A second chance. Book review: The Knife by Salman Rushdie. “Reflections following an assassination attempt”.

“On August 12, 2022, at a quarter to eleven on a Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and nearly killed by a young man with a knife as soon as I stepped on the stage at the Chautauqua Amphitheater to speak about how important it is to protect writers from danger”.

In this way, in the specific tone for a report or, more quickly, for a statement to the Police begins knife, the latest, perhaps Salman Rushdie’s most painful and personal book. One that contains, as the subtitle says, “reflections following an assassination attempt.” Book placed, and not by chance, under the sign of a quote from Samuel Beckett: We are different, different from who we were before yesterday’s misfortune. I say not by chance because the Irish-born writer was many, many years ago, at a time when he had yet written very little of what he would become an opera (he was working then, in 1938, at Murphy), the victim of an aggression. Somewhat similar to what Rushdie will face. This was because he had refused to comply with the request of a pimp, he had not only had the strength to face it, to recover from a knife blow, but also the strength to meet in court with the aggressor whose act, according to his own confessions, in what André Gide called, in The Vatican Caves, “the free act”.

I do not know whether, in the conference that never took place, Rushdie intended to evoke the Becket caset. Pesemne, yes. But I know for sure that the decision of the one who had written Oh, what beautiful days! of confronting the aggressor meant enormously for the way in which, many years later, the writer of Indian origin knew how to capitalize on what he himself calls a second chance. A chance which, behold, existed and which accounts for the most consistent part of knife. Volume published in 2024 in English and also in 2024 in Romanian, at the publishing house from Iași Polyrom. In the excellent translation and with the notes of Dana Crăciun.

I admit that it was no accident that I mentioned the title of a certain play by Samuel Beckett. Title that sounds in English Happy Days. For what happened to Salman Rushdie on that late Friday morning marked the end of a five-year phase of happiness. From the famous, terrible fatwadeath sentence decided by Ayatollah Khomeyni at the end of the 80s, about which we, the Romanians, learned from Radio Free Europethe place where I also learned about The Satanic Verses (I remind you that in his last days, during his so enigmatic visit to Iran, Ceaușescu also paid tribute to the one who had become the symbol of religious fanaticism in absolute form) a consistent number of years had passed. After a period of life in which police protection had mingled with the need for renewed explanations, even with the need from a certain point becoming the burden of defending the book, Rushdie had come to live in relative normality. And even in a certain happiness given by meeting Rachel, i.e. with the one commonly known by the first name Eliza, the one who will become his wife in 2021. After a whole series of events recalled in luxurious detail, with humor and tenderness on the part beginning of the book. There was a certain love surprise that somehow reminded me of Marivaux’s plays, there was also a small accident during which Rushdie was covered in blood and broke his glasses (these things were repeated exactly and during the 27 seconds that the attack of August 12, 2022 lasted, an attack dreamed of only a few days before), the illness followed Sars Cov 2. And finally, there was a ceremony and a wedding reception held without the participation of the family who were not allowed to come from England to the United States precisely because of the protective measures still in place. All this marked five years of happiness. About which Rushdie at one point began to write, despite the sayings of Montherlant who had stated somewhere that: “happiness writes with white ink on white sheets”. After the failed Chautauqua conference. Before which then intervened the 27 seconds, memorized in the smallest and most terrible details, intervened the knife, perceived as an instrument of terror, as neighborhood weapon and which makes those crimes committed with him establish between the victim and the aggressor a certain kind of intimidated. Invisible knife, which Rushdie declares from the very beginning unable to describe, but which he did his duty more than adequately. Materialized in an impressive number of wounds on the body, in the eye that became “a monstrosity”, finally lost for good. Contradiction of prognoses intervened- will survive/won’t survive, the morally saving arrival of Eliza, the encouraging signals of friends and most of the literary world, but also the backlash from India and Pakistan. Reactions that couldn’t help but hurt. Finally, the decision to survive intervened. And the awareness of the fact that “there is a recovery of the body”, described in luxurious detail in the first part of the book, subtitled part Angel of Deathand especially in the chapter Hamot and “a recovery of mind and spirit”. About which we are talking in the second part of the volume. The one titled Angel of Life.

And now we return to Beckett and the story of his youth. To the fact that the future great playwright went to see his attacker. The fact became an example for the author Satanic verses. Who has his own way of meeting the criminal. Rushdie does not want to write in the book the real name of the person who wanted to take his life. She prefers to call him by an initial. A simple A. Salman Rushdie quotes some of his statements from which it is clear that the idea of ​​the assassination, of this act of cultural terrorism, had not the slightest real foundation. The one named A. never admitted his guilt, although his act with criminal intentions had happened in plain sight, he refused the deals with the prosecutors.

But these are not the details that really interest Salman Rushdie. The writer would have liked to know the intimate details of the crime planned by A. But as his statements did not really say much, Rushdie imagined four meetings, four dialogues with him. Pesme dialogues with therapeutic functions, necessary for vision rebuildingHAPPINESSthat’s right, “a wounded happiness”, just as a second visit to Chautauqua was also needed…. Read the entire article on Contributors.ro