On 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie was at a literary conference in Chautauqua, New York, about to deliver a lecture on keeping writers from harm, when a stranger rushed at him with a knife. Rushdie – who in 1989 had a fatwa issued against him by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini calling for his death, after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses – was stabbed in his neck, chest, hand and eye.
Knife is Rushdie’s memoir of his “near-death” in which he recalls seeing his attacker and thinking to himself: “So it’s you. Here you are.” The attack lasted 27 seconds and, to this day, the author remains bewildered that he didn’t fight back. “Was I so feeble that I couldn’t make the slightest attempt to defend myself?” he asks. As baffling to him is that the man, a Lebanese-American whom he calls “The A” (short for “Assailant” or “Ass”), had never read The Satanic Verses. Instead, he had watched clips of Rushdie lecturing on YouTube and concluded that he was “disingenuous”.
A harrowing account of the before, during and after of a violent assault, Knife is given added power and immediacy in being narrated by Rushdie himself. His tone throughout moves between anger, resignation and dry humour. While he is unsparing with the details – for a while his eyeball, which could not be saved, lolled on his cheek like “a large soft-boiled egg” – there are also outpourings of love for his friends, family and his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. The ultimate intention in Knife is to reveal how love triumphs over cruelty and to “answer violence with art”.
• Available via Penguin Audio, 6hr 22min
Further listening
Love in Exile
Shon Faye, Penguin Audio, 7hr 1min
An insightful memoir of one woman’s search for love, the commodification of romance and finding one’s self-worth. Read by the author.
Show Don’t Tell
Curtis Sittenfeld, Penguin Audio, 10hr 32min
A cast of narrators including Xe Sands, Michael Crouch and Kristen Sieh read this short-story collection from the Romantic Comedy author.
