The cover of Rushdie’s latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, is a cream-coloured background with the book title and a slit down the ‘I’ in Knife. Eerie.
Rushdie has been in the news for a while now. Most recently, in 2022, a man stabbed him after rushing onto the stage where the novelist was scheduled to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, US. Knife is a meditation, as Rushdie calls it, capturing the attack and its aftermath.
Going further back in time, Rushdie came prominently into the public eye with his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which created a furore, as some Muslims considered it an insult to Islam. They objected - among other things - to two prostitutes in the book being given names of wives of the Prophet Muhammad. The book's title refers to a heavily disputed story about a series of verses that were claimed to have been omitted from the Quran because they were revealed to the Prophet Muhammed not by the Angel Gabriel, but by the devil. Some claimed the verses were recited to a crowd by the Prophet, but Muslim scholars have historically agreed that these verses were never part of the Quranic revelation. The supreme leader of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa or a call for his death. The book was banned in 13 countries, including India.
I was living in Rome when The Satanic Verses was published. On a trip to India, my brother-in-law told me he had a copy of the book. Lowering his voice (as if someone was listening) he told me how he had to whisper in the ear of the owner of the bookshop he frequented in South Delhi and ask if he had a copy. The owner bent down, retrieved a copy covered in brown paper and whispered back: Don’t open it here please, and don’t tell anyone where you got it from.
I started reading the book. Five months pregnant, propped up in bed with the 546-page hard cover book, was not easy. It was heavy, and the style was difficult. I’m confessing I couldn’t get through the book, as I didn’t have the attention span the book required. And I wasn’t good with allegory and fantasy.
My introduction to Rushdie’s writing was his second novel, Midnight's Children, published in 1981. I found this easier to read. It won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was claimed as "the best novel of all winners". The book is full of imagination and astonishing characters which, even then, I couldn’t keep straight. It was translated into twelve languages and dealt with incidents in the period before and after India’s partition and the creation of Pakistan and India. Politics, religion and fanaticism came together in a well knitted pattern of purl and plain. This too was hard for me to completely enjoy. In a 1988 interview with the magazine India Today, Rushdie, talking about his writing, said:
“Actually, one of my major themes is religion and fanaticism. I have talked about the Islamic religion because that is what I knew the most about. But the idea about religious faith and the nature of religious experience and also the political implications of religious extremism are applicable with a few variations to just about any religion. In the beginning and the end of the novel, there are other kinds of fundamentalism.”
I enjoyed Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir. Published in 2012, it recounts his time in hiding from ongoing threats to his life, after The Satanic Verses. Rushdie began to use "Joseph Anton" as a pseudonym. The memoir discusses his friendships with writers such as Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Bill Buford, and Martin Amis, as well as BBC’s Alan Yentob. It includes the story of the break-up of his relationship with his second wife, Marianne Wiggins, the acrimonious nature of their split, and his third and fourth marriages (and break-ups) to Elizabeth West and Padma Lakshmi. The memoir is written in the third person.
Knife is a narration of events that started with Rushdie’s trip to the Chautauqua Institution in New York, where he was to give a speech at a weeklong series of events titled “More than Shelter: Redefining the American Home.” In an amphitheatre that could seat a thousand people, just after his introduction, a man ran down the right aisle, jumped on the stage and began stabbing him. Rushdie, including others, were taken aback, and it took a while to react and then respond. In this time, the assailant had knifed Rushdie 12 times. Reading this, I could picture the event, so graphic. Where was security, I kept asking myself as I read? It was the same question I asked myself and aloud when I heard about the stabbing in 2022. Where was security? There was none.
As the book unfolds, I see how much Rushdie was loved by his family and friends and in turn how much he loved them. His support community was large and varied. In the aftermath of the stabbing, Rushdie lost sight in his left eye and wears glasses with a dark lens over that eye. He has also lost weight. The book is a result of the rather careful documentation that Rushdie and his partner Rachel Eliza Griffiths, known as Eliza, did during his convalescence. They did audio and video recordings of his thoughts, feelings, his interactions with the hospital staff, family and friends.
I like this book as it’s a personal one. It highlights the realisations that result from a grave adversity, the possibility of the loss - of one’s life, the use of organs, mobility, the mind, speech – all that we take for granted. It reminded me the time that Covid-19 brought all lives to a halt, when I often said: “The best laid plans of mice and men, go awry,” an excerpt from a poem by Robert Burns, in the 1770s, in the realisation that adversity has a way of bringing us back to reality that we cannot control our lives to the extent we’d like to. Rushdie’s realisations are this and more.
In one part of the book, Rushdie has an imaginary conversation with the assailant, whom he calls ‘A’. He’s desperate to find out what was going on in the mind of ‘A’ in preparation for the attack. I didn’t find this particularly appealing.
I like Rushdie’s essays best. Not only that, but I lean towards his position on religion and how it needs to be more current and updated to our present times. In the present climate of religious and other kinds of fundamentalism, the call is an important one.
Knife is an important book. No magic realism here.