“At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.”

This very powerful first-person narration is how Salman Rushdie begins his latest book of memoirs called Knife, published just a couple of months ago. Winner of the Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers award 25 years later for his novel Midnight’s Children, several of his fifteen novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Rushdie also has a collection of short stories, a memoir, a work of reportage, and three collections of essays to his credit. But he is specifically remembered for the fatwa declared by Ayatollah Khomeini on the charge of blasphemy after the publication of The Satanic Verses more than thirty years ago. But in spite of living for three decades in asylum because he was not safe in his own country, the vendetta and violence took their ultimate toll on 12 August 2022, when an unidentified man attempted to murder him on stage with a knife where he had gone to participate in a week of events at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York titled “More Than Shelter: Redefining the American Home.”

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This horrific act of violence shook the literary world and beyond. Now, one and a half years after the incident, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie writes this memoir where he relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey towards physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his present African American wife Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.

Dedicating the book to the men and women who saved his life, the text is neatly divided into two parts, each containing four sections. Part I, titled “The Angel of Death” begins with the chapter called ‘Knife.’ Describing that beautiful August morning in detail, Rushdie tells us how violence came running at him and his reality fell apart. It was perhaps not very surprising that, in the few seconds available to him, he didn’t know what to do. So, he narrates the rest of the incidents in the form of a collage, with bits of memory pieced together with other eyewitnesses and news reports. The audience members also acted according to their best nature, and so that morning he “experienced both the worst and the best of human nature, almost simultaneously.” Rushdie concludes this chapter by informing his readers that he no longer felt the slightest urge to defend The Satanic Verses or himself. “Let me say this right up front: I am proud of the work I’ve done, and that very much includes The Satanic Verses.” The only problem was that the incident of his attempted murder dragged “that” novel back into the narrative of scandal.

The second chapter ‘Eliza’ gives us details of how Rushdie met the African American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, entirely unknown to him, through Mr Norman Mailer and how their friendship grew stronger day by day, leading them to get secretly married, realising that it was a relationship not of competitiveness but of total mutual support. They showed that even in this attention-addicted time, it was still possible for two people to lead, pretty openly, a happily private life until the knife incident changed everything. Section three, titled ‘Hamot’, comprises Rushdie’s detailed description of how he spent eighteen days in the extreme-trauma ward of the hospital but also how being able to do a few simple everyday things for himself lifted his spirits greatly. After eighteen days there, it was time for him to go.

In the fourth section titled ‘Rehab’, Rushdie tells us about the optimism that flooded through him. During his sleepless nights at the rehab, he often thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. Talking about different occasions when the knife is used, he realises that the knife is a tool and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral, and it is the misuse of knives that is immoral. Then he states that language was also a knife for him, and he would use it to fight back. Apart from the rehab of the body, there is also the rehab of the mind and spirit. The chapter ends with his period of rehab being over, and after more than six weeks in two hospitals, he could return to the world.

Part II, titled “The Angel of Life” is also divided into four sections and shows how, in the end, Rushdie found the strength to stand up again. The first section titled ‘Homecoming’ begins with him describing his plan to leave Rusk at 3 a.m. as quietly as possible and to get back to his home through the empty night city to avoid any watching eyes. It was a profound emotional experience, and he felt “100 percent better and healthier immediately. I was home.” He felt that he had emerged from the long tunnel of hospital visits and had been returned to the general population. Here he made a resolution that instead of remaining a mere victim, he would answer violence with art: “Hello, world, we were saying. We’re back, and after our encounter with hatred, we’re celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life.”

The sixth chapter, ‘The A.’ is how he addresses his assassin, and it is really Rushdie at his imaginative best. In it, he has recorded a detailed conversation that never occurred between himself and “a man I met for only twenty-seven seconds of my life.” After bringing in several intertextual references about other writers and situations, in the fourth and final session of his imaginative conversation, Rushdie states, “You don’t know me. You’ll never know me.” After the imagined conversation is over, he no longer has the energy to imagine the assassin, just as he never had the ability to imagine him.

At the beginning of the next section called ‘Second Chance,’ Rushdie states that as he recovered from his wounds, both physical and psychological, he was far from sure that he would emerge from the experience stronger. He was just happy to be emerging from the experience alive. But the big news for him anyway was that, after half a year of nothingness, the writing juices had indeed started to flow again. But it was hard for him to write about post-traumatic stress disorder at any time, especially when his hand felt like it was “inside a glove” and “the eye… is an absence with an immensely powerful presence.” He went for a ten-day visit to London, and by the time he returned to New York, he thought it was pretty clear that it was what his second chance at life should concentrate on: love and work. But there were also various Muslim voices celebrating what had happened to him. So he ruminates at length on how, apart from private pleasures, he had to combat the argument that had bedevilled his life—the argument about God. He had never felt the need for religious faith to help him comprehend and deal with the world, and so he declares, “My godlessness remains intact. That isn’t going to change in this second-chance life.”

The title of the final section, ‘Closure?’ ends with a query mark. In it, he writes that his own anger faded, and it felt trivial when set beside the anger of the planet. He understood that three things had happened that had helped him on his journey towards coming to terms with what had happened. The first was the passage of time, and though time might not heal all wounds, it definitely deadened the pain, and his nightmares went away. The second was therapy, and the third was the writing of this book. These things did not give him “closure” and he felt he was no longer certain that he wanted or needed to confront and address the A. in open court. He writes that the “Samuel Beckett moment” no longer felt essential to him. Overall, this memoir is a moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, and art.

The simple yet very appealing cover of the book adds to its USP and establishes once again what an excellent storyteller Salman Rushdie is. His fame might have waned a little with his last few publications, especially since Joseph Anton: A Memoir did not create much impact upon the readers, but Knife has brought back the powerful and erudite Rushdie as he has risen phoenix-like from the ashes and revealed his erudition without being parochial. A page-turner, the book is really a collector’s item and is recommended to the common reader as well, even for those who find his writing to be too high-brow and full of intertextual references. They will have no problem understanding the ‘free-associative way’ in which the mind of this 75-year-old writer works even today.

The reviewer is critic and translator, and former professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Shantiniketan.