Salman Rushdie's memoir 'Knife' recounts his attack and recovery

Summary

NPR's Book of the Day: Salman Rushdie's Memoir 'Knife' – A Detailed Summary

In the January 1, 2025 episode of NPR's Book of the Day, host Andrew Limbong delves into Salman Rushdie's poignant memoir, 'Knife', which recounts the harrowing attack on the acclaimed author in 2022 and his journey of recovery. This episode offers an in-depth exploration of Rushdie's experiences, emotions, and reflections following the violent incident, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of his resilience and the profound impact on his life and work.

Introduction to 'Knife' and the Attack

Andrew Limbong opens the episode by introducing Salman Rushdie, renowned for masterpieces like Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, and Victory City. He highlights the infamous knife attack in 2022, marking a rare moment when Rushdie, typically low-key, chose to speak publicly about the ordeal.

Andrew Limbong [00:02]: "You also likely know that he was attacked, stabbed on stage in 2022. ... But now he's ready to talk. His new memoir recounting that event and what his life has been like since is titled Knife."

The 2022 Stabbing: Details and Emotions

In his memoir, Rushdie vividly describes the attack, painting a graphic picture of that terrifying day. He recounts the sudden emergence of the assailant from the audience and the swift progression of the attack.

Salman Rushdie [01:25]: "I saw this man rise out of the audience..."

Salman Rushdie [01:49]: "And ever since then, there really hasn't been much risk talking about your life."

The conversation delves into the historical context of the attack, referencing the 1988 fatwa issued by Iran’s supreme leader, which had long threatened Rushdie's life following the publication of The Satanic Verses. Despite living under police protection in New York since the early 2000s, the attack in 2022 shattered his sense of security.

The Aftermath: Physical and Emotional Recovery

Rushdie opens up about the physical toll of the stabbing, including the permanent blindness in his right eye and the limited sensation in his fingers. He reflects on the randomness of the attack and the intense emotions he felt lying injured on stage.

Salman Rushdie [03:43]: "Yeah. Because I thought, here I am in the middle of upstate New York... dying as I thought. Dying in the company of strangers."

Salman Rushdie [04:00]: "I'm lucky that I got away with it."

Despite the severity of his injuries, Rushdie emphasizes his survival as a combination of luck and circumstance, including the presence of a trauma hospital nearby and favorable weather conditions that enabled emergency services to reach him promptly.

Reflections on Faith and Writing

A significant portion of the memoir explores Rushdie's reflections on faith, miracles, and the role of storytelling in his life. He discusses how the attack, a near-death experience devoid of supernatural elements, reinforced his appreciation for everyday life and influenced his literary perspectives.

Salman Rushdie [06:33]: "No, ma'am. I mean, one of the things that is interesting about that near death experience is that there was nothing supernatural about it."

Rushdie contrasts his disbelief in miracles with the magical realism in his writing, suggesting that his books serve as a bridge between fiction and reality, allowing for the acceptance of the world's inherent surrealism.

Acknowledging Love and Support from Eliza

Central to 'Knife' is Rushdie's profound love for his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, a poet and novelist who plays a pivotal role in his recovery. Their relationship, rekindled in his later years, underscores the memoir's themes of love, support, and resilience.

Salman Rushdie [09:38]: "You know, it's a very interesting thing to find love late in life, and I wasn't expecting it."

Rushdie recounts the story of how he met Eliza, illustrating a moment of vulnerability and unexpected connection that later became a cornerstone of his strength during the recovery process.

Revisiting the Attack Site for Closure

Seeking closure, Rushdie describes his decision to return to the exact location of the attack nearly thirteen months later. Accompanied by Eliza, this visit symbolizes his attempt to confront and overcome the trauma, ultimately finding a sense of relief and liberation.

Salman Rushdie [15:10]: "I had this physical sense of somebody lifting a weight from my shoulders... I feel lighter."

This poignant moment in the memoir highlights the healing power of facing one's fears and the importance of companionship in overcoming profound trauma.

Challenges to His Literary Legacy

Rushdie candidly addresses the impact of the fatwa and the stabbing on his literary reputation. He expresses frustration that these violent episodes overshadow his literary achievements, potentially deterring new readers from exploring his extensive body of work.

Salman Rushdie [12:00]: "Yeah, I know this is the big damage to my work as a writer."

Despite this, he encourages listeners to explore his other novels, emphasizing their value and the diverse narratives they offer beyond the shadow of his personal ordeals.

Final Thoughts: Humor and Moving Forward

In a lighter twist, Rushdie shares humorous anecdotes about the aftermath of the attack, including the damage to his Ralph Lauren suit and the subsequent goodwill gesture from his tailor. This blend of humor amidst tragedy illustrates his enduring spirit and ability to find light in dark times.

Salman Rushdie [15:58]: "Yeah. I had a nice Ralph Lauren suit."

Salman Rushdie [16:28]: "They said, you give you a discount."

Conclusion

Salman Rushdie's 'Knife' offers a compelling narrative of survival, love, and the enduring power of storytelling. Through his candid reflections and vivid recounting of events, Rushdie provides listeners with an intimate glimpse into his life post-attack, highlighting his resilience and unwavering commitment to his craft. This episode of NPR's Book of the Day not only celebrates Rushdie's literary contributions but also honors his extraordinary journey of healing and personal growth.

For those interested in exploring Rushdie's experiences further, Knife is available for purchase, offering an in-depth look at one of literature's most celebrated voices facing unimaginable adversity.

Transcript

[Andrew Limbong]

Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. A big name author on the POD means I don't gotta do much heavy lifting. You know who Salman Rushdie is, right? He wrote Midnight's Children, the Satanic Verses, more recently Victory City. You also likely know that he was attacked, stabbed on stage in 2022. He's kept pretty low key since the attack. You know, low key for Rushdie. But now he's ready to talk. His new memoir recounting that event and what his life has been like since is titled Knife. And he talks to NPR's Mayor Louise Kelly about not just the attack, but surviving and where this whole ordeal has left him spiritually. That's ahead.

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[Mayor Louise Kelly]

Salman Rushdie is a writer, a storyteller. So when you ask him to tell the story of the day in 2022 when he was attacked and nearly killed by a young man with a knife, Rushdie paints a vivid picture.

[Salman Rushdie]

I saw this man rise out of the audience.

[Interviewer]

You're at the lectern at this point.

[Salman Rushdie]

You stepped on the stage? No, we were sitting in chairs on the stage with a little table between us. And this man got up out of the audience and came towards the stage. There's a few steps up. And then he started sprinting. He sprinted up the steps and came at me. And I immediately thought, oh, it's actually happening.

[Mayor Louise Kelly]

What Salman Rushdie is referring to is the fatwa, a response to his 1988 novel the Satanic Verses. Iran's supreme leader issued a ruling the following year ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. He lived in hiding for a while, police protection 24 hours a day. But around the turn of the century, Rushdie says the Iranians, quote, called off the dogs.

[Salman Rushdie]

And ever since then, there really hasn't been much risk talking about your life. I came to live in New York early in the year 2000, and I've been here ever since. And I've done hundreds of public events, you know, talks, readings, lectures, discussions without there ever being the faintest murmur of a problem. And so I had really come to feel that okay, this is ancient history.

[Interviewer]

But on that day, your first thought was, okay, it's you. You're here.

[Salman Rushdie]

Finally, after it felt like it, I say in the book something to the effect that it felt like he was a time traveler, somebody emerging out of the past.

[Mayor Louise Kelly]

Rushdie writes about the attack in his memoir out this week titled Knife. When he came to talk with me about it in our New York bureau the other day, he wore glasses that obscured his right eye, which was blinded in the stabbing.

[Salman Rushdie]

I thought he hit me. I didn't. I never saw the knife. I didn't realize that there was a weapon in his hand until I saw the blood coming out.

[Interviewer]

How many times did he stab you?

[Salman Rushdie]

I've been trying to work it out. I think it's at least 12. It might be 13 or 14. I keep trying to count them, and I lose count.

[Interviewer]

You describe lying at on the floor, you're in a huge pool of your own blood, and that your overwhelming emotion, it wasn't fear, it wasn't pain, it was extreme loneliness.

[Salman Rushdie]

Yeah. Because I thought, here I am in the middle of upstate New York, almost in Canada, very far from everyone I love, dying as I thought. I thought I was dying. Dying in the company of strangers.

[Interviewer]

And that felt on a stage.

[Salman Rushdie]

On a stage that felt worse than the dying. And, I mean, I'm lucky that I got away with it. I think I'm very lucky that I got away with it. I mean, I was lucky for a start that there was this trauma hospital just across the state line in Pennsylvania that in a helicopter was quite close. I mean, I was lucky that it was a. That it was a sunny day. If it had been rainy and stormy, the helicopter would not have been able to fly, and then I'd be dead.

[Interviewer]

There's something so odd about hearing you describe anything about that day as lucky, but. Yes.

[Salman Rushdie]

Yeah. I mean, one of the surgeons who had operated on me said. He said, you know, first you were very unlucky, and then you were very lucky. And I said, well, what's the lucky part? And he said, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife. And it's true. I mean, if you look at the injuries, they were basically, he was flailing around, just putting the knife everywhere he could think of. I mean, he came very close to killing me, but he didn't.

[Interviewer]

You never use his name, either now or in the book. You call him the A. For what? The attacker.

[Salman Rushdie]

The attacker, the assailant, the adversary. And Ruder Words would begin with a.

[Interviewer]

Leave that to people's imaginations.

[Salman Rushdie]

I think most people could imagine it.

[Interviewer]

You recount in the book and I'll leave it to people to read the long two steps forward, one step back of your recovery. You're sitting before me now. April 2024. How are you?

[Salman Rushdie]

I'm not so bad, thank you. I mean, there are things that are not going to get better. Like my right eye is not coming back.

[Interviewer]

That was the worst of your wounds, which is saying something because the wound.

[Salman Rushdie]

Because the knife went, I mean, went all the way to the optic nerve. And if you damage the optic nerve, there's nothing to be done. And the left hand, I mean, it's better in the sense that I've got a lot of movement back.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, you're opening and closing your fingers.

[Salman Rushdie]

But there's still like almost no feeling in my middle two fingers here.

[Interviewer]

So you're alive.

[Salman Rushdie]

I'm alive.

[Interviewer]

Your wounds were such that, as you have already suggested, you maybe shouldn't be.

[Salman Rushdie]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

How does that have you thinking? I mean, it's a miracle in a way.

[Salman Rushdie]

And you're someone who has never believed in miracles.

[Interviewer]

Exactly. Where does that leave you?

[Salman Rushdie]

Except my books believe in them. My books are full of them. So maybe my books allowed the miracles to cross over from fiction into fact.

[Interviewer]

Has it changed your thinking at all in terms of faith? God? Is there a higher power out there that made sure I would get through this?

[Salman Rushdie]

No, ma'am. I mean, one of the things that is interesting about that near death experience is that there was nothing supernatural about it. No choirs of angels, no tunnel of light, nothing like that. It was just somebody physically lying on the ground bleeding to death. So I thought, well, that suggests to me that maybe I'm not wrong. What it does do, getting that close to death and then coming back from it, is it gives you an immensely increased sense of the value of every day of life.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I can imagine.

[Salman Rushdie]

Just immensely. Just wake up in the morning and you think, still here.

[Interviewer]

Go back to your writing again. Because as people who have read your fiction will know, well, all kinds of magical things do happen in your writing. Your characters do things that do not align in any way with reality or science. Why do you let yourself do things in writing that you don't allow yourself to believe in in life?

[Salman Rushdie]

Well, because I think that realism as a literary form is not a sufficient way to describe the craziness of the world. The world is insane, as we see every day on the news. And realism is a wonderful form, but it doesn't allow you to accept that the world is now not realistic. The world is surreal. And surrealism seems to me to be closer to the real. That's what I think I'm doing.

[Interviewer]

Is this you using what you do best, using language as your own knife?

[Salman Rushdie]

In a way, yes, exactly. That's what the book is called, Knife. Not only because it's about a knife, but because it is a knife. It's, you know, I got myself into a knife fight. Somehow I had to have a knife of my own.

[Andrew Limbong]

One of the most striking things about Rushdie's memoir is that it's actually mostly about how much he loves his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. He calls her Eliza. And there's a really intense moment in this next part of the interview where Rushdie visits the site where he was stabbed and says how important it was for him to not be alone.

[Mayor Louise Kelly]

In Salman Rushdie's new memoir, there is a clear villain. It's a young man wielding a knife who leapt from the audience and stabbed and almost killed Rushdie on a stage in upstate New York in August of 2022. There is also a clear hero to the story, Rushdie's wife, Eliza.

[Salman Rushdie]

You know, it's a very interesting thing to find love late in life, and I wasn't expecting it. In fact, I was actively not expecting it.

[Mayor Louise Kelly]

Rusty was already in his 70s when he married for a fifth time in 2021. When he stopped by our studios in New York the other day to talk about his new book, Knife, he spoke of being so entranced, so distracted the night he met Rachel Eliza Griffiths, that he managed to walk into a glass.

[Salman Rushdie]

Door, roof terrace, sliding glass, out onto the terrace. And I said, let's go out and look at the view. Nice summer evening, romantic. And so she went out ahead of me and through the sliding door that was open. And I was so distracted that I didn't notice that the other half of the sliding door was shut. And so I walked wham into it and fell down and my glasses cut my nose. And so there's blood coming down my nose. And it was very dramatic. And I was lying there thinking, do not pass out.

[Interviewer]

Hold yourself together.

[Salman Rushdie]

Yeah. Which I didn't. And then, you know, later on when this appalling attack happened, it seemed like that meeting with Eliza had been like a comic pre figuring of this, which also involved falling down classes, cutting your nose.

[Mayor Louise Kelly]

The prefiguring he's talking about, the foreshadowing is of the violent attack that nearly killed him 20 months ago. He he was stabbed at least a dozen times. Rushdie says he keeps trying to count and loses track on the program. Yesterday we heard how he's doing. Basically, he was left blind in one eye, left with almost no feeling in two fingers on his left hand. But ask Rushdie the most upsetting thing about the attack, that it has turned him once again into somebody he has tried very hard not not to be.

[Interviewer]

You write in knife about how for the 33 plus years since Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa calling for your death, that you have fought against being defined as the guy with the fatwa on him, and that you've come to realize no matter what you do, no matter how glorious a book you have ever written or ever will write, this is what you'll be known for. And now additionally, as the guy who got knifed.

[Salman Rushdie]

Yeah, I know this is the big damage to my work as a writer.

[Interviewer]

Is it? Because it seems like you're making lemonade out of lemons here.

[Salman Rushdie]

Well, I'm trying to do that, but, you know, I've spent Most of my 50 years of my life trying to be a novelist. And what this whole episode from 1989 until now has done is in a way to turn people's attention away from my novels. And, you know, some of them are quite good and I would like people to have a look at them. And that frustrates me that for many people, this subject is so. Because it's a big news subject, it's so prominent in people's minds that what my books are like is somewhere further to the back of their interest.

[Interviewer]

Although it's also possible that a whole new generation picked up the Satanic Verses because of this.

[Salman Rushdie]

Yeah, that's possible.

[Interviewer]

Not that one would have wished that was the.

[Salman Rushdie]

I always tell people not to read that book first because it has too much baggage around it. You know, I say read something else. Read the most recent novel, Victory City. Read. Read Midnight Children. Back at the other end of my life, read Harun and the Sea of Stories, which I wrote for my young son. I mean, there's, I think, you know, when you've got 22 books sitting on a bookshelf, there's a lot of ways into a writer's life.

[Interviewer]

Do you feel safe now?

[Salman Rushdie]

Well, I feel safe partly because, yes, I feel safe and partly because we've been sensible, we've taken steps to make things safer. You know, it's probably not a good idea to talk about security on the primetime media.

[Interviewer]

We don't need to get into the details of your. Whatever measures you may be taking, there's.

[Salman Rushdie]

A thing that has become significant again in a way that it hadn't been. So. Yeah, we're taking care.

[Interviewer]

Chapter 8 in this book is titled Closure with a question Mark. And I want you to tell me about going back 13 months later to the exact place where you attacked. Why do that to yourself?

[Salman Rushdie]

Well, because it's. It just became for me a kind of. I don't want to say obsession, but it became very important for me. I thought, to tell myself that I was standing up in the place where I fell down. I just thought it would mean a lot to me. I mean, Eliza wasn't delighted about it.

[Interviewer]

She came with you. Your wife.

[Salman Rushdie]

Yeah. She sat down, she said, you're not going by yourself. But I was absolutely determined to do it. And when I was standing on the stage, I shouldn't tell you because it spoils the end of the book, but when I was standing on the stage, I had this physical sense of somebody lifting a weight from my shoulders. Felt like somebody came and lifted a burden off me. And I said to Eliza, I said, you know, I don't know why, but actually I feel lighter. And that's more than I had hoped that it would do. But that's what it did.

[Interviewer]

I love, too. You just told me you wanted to stand where you had fallen down.

[Salman Rushdie]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

You also talked about how alone you felt in the moment of the stabbing. And to go back and not be alone.

[Salman Rushdie]

Not be alone was very important because Eliza had never been there, you know, so she didn't know what it looked like, so she'd had to imagine it. So for her to see it for real, that was difficult for her also for both of us, I think it was an important moment.

[Interviewer]

Well, I will bring us to a close by noting yours is not a laugh out loud. Funny book on many levels, but I did laugh out loud as you're describing that scene of going back, standing where you had fallen down on that stage. And it seemed that one of the things that annoyed you most about being knifed and nearly murdered was that the dude ruined your suit.

[Salman Rushdie]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Salman Rushdie]

Yes. I had a nice Ralph Lauren suit.

[Mayor Louise Kelly]

You.

[Interviewer]

Right. I stood where I had almost been killed wearing, I have to tell you, my new Ralph Lauren suit. And you felt whole.

[Salman Rushdie]

That was one of the things I did for myself, to feel good.

[Interviewer]

The new suit worked.

[Salman Rushdie]

The new suit worked. Yeah. I even got a discount.

[Interviewer]

What? Because the tailor was like, oh, God, we need to get you a good new suit.

[Salman Rushdie]

Because they said, you give you a discount.

[Interviewer]

You should look sharp for this moment.

[Salman Rushdie]

No, I didn't tell them I was going to wear it to go back there. They just put on being nice to me. Glad.

[Interviewer]

So a happy ending in its way. It's a lot to go through for a new roller. Well, thank you.

[Salman Rushdie]

Thank you.

[Interviewer]

This was fun.

[Salman Rushdie]

This was indeed.

[Mayor Louise Kelly]

The writer Salman Rushdie in our New York bureau talking about his new memoir, Knife. To watch a 30 minute video of this conversation, you can visit NPR's YouTube channel, YouTube.com NPR.

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