm assurance about long weeks in the hospital—and, “because you have no alternative,” the poking and prodding that come with it. He affectingly evokes the accompanying emotions, including the psychic emptiness that comes in the presence of death, which did not shake him from his atheism: “My godlessness remains intact. That isn’t going to change in this second-chance life.” What sustained him in recovery, he writes, was a blend of willpower, good medical attention, and, especially, love found late in life after years of living alone. Addressing “the A” in absentia at several points, he comes close to taunting. Art survives the artist even as his alleged attacker, locked in prison, will soon be irrelevant to the world; in this instance, the artist survives, too: “After the angel of death, the angel of life.”

A graceful meditation on life and death that captures Rushdie at his most observant and lyrical.