Knife: Salman Rushdie’s ‘mesmeric memoir’ of brutal attack

 When Salman Rushdie attended a literary event in upstate New York on the morning of 12 August 2022, it had been 33 years since the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa for his novel “The Satanic Verses”. He writes in his new book that his first thought when he saw a masked man in black clothes running fast towards him was: “So it’s you. Here you are.” His second thought was: “Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years?” 

The attacker – a 24-year-old extremist named Hadi Matar who had read just two pages of “The Satanic Verses” – managed to stab him about 15 times before being wrestled to the floor. The attack left Rushdie with a severed right optic nerve, a paralysed left hand and a dozen other serious injuries, said Boyd Tonkin in the Financial Times. Doctors initially believed he wouldn’t survive. But he did, and has now written this “fizzing, galloping memoir” about the ordeal. “Knife” is “not just a candid and fearless book but – against all odds – a defiantly witty one”. Despite all Rushdie has endured – the decade spent in hiding from 1989, now this frenzied assault – he has survived, with his sense of humour intact.