In his new memoir, the celebrated novelist reflects on the 2022 stabbing that nearly took his life
“Beauty is its own excuse for Being,” Emerson once wrote. In contrast, an interesting, unusual or disturbing experience is not always its own excuse for a memoir.
It goes without saying that the novelist’s ordeal was harrowing. On Aug. 12, 2022, he found himself in the idyllic town of Chautauqua, N.Y., where he was slated to talk about “the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.” The subject is one he knows all too much about: Since Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death, pursuant to the publication of his virtuoso novel “The Satanic Verses” in 1988, the author has been in and out of hiding.
Fifteen days after his emergency surgery, during which doctors operated on multiple organs simultaneously, he was able to walk again; more than six weeks later, he returned to his home in Manhattan. But even then, he had to undergo physical therapy so as to relearn how to move his hand, and a severed nerve in his neck meant one side of his lower lip was permanently paralyzed.
Rushdie is a fount of erudite references — he alludes to Henry James, Elias Canetti and John Berryman, among others — but his own writing in “Knife” can veer into cliché. His friends’ supportive words in the wake of the attack were “comforting and strengthening”; when he revisits the site of the incident, he is “making my peace with what had happened, making peace with my life.
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