Review: Knife by Salman Rushdie
Disarmingly raw, emotional, urgent and honest, Salman Rushdie’s latest memoir, Knife, is about optimism, and the never-say-die spirit
A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars. – Salman Rushdie
Very rarely do the visual and the textual — as in the case of the cover and contents of Salman Rushdie’s latest memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder — have such a gravitational pull towards one another. The jacket image of a surface slashed, slit by a sharp-edged blade, echoes perfectly — in a stylised minimalist manner — the grimness of the episode that led the author to write this book.
“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 amphitheatre in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm,” Rushdie writes in the opening paragraph of Knife. “The last thing my right eye would ever see: I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low… I didn’t try to run. I was transfixed.”
The attacker’s design cleverly mimics the book cover’s allusive design. Therefore, it is worth dwelling a bit on the outstanding jacket-art of Knife by Arsh Raziuddin, displayed and shared widely across social media platforms. Pinaki De, one of India’s leading book designers, said: “It is also important to dig deeper and understand how Arsh ‘digitally’ used a reference from a master to create a rare palimpsest that binds the vision of the present and past together. Few artists have been as influential with a singular gesture as Lucio Fontana ‘manually’ slashing his canvases for the Tagli (Cut) series. Earlier, he created his first series of paintings in which he punctured the canvas with buchi (holes). Now, that subtle reference to Fontana (many call it the Fontana effect) makes this cover a brilliant example of what a real good book cover should be like.” So tagli or “cut” (or “scar” or “wound”) couldn’t be a more appropriate and iconic image for Rushdie’s Knife.
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If one wishes to cogently grasp Salman Rushdie’s non-fiction arc — I would strongly recommend the readers to first read Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991; Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002; Language of Truth: Essays 2003-2020; and Joseph Anton: A Memoir in which he looks back on the fatwa, the death decree, issued more than 20 years earlier by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini because of the alleged blasphemy in Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses.
In Knife, Rushdie re-lives — with introspection — the traumatic event of August 2022 and his hard “journey towards physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.”
“In death we are all yesterday’s people, trapped forever in the past tense. That was the cage into which the knife wanted to put me.” writes Rushdie. “Not the future. The revenant past, seeking to drag me back in time.”
“There was the knife in the eye. That was the cruellest blow, and it was a deep wound. The blade went in all the way to the optic nerve, which meant there would be no possibility of saving the vision. It was gone,” records Rushdie. After being stabbed 15 times, his face was slashed open, and looked like “a sci-fi movie special effect.” He describes his eye as “bulging out of its socket and hanging down on his face like a large soft-boiled egg.” He quotes Samuel Beckett in the epigraph to Knife: “We are other; no longer what we were / before the calamity of yesterday.” The 27-second attack felt like an “extraordinary half-minute of intimacy between life and death,” according to Rushdie. “It is said that Henry James’s last words were ‘So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.’ Death was coming at me, too, but it didn’t strike me as distinguished. It struck me as anachronistic.”
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Knife’s architectural structure is also arresting. It is in two parts — The Angel of Death and The Angel of Life — each with four chapters. Part One contains Knife, Eliza, Hamot, Rehab; and Part Two Homecoming, The A (short for ass, asinine, assassin), Second Chance, Closure?. In an unbalanced world, Rushdie strives to allude to symmetry — two mirroring two, four mirroring four — a sense of yin-yang, balance and order.
But that does not mean the author did not go through occluded feelings of imbalance, of the unjustness of it all — even as his cerebral logic tries to intellectualise the sequence of events to satisfy his own mind. But the mind can be such a trickster — “During those empty sleepless nights, I thought a lot about The Knife as an idea,” he introspects. “When a knife makes the first cut in a wedding cake,… [it is a] ritual… [joining] two people… together. A kitchen knife is an essential part of the creative act of cooking. A Swiss Army knife is a helper, able to perform many small but necessary tasks… Occam’s razor is a conceptual knife, a knife of theory, that cuts through a lot of bullshit… A knife is a tool, and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral. It is the misuse of knives that is immoral.”
Knife is a heart-wrenching narrative of survival and recovery from the horrific attack on stage. Rushdie’s writing here compared to his earlier book is disarmingly raw and emotional — it is urgent and honest — it has the gravitas and tone of a person who has lived many lives, both in the open and in hiding, both public and private, both extroverted and introverted. But he is always questioning, with his logic intact — with a hope and light that has allowed him to carry on even against multiple adversities of veiled and semi-veiled imprisonment.
Never have all these events allowed him to be silent — in fact, he is more vocal than ever, more persuasive and demanding of his reader’s attention now. And this he is able to achieve because he innately and fundamentally believes — and makes us believe — in the freedom of speech and life.
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Salman Rushdie is the author of 15 previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), and Victory City. A former president of PEN American Centre, he was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the queen of the UK’s last Birthday Honours list in 2022.
Knife is a deeply personal account. Written in first person (like Midnight’s Children) — the “I” (or the “slash/gash” in the new memoir) and its brutalised twin “eye” in an oblique way, mirror Saleem Sinai (the narrator) and Shiva (the “pair” who are swapped at birth, and their lives changed forever by that act of deceit). Even though vastly different in its scope and style, Knife seems to retain Rushdie’s penchant for intertextual references in his work — literary allusions, characters and tropes inter-bleeding into different works he has written. “Saleem Sinai, born at the midnight moment of Indian independence, who lay unborn in my abandoned draft of The Antagonist …. [finds himself] at the centre of my new scheme [of Midnight’s Children],” writes Rushdie in his essay, Another Writer’s Beginnings.
Confidence and self-doubt, memory and writing, self and the other, society and solitude, death and life, and much more — all act as yin-yang polar tensions throughout the book. In the same essay, he concludes that “once you have found your wings, however long it takes, however many times you have failed before you found them, once you have found your wings, you fly.” Knife is about affirmation, about optimism, about the never-say-die spirit. Against all odds, Rushdie survives and assuages hatred with love, turns grief to strength, gore to irony. If Salman Rushdie testifies against his assailant in court, this is what he plans to say, he declared in the 60 Minutes programme on CBS News: “I find I have very little to say to you. Our lives touched each other for an instant and then separated. Mine has improved since that day, while yours has deteriorated. You made a bad gamble and lost.” Rushdie turns grief into strength. “Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty” — he writes — “Language was my knife.”
Knife — riveting and magnetic — pulls at your heartstrings. But it is ultimately “a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable. This is an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art — and finding the strength to stand up again.”
“Love”, particularly mature and familial love — acting as the binding spine of this book — is at the core of healing and the emergence of hope. “I have always believed that love is a force, that in its most potent form it can move mountains. It changes the world,” he writes. And indeed, with Knife, a timely gift from Rushdie — we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars.
Sudeep Sen’s Anthropocene won the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize. Red and Rock — that complete ‘The Eco Trilogy’ — appear later this year. [www.sudeepsen.org]
