TheDaak review

Book: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie, United Kingdom, Penguin Random House, 2024, 272 pages,  ISBN 9780593913659, Rs. 699, Paperback. 

By Anshul Rai Sharma

‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’ wrote Immanuel Kant. No one has embodied this wisdom more than Salman Rushdie, a writer of many worlds and stories, where characters are never protected, not even from their own crookedness. For over four decades, Rushdie’s work has navigated themes of cultural hybridity, identity, and the moral interplay between good and evil. As a writer, he celebrates this complexity, showing the reader that it is the very crookedness of humanity that makes both life and literature meaningful. 

On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife, at a stage in Chautauqua.  Knife (2024) is Rushdie’s account of this event, his first book after an attack that nearly cost him his life, leading to the loss of his right eye. However, the book is more than just the wound. As a writer of international eminence and controversy, the attack is situated in the context of Ayatollah Khomeini’s death order against the author and all those involved in the publication of the book The Satanic Verses (1989). The novel’s questioning of the moral authority of the Quran, was perceived as an attack on Islamic values and identity. It led to widespread protests and international controversy, highlighting the deep gulf between freedom of expression and religious sensitivity.

Facing his attacker thirty-three and a half years after the death order, Rushdie thinks to himself, “Why now? Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years?” (p. 6) Rushdie’s characters are often faced with this question. Consider Gibreel Farishta in The Satanic Verses, who survives an explosion, experiences visions that blur the line between reality and imagination, causing him to question: why he, out of all people, has been chosen to bear these visions and transformations.

The August attack marks a pivotal moment for the author when “reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible” (p. 12). When asked why he neither fought nor fled, he explains that violence creates a crisis in discerning reality, often leading to inaction. One simply does not know what to do. However, the author, who grew up in Bombay and was nurtured by stories like The Thousand and One Nights and Ali Baba, finds reserves of strength to understand and process the event through writing. He reflects, “to write would be my way of owning what happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim” (p. 129). Like Scheherazade, he cannot afford to be silent, declaring, “I would answer violence with art” (p. 129).

The result is one of the most tender self-portraits of the aging writer. A meditation on life, violence, family, and friendship. He spends time introducing us to his encounter with his wife, American novelist and poet, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. A private couple who led private lives, their relationship came to the fore after the attack, when Eliza became the main person who took care of Salman. He acknowledges that the veil is down and invites readers into their shared world. A lively description of their marriage, blending Indian and African-American traditions, culminates with a recitation of E. E. Cummings’ poem, “I carry your heart with me” (1952).

Soon, the reader enters hospital rooms and all that is cherished comes crashing down. The attack causes massive damage to Rushdie’s body, and he does not shy from revealing them. We are plunged into the unfreedoms of a hospital bed, lack of privacy, sleepless nights, and excruciating pain. His visceral account describes the treatment of his right (damaged) eye which, having lost vision, needed to be stitched shut so that repeated moisturization could be avoided. He writes, “Let me offer this piece of advice to you, gentle reader: if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut…avoid it. It really, really hurts”(p. 69). Similarly, a urination problem leads to three painful sessions of urinary catheterization. All masks are off when we face death, and the reader realizes that shyness was never a quality of this enormous literary figure. 

The author still managed to find some respite, a sense of humour within these developments. There is humor in the way life unfolds.  For example, the author describes a prostate exam as,

 “Bend over. Spread your legs, lubricant, rubber gloves, aaagh. That’s uncomfortable. Now it’s even more uncomfortable. No, don’t hurry, take your time. And…. It’s done” (p. 113). 

This could well be a passage from one of his fiction books, and in a way, this is how he views life, a funniness in reality that is easy to miss.

Even amidst battling a near-death experience, the author is unable to embrace a humorless life. In a tribute essay to his (another) late friend, Christopher Hitchens, he recalls them fighting the same battle, where everything he loved (literature, freedom, irreverence) stood against everything he detested, including fanaticism, violence, and humorlessness. Indeed, humor is a principal axis that separates the attacker and the victim. In an imaginary exchange between Rushdie and his assassin, Mr. A., he tells the latter, “one way of understanding the argument over that book [The Satanic Verses] was that it was a quarrel between those with a sense of humor and those without one” (p. 167).

Death pervades the book, with the idea of death and the urge to live explored throughout the pages. Near-death experience alerts Rushdie to the fragility of life, as the book is cited with several examples. In a deeply personal exchange, Rushdie pays tribute to his friend and author Martin Amis, who, despite being unwell, showed his support and admiration for the author during his recovery. Amis passed away in May 2023. Raymond Carver’s poem Gravy (1988) is invoked, reminding us to be grateful for every minute we get to spend on this crooked earth. Rushdie also visits another close friend, Paul Auster, who actively supported him after the attack. Auster was suffering from lung cancer when they met, as noted in the book. He passed away recently, in April 2024.

Part one of the book, titled “Angel of Death,” gives way to part two titled “Angel of Life” where his family takes center stage. In the aftermath of the attack, he is also, like any of us, in need of support. His wife, Eliza, his sons, Milan and Zafar, and his sister, Sameen are the heroes of the book. Rushdie poignantly describes the emotional toll of care work, detailing the pains his wife endures to enable his recovery. Eliza is central to his life’s story and one of his initial thoughts during the attack was, he admits, the fear of dying among strangers without his wife by his side.

I realized that this is a writer who knows how to build worlds. Not only does he create them to his own design, but he also possesses the mental strength to understand the unfolding of stories in this world. He knows that when  the story is his personal account, he decides that it will be about life, and not death. A stab in the right eye might be enough to make anyone give up writing, but this writer, this Bombay-born, world-trotting, controversy-causing literary giant, would have none of it. Reading the Knife, one realizes the power of a rational, vibrant and playful mind to comprehend the world around it. Sometimes the world we live in is not the brightest, as Kant tells us. Sometimes the brute forces that have dulled our senses to nature take over and become all-encompassing. The question emerges: How is it that our imaginations have become limited to this muck of the earth? 

In a way, all of Rushdie’s work is an answer to this question. In this book, he reminds us, as he reminds his assassin, that all the stories are about this world. At the end of the day, we must live in this world. No godly missions will save us. We are all there is, and we must work with this, to make something of a life. The delusions of the young Islamist, Mr. A, clash with the profound insights of the seasoned rationalist, whose atheism and grounded perception of reality reveal the true miracles of the world as it is. Indeed, this book, as much as Salman Rushdie’s recovery, is a miracle to be celebrated. 

References

Carver, Raymond. “Gravy.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed July 4th, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49863/gravy. 

Cummings, E. E. “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed July 4th, 2024.https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49493/i-carry-your-heart-with-mei-carry-it-in.

Kant, Immanuel. “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” Translated by Lewis White Beck. In On History, 11-26. Indianapolis. Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.

Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988.