November 1, 2023
Booker Prize--winning novelist Rushdie (author of Victory City, Joseph Anton, The Satanic Verses, and over a dozen additional titles) turns to nonfiction once more to explore the shocking attempt to kill him, its repercussions, and the role of art in his life and the world. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from April 19, 2024
Rushdie chose Joseph Anton when asked to come up with an alias by the British officers who were protecting him after the Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced him to death for writing The Satanic Verses in 1989, and that became the title of his 2012 memoir recounting 13 grueling years of threats and high-security isolation. Rushdie was finally able to live openly as the global literary force he is after moving to New York. Since then he's dedicated himself not only to writing profoundly imaginative and provocative novels laced with caustic social commentary, but also to serving as a prominent freedom of speech advocate. In fact he was in historic, peaceful Chautauqua in New York State, on August 12, 2022, as he writes at the start of his gripping new memoir, Knife, "to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm." Rushdie never had that discussion because a man in the audience ran to the stage and viciously and chaotically attacked the 75-year-old writer with a knife. Over the course of this riveting chronicle, Rushdie, drawing on his exceptional storytelling prowess, deep literary fluency, and hard-tested moral compass, describes in unflinching detail the full extent of his injuries (""the knife in the eye . . . the cruelest blow") and what it took to work through the painful and painstaking process of recovery. Rushdie does not name his would-be assassin, a radicalized 24-year-old who essentially knew nothing about Rushdie or his work, and categorizes the attack as an example of "violence unleashed by a false narrative," part of a plague of weaponized disinformation raging around the world, stoking wars in which civilians are dying in horrifying numbers. Knife is testament to Rushdie's convictions and to the sustaining power of love as he focuses on the suffering and support of his family and his wife, writer and artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, during this ordeal. In this stunning story of love harshly tested and reaffirmed, of courage and strength, of creativity and the power of mind over body, every electrifying page elicits tears and awe. Rushdie reports on his prescient dream before the attack and the nightmares that followed, about learning to live with vision in only one eye and one severely damaged hand, and how he has renewed his commitment to writing, magnificently manifest here: "I would answer violence with art." And he calls, once again, for "the defense of free-speech principles." In spite of all their anguish, Rushdie and Griffiths brought extraordinarily resonant novels to the world in 2023, Victory City and Promise, respectively, and that is further testimony to the transcendence of art which, Rushdie writes, "stands at the essence of our humanity" and, "in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it."
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May 13, 2024
Rushdie follows Victory City with a forceful and surprisingly good-humored account of the 2022 knife attack that nearly killed him. At a speaking engagement in Chautaqua, N.Y., a 24-year-old man Rushdie refers to only as “A” rushed the stage where he was speaking and stabbed him multiple times, including in the eye. Authorities swiftly connected the assault to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini after Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988. Rushdie chronicles the year following the attack, during which he recovered from liver damage, the removal of part of his small intestine, and the loss of his right eye. Though he writes of being plagued by nightmares and gory memories of the assault, Rushdie’s wit shines through (“Let me offer this piece of advice to you, gentle reader: if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut... avoid it”). Just as arresting is an imagined conversation with A, which sees Rushdie trying to parse his attacker’s religious convictions. By the time the narrative comes full circle, with Rushdie speaking on the same Chautaqua stage a year later, he’s opened a fascinating window into perhaps the most vulnerable period of his life. It’s a rewarding tale of resilience.