All day yesterday I was making my way back to Chicago from Ivins, Utah: first, a two-hour drive to Las Vegas, then a two-hour wait in the airport, with the flashing and music of slot machines IN THE WAITING AREA, and finally a four-hour flight back home. I am exhausted. Which is to say: posting will be very light today—if there is any.
But on the way home I read Salman Rushdie’s latest book, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, which came out in April. Click the screenshot below to go to the Amazon site. I have to say that the cover is wonderfully designed given the contents:
It’s a short (200-page) account of the attempted murder of Rushdie on August 12, 2022 by accused perp Hadi Matar, a Lebanese-American likely trying to fulfill the fatwa issued on Rushdie in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Ayatollah considered Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses as anti-Muslim blasphemy, and called for the author’s assassination. A $3 million bounty accompanied the fatwa. Rushdie went into hiding, but several people connected with the book were killed.
Finally, after 33 years, the fatwa was fulfilled when Matar ran at Rushdie as the author was about to address a Chautauqua, New York audience about the need for a “safe space” for politically demonized writers. Matar apparently stabbed Rushdie 15 times in the neck, eye, chest, and hand, blinding him in one eye and rendering his left hand largely useless. For several days Rushdie hovered between life and death, but thanks to expert trauma care, he survived. His eye remains but its sightless, and his hand is only minimally useful. But, Rushdie avers, he was largely saved by the love of his (fifth) wife, the African-American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. In many ways the book is a paean to Griffiths, who was by his side the whole way, and the description of their mutual love is quite moving.
Rushdie, as you see from this book, is back in action, and on to another novel. I have read only one of his, but it was a corker: Midnight’s Children, which I picked up for a pittance in a used-book stall in New Delhi. I was mesmerized by the novel, which won not only a Booker Prize, but the “Booker of the Bookers“, an award for the 25th anniversary of the Prize. In other words, it was judged the best of the 25 Booker winners. I’ve read a fair number of Booker-Prize winners, and think Rushdie’s award was well deserved. Midnight’s Children is a great classic, a magical-realism account centered on the partition of India in 1947. PLEASE read it if you haven’t.
Sad to say, that is the only novel of Rushdie’s I’ve read, and I must catch up. He’s written about 20 of them, apparently of varying quality, including an earlier autobiography called Joseph Anton, dealing with his post-fatwa journey. But I hear some of the novels are gems, and I must get to them. He’s a likely future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which I think has been delayed only because Stockholm fears Muslim backlash if Rushdie wins.
As for Knife, it’s a gripping short read and the details of Rushdie’s assault and subsequent recovery make the book one that’s hard to put down. I recommend it highly for a short read and for those interested in Rushdie. A fair amount of the last part of the book is a fictionalized dialogue between Rushdie and his assailant, which changes the pace of the book substantially. At first I didn’t like this bit, but the more I read it, the more I enjoyed it. It is, I suppose, a way for Rushdie to come to terms with Matar and his attack, trying to suss out why a New Jersey resident would knife the writer after so many years.
Below is a Wikipedia photo of the post-attack Rushdie. He decided not to have his eye removed but rather to hide it with a dark lens in his glasses. He does have macular degeneration in his other eye, and fears above all that he will go blind. But it looks as though they’ve stabilized his condition:
Matar, by the way, is still awaiting trial. They delayed it because his public defender argued that Rushdie’s published account was essential for Matar’s defense.
Liked the book a lot. This and his other memoir, Joseph Anton, I liked far better than his magical-realism novels (although Quichotte was pretty good.)
Thanks for this – a must read I’d say – a singular Rushdie piece, standing apart (I have not read it) – sounds like “real life” raw human expression, and a rarity in that not everyone who gets stabbed is inclined to reflect – indeed, meditate – on it.
In short, I think it will confirm my suspicion : Life is a gift – despite what it brings.
Live long and prosper, Mr. Rushdie.
BTW the trailer for his Masterclass is worth hearing – try searching for it, I din’t have it handy and I’m out of ti—
The religion of peace. NOT!
Indeed. The fatwa hasn’t been fulfilled either as Rushdie is still alive.
Midnight’s Children seems to be a book that you either love or hate. I err on the “hate” side, despite having been thoroughly looking forward to reading it and being a Booker enthusiast.
Took me months to finish, plodding through each chapter of dense and often boring prose, in my opinion.
Which is a great shame! As those it really touches seem to rate it very highly and it seemed to tick a lot of the boxes that would make me enjoy a book. Perhaps I will give it a second read someday.
(There’s a book study guide I like called Shmoop that gives books a tough-o-meter rating on how hard it is to read…MC gets the highest score. The only other book I’ve found on there that gets a 10/10 is Finnegan’s Wake.)
I too wanted to like MC and was grossly disappointed to find it unreadable.
Rushdie as an author is not for everyone but he remains an inspiring personality.
That rating for difficulty is bad; it’s nowhere near as hard as Finnegan’s Wake, which is the hardest book ever (I’d put Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past way above Midnight’s Children for TEDIUM). I still think MC was a masterpiece, and the Booker judges agree!
I just checked out Midnights Children from my library. When you think about it, the fact I was able to do that without even leaving my house is a bit of magical realism itself.
I’d think that the obvious choice for your next Rushdie book is Satanic Verses.
I had a late thought: Out of curiosity, did you ever read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez? It’s the first book I think of when I hear “magical realism.”
My former journalism professor said that it should be required reading for everybody alive. I did go on to read the book (even though it was not, in fact, required reading!), and I’d say it’s on my top ten lifetime list of novels.
Yes, I read it and loved it. By and large I’m not big on magical realism, but both the Marquez book and Midnight’s Children are required reading, as you learned by reading it. It’s a wonderful book.
I read Satanic Verses back when it was first published and that got me hooked. Rushdie is one of my favorite writers. I agree, not every one of his novels are great, but they’re thought provoking. A particular favorite of mine is The Enchantress of Florence.
This strikes me as a bizarre legal decision. Would they postpone it indefinitely if the victim didn’t write about it? I can’t wrap my brain around it!
I don’t know; I just found this out from Wikipedia. I suppose what Rushdie says, or how he describes the attack, could count as “evidence”. After all, Matar pleaded “not guilty”. But given that a thousand people witnessed that attack and Matar was apprehended on the spot, he’d be better off doing a plea bargain. It seems that he’ll be accused of both state crimes (attempted murder) and terrorism-related federal crimes. And you get very little time off for good behavior for federal crimes.
I loved “Knife” as well. I found it very moving, especially Rushdie ‘s description of his and Eliza’s relationship. In his fictional conversation with Matar, Rushdie seemed almost compassionate (though angry) with the attacker.
While reading “Knife,” I also wondered if this had happened to anyone else, could they have afforded the superb medical treatment that Rushdie received? Wealth and fame definitely have their advantages.
When “Satanic Verses” was first released, I bought the hardback and attempted to read it. I found Rushdie’s prose so dense and tedious that I only managed to read about a fourth of the novel before giving up.
As far as I remember, Rushdie had medical insurance through NYU, where he’s some kind of adjunct faculty.
I read Knife. It’s scary and hard to put down. The only criticism I have is that it’s very much internally directed. But how can it not be? Unlike Ginger K, above, I thought that the fictional conversation with his attacker was tedious and could have been left out. The real events were compelling enough on their own. Good book.
“He’s a likely future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which I think has been delayed only because Stockholm fears Muslim backlash if Rushdie wins.”
It is not that the academy fears Muslim backlash (which they of course do, hugely) as much as the majority of them are postmodernist relativists and also extremely pretentious. The academy is not favorably looked upon in Sweden, not since the scandals and the internal strife (https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/behind-the-scandal-at-the-swedish-academy-a-1207928.html) but also becuase they go out of their way to find obscure authors and steer clear of anyone with any amount of popularity amongst the common folks.
“they go out of their way to find obscure authors and steer clear of anyone with any amount of popularity amongst the common folks.”
Not counting Bob Dylan, of course. Since many of the last, say, 20 winners of the Nobel for Lit write for non-English reading audiences, I am reluctant to say whether they are popular amongst the “common folk,” but that was never a criterion of a literary prize anyway.
American born Matar was radicalized on a teenage trip to his Dad’s village in Hezb-land southern Lebanon, the place Israel is right now trying to clean out of terrorists.
I think, after the post 2006 “settlement” the hilariously stupid UN 1701? edict of Hezb disarming failed, as it has, the only solution now is for Israel to make the 15% of Lebanon south of the Letani river an uninhabitable zone. It is a lot for the Connecticut sized Lebanese Republic but it (just eyeballing it here) is much smaller than the city of NY.
The toll of Shia’ Islam in Lebanon is huge and unpredictable.
Onwards Israeli heroes.
D.A.
NYC
I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories and loved it. I just saw on Wikipedia that it is considered a children’s book. That was not obvious to me when I read it. Not sure what that says about me or about the book. But them’s the facts.
I’ve been a Rushdie fan for many years starting with Midnight’s Children. Couldn’t put it down. Satanic Verses was another page turner for me. Also loved The Moor’s Last Sigh and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. All great works of imagination. Not so with Joseph Anton his not so secret bio. A brilliant writer whose many books grace my shelves. And will continue.
In 2007, after the fatwa had been issued and Rushdie had been sort of in hiding for some time but was said to be resuming some public appearances, I was in a big movie-watching phase involving almost weekly trips to movie theaters to watch whatever struck me as likely of some interest. I guess that convoluted sentence was meant to explain why I was at the now-defunct Piper’s Alley movie theater watching “Then She Found Me”, a dramedy starring Helen Hunt and Bette Midler. At one point, Hunt’s character thinks she may be pregnant and goes in for a medical appointment. Her regular ob/gyn is away or something, and she sees a substitute doctor.
That doctor looked so familiar! I couldn’t understand why, as my mind tried to review a mental roster of middle-aged bearded supporting actors I might recognize … but no hits. Then the doctor, who had stepped out of the room, came back in and continued the medical consultation. It hit me, and I audibly exclaimed “Hey that’s Salman Rushdie!” . And it was.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0750723/