Knife: Meditation After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
Starts: 4.5
There are few writers that I was introduced to in college that have continued to speak to me as much now as they did then. Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie are two authors who are still writing seminal works that illustrate why people will be reading them long after we are gone. My first Rushdie book was East West, a collection of short stories I read my senior year that highlighted not just Rushdie’s lyrical magical realism but the inherent tension between how his two homes, India and Great Britain, shaped the immigrant experience.
A few years later, I picked up Midnight’s Children. I was reading a lot about India at the time, starting with William Dalrymple’s City of Djinn and John Irving’s Son of Circus, and then finally starting Rushdie’s seminal work. Midnight’s Children is an epic, it layers the life of its main character with the birth of the independent nations of India and Pakistan. I didn’t pick up another of Rushdie’s works until about 8 years later when I started Joseph Anton, his memoir about the ten years he spent under constant protection after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for what he determined was slander against Islam in the Satanic Verses. It is a vivid insight into what it is like to have your whole life, and the lives of your friends and loved ones, under threat for mere words you had written. It was a moving book and it highlighted Rushdie’s courage as well as underscored how it drove him to constantly fight for artistic freedom for other artists.
Ten years later, the fatwa was no longer ruling his life; he had a new wife and he had a new book coming out. And he felt that he was finally gaining some distance from that notoriety. Then on August 12, as he was approaching the podium to give a speed in Chautauqua, NY, when a young man rushed him and attacked him with a knife. Rushdie barely survived; twenty-four years after the fatwa, someone finally got close enough to almost murder him.
As he did in Joseph Anton, Rushdie writes poetically about the moment of the attack all through his recovery. He images conversations with the attacker, who he will not name, trying to highlight how extremism is not helping the cause nor is it what Mohammad preached. Finally, it is a meditation on life; how we can be reborn, how we can find love and strength, and how death comes for us all.
If you have not read any of Salman Rushdie’s works, I think you must and I always suggest Midnight’s Children. It is a long book, but so worth it. To read it, or any Rushdie book, is to get a glimpse into India and its traditions, to see the struggle of what it is to be Eastern in a Western world. And you may not like his books, or think he is a bit of a pompous ass, but you can’t deny that he has suffered for his works, more than a lot of artists in the “free” world have, and you can admire his spirit as he has never really given up.
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