British-American author Salman Rushdie recounts the 2022 stabbing at a public event that left him blind in one eye in "Knife", his first memoir since the near-fatal attack, which hits English language bookstores on Tuesday. The French edition, "Le Couteau", will be released Thursday.
The Indian-born author, a naturalised US citizen based in New York, has faced death threats since his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" was declared blasphemous by Iran's supreme leader, making Salman Rushdie a global symbol of free speech.
But after years remaining unscathed, a knife-wielding assailant jumped on stage at an arts gathering in rural New York state and stabbed Rushdie multiple times in the neck and abdomen. He ultimately lost his right eye.
“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,” Rushdie writes in the opening paragraph of the memoir “Knife”, published Tuesday.
At just over 200 pages, “Knife” is a brief work in the canon of Rushdie, among the most exuberant and expansive of contemporary novelists.
“Knife” is also his first memoir since “Joseph Anton”, the 2012 publication in which he looked back on the fatwa, or death decree, issued more than 20 years earlier by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini following the publication of “The Satanic Verses”.
Iran denied any link with the knife attacker in New York state, but said Rushdie, now 76, was to blame for the incident. The suspect, then 24, has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder.
In an interview with the New York Post, the alleged attacker, who was born in the US and whose parents had emigrated from Lebanon, said he had only read two pages of "The Satanic Verses" but believed Rushdie had "attacked Islam".
'Murderous ghost from the past'
As Rushdie observes in “Knife”, subtitled “Meditations After an Attempted Murder”, he had sometimes pictured his “public assassin” turning up.
The timing of the 2022 attack seemed not just startling, but “anachronistic”, the rising of a “murderous ghost from the past”, returning to settle a score Rushdie thought long resolved. He refers to August 11, 2022, as his “last innocent evening”.
In many ways, “Knife” is as notable for the spirit it shares with Rushdie's other books as it is for the blunt and horrifying descriptions of the attack that did, and did not, change his life.
In the book's first chapter, Rushdie praises the “pure heroism”, the physical courage of the Chautauqua Institution event moderator Henry Reese, who grabbed the assailant.
But if another kind of heroism is hope and determination (and humour) in the wake of trauma, then “Knife” is a heroic book, documenting Rushdie's journey from lying in his own blood to a return to the same stage 13 months later and attaining a state of “wounded happiness”.
The long-awaited new memoir reveals Ruhdie's undaunted spirit and commitment to free speech, according to reviewers.
Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of free speech advocacy group PEN America, said that "since that dreadful day ... we have awaited the story of how Salman's would-be assassins finally caught up with him".
"A master storyteller, Salman has held this narrative close until now, leaving us to marvel from a distance at his courage and resilience," she said.
In an interview with CBS programme "60 Minutes" ahead of the release of "Knife", Rushdie recounted that he had dreamed two days before the attack of being stabbed in an amphitheater – and considered not attending the event.
"And then I thought, 'Don't be silly. It's a dream,'" he said.
He also writes in “Knife” that he was due to be paid "generously" for the event – money he planned to use for home repairs.
Rushdie had been invited to talk about protecting writers whose lives have been threatened – an irony not lost on him.
"It just turned out not to be a safe space for me," he told the interviewer.
In the book, Rushdie says he has experienced nightmares in the wake of the attack, according to The Guardian.
From Mumbai to New York via London
Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai but moved to England as a boy, was propelled into the spotlight with his second novel "Midnight's Children" (1981), which won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for its portrayal of post-independence India.
But "The Satanic Verses" brought him far greater, mostly unwelcome, attention.
The atheist author, whose parents were non-practicing Muslims, was forced to go underground.
He was granted police protection in Britain and moved repeatedly while in hiding. The Japanese translator of “The Satanic Verses” was murdered, and its Italian translator and Norwegian publisher were attacked.
Rushdie only began to emerge from his life on the run in the late 1990s after Iran said it would not support his assassination.
He became a fixture on the international party circuit, even appearing in films such as "Bridget Jones's Diary" and US television sitcom "Seinfeld".
The author has been married five times and has two children.
Since the 2022 knife attack, he also released a novel, "Victory City" (2023).
He has also revisited the Chautauqua Institution, where the near-fatal stabbing occurred, writing in “Knife” that the trip was cathartic.
"As we stood there in the stillness, I realized that a burden had lifted from me somehow, and the best word I could find for what I was feeling was lightness," Rushdie wrote.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)
