Knife by Salman Rushdie review – a story of hatred defeated by love

A book its author ‘would much rather not have needed to write’ ranges far beyond his attempted murder and recovery

A couple of nights before he was almost killed by a stranger with a knife, Salman Rushdie dreamed about being attacked by a Roman gladiator with a spear. He’d had similar dreams ever since Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa following publication of The Satanic Verses, back in 1989, imagining “my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me”. When on the morning of 12 August 2022, in Chautauqua in upstate New York, on stage to talk about (of all things) the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, he saw a figure in black rushing towards him, his first thought was “So it’s you. Here you are”, and his second, more bemused, was “Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years?”

In his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton, Rushdie expressed his post-fatwa disorientation by writing of his experiences in the third person, as if the trauma were happening to someone else. Here, as he says, it’s an I-story (and also, since he lost his right one, an eye-story): “When somebody wounds you 15 times that definitely feels very first person.” Joseph Anton (the Christian names of his literary heroes Conrad and Chekhov) was the codename he adopted in hiding to avoid using his own name. Here it’s his attacker’s name he avoids using – he refers to Hadi Matar as “the A”, short for Assailant or would-be Assassin. Or, for Ass: like the Islamist terrorists who have attacked and even murdered people associated with Rushdie, Matar’s knowledge of The Satanic Verses was negligible – he said that he’d read just a couple of pages. After being charged with attempted murder and assault, Matar pled not guilty. Bail was denied, and trial will be held in due course.