Knife: An Afterlife in This Life by Salman Rushdie
Reviewed by Drew Pisarra

Salman Rushdie’s Knife: An Afterlife in This Life, Random House, www.penguinrandomhouse.com 2024, 224 pages, $28.00

“We are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.” Samuel Beckett

Despite the quote that opens Knife, noted novelist Salman Rushdie’s new memoir reads as an argument to the contrary. Throughout these recollections, Rushdie repeatedly asserts that in defiance of the August 2022 stabbing that almost cost him his life – and left him blind in one eye, maimed in one hand, and compromised in his lower lip – he remains inside an unchanged man. As coping mechanisms go, his claim is easy to understand. And as a reader, one hates to deny him the right to claim in print that his essential character has stayed the same.

But is it true? And how would we know? Or, perhaps, more importantly, how does this strategy play out? Well, he strips his assailant of a name as a way to disempower him; keeps his descriptions of the bloody encounter largely to the opening chapter; and conducts a lengthy fictionalized interview, recasting the attacker as a bratty incel living the “unexamined life.”

But it’s difficult to accept that a calamity as horrific as this one wouldn’t leave us at our core dramatically altered. Beckett knew what he was talking about. He too was stabbed with almost fatal results, as Rushdie recounts in this book. Nor are these two authors alone. The fatwa calling for Rushdie’s head after the publication of The Satanic Verses likely resulted in the murder of Hitoshi Igarashi, that novel’s Japanese translator, and perhaps – by association – the stabbing of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz as well.

Before Knife was announced, I confess I hadn’t read Rushdie’s incendiary novel. I wasn’t a complete stranger to his writing, mind you. I’d read both Haroun and the Sea of Stories (terrific) and The Enchantress of Florence (not so good). Having read The Satanic Verses in preparation for this review, I would say, you needn’t bother doing the research. Not because The Satanic Verses isn’t good. It is. But because, again, Rushdie is not particularly interested in defending the novel, exploring the sociopolitical chaos it inspired, or dredging up his memories of his time in hiding and/or under guard. He’d like to move on. And why shouldn’t he? As one of the most visible free speech advocates of our time, he’s left a trail of potent speeches defending the right to uncensored expression – some of them cited at length in this very memoir.

Interestingly, Knife is infinitely more dismissive of religion and faith than the book that so enraged Ruhollah Khomeini, the Ayatollah who was the Supreme Leader of Iran when he issued the fatwa on Rushdie. In contrast, The Satanic Verses, much to my surprise at least, seems to advocate in favor of belief; in one of the book’s primary storylines, the non-believers lose a chance at heaven or something like it while those of faith miraculously disappear. Following a prophet has its benefits after all! Contrarily, Knife finds Rushdie vehemently asserting his atheism and unwilling to see religion as anything but an outdated instructional manual for morals (at best) or a justification for violence (at worst). Not for him, God the unseeable, the unknowable, the omnipresent and omnipotent. He saves such ideas for his literary fiction. Although, he does believe in Love.

Speaking of which, you may be surprised just how many pages in Knife are devoted to Rushdie’s fifth wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Rushdie practically fawns over Griffiths – from their meet-cute beginnings on through the attack then inevitably further into its challenging aftermath. Tellingly, Griffiths is one of the few people called out by name within this memoir. The doctors are almost universally designated by single letters or their specialty or what they’re treating at the time; the retired fireman who may be responsible for Rushdie’s survival, thanks to a well-placed thumb on a neck wound to staunch the blood, might be named Matt or Mark or something else. Rushdie can’t recall.

Because of this, the recovery process and much of what precedes it seems to take place in a generic world in which details like Rushdie’s gifts of a fan and a handbag for his wife in Rome and Milan respectively are shared completely without description. It’s as if Rushdie wants to give us a glimpse into his life but not the ability to stare. By his own admission, Rushdie is a private man. And if he doesn’t want to get into the particulars regarding what his sons look like or his apartment, for that matter, so be it. I respect that choice wholeheartedly. His jocular commentary about catheter insertion, eyelid stitching, and prostate exams may seem discordant but again, why should we criticize the writer for not adopting a universally somber tone?

If anything, Knife holds up a mirror to us, the readers, forcing us to see ourselves for the craven culture vultures we’ve become. Why must this person recount in gory detail the most traumatic event of his life at length? Why should we be disappointed when someone doesn’t want to dwell among the shadows or deep dive into the darkest day of his life? Why should we begrudge an artist for attempting to make the best out of a worst? Who are we to make demands?

I’ve no doubt that Rushdie felt some pressure to pen this memoir, from agents, from editors, from colleagues, and from friends who may have offered it as a kind of comfort – writing as therapy, something Rushdie recoils from. As for the general public all wondering “What happened? I mean, what really happened.” Let’s be honest. We know what happened. A religious zealot gave instructions to assassinate a great writer. Years later, a young man from New Jersey mistakenly thought he’d found a purpose. And now, the victim has survived to tell the story.

If Salman doesn’t recount this momentous event with all the nitty gritty, that’s his business. If he wants to discredit a prophetic dream he had, I suppose we should be thankful he mentioned it at all. He cannot recall “wailing with pain” when under attack which is how the onlookers reported it. Do we really need him to own it? Aren’t his injuries– psychic and physical – enough? Rushdie insists he’s now ready to move on from this particular trauma. Let’s do the same. As Beckett himself said, “The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”