Knife by Salman Rushdie review – a life interrupted

While the author’s account of the 2022 murder attempt is a courageous defence of free speech, it is also shot through with self-regard, making it a sometimes hard book to admire

Twelve weeks after the knife attack that almost killed him on 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie returned to his home in New York. One miracle duly following another, he was fairly soon out and about again: eating (tentatively) and drinking, and generally amazing everyone with his corporeal presence. At a dinner party in Brooklyn, for instance, he saw his old friend Martin Amis, who was then dying of cancer. After this meeting, which would be their last, Amis apparently sent Rushdie an email “so laudatory that I can’t reproduce it all”. What he will tell us, however, is that having expected his fellow writer to be altered, even diminished, by his trauma, Amis was struck by his intactness. Rushdie was, he wrote, entire: “And I thought with amazement, He’s EQUAL to it.”

In his extraordinary new book about the attempt on his life, Rushdie acknowledges that this statement may not have been true – and he’s right, of course. We are no match for horror and violence, just as we’re no match for cancer or any other illness. Such things may only be endured; a body responds (or not) to whatever treatment is available. But in another way, Amis wasn’t wrong. For all that Knife is unsparing of grisly details – when Rushdie describes the initial state of the eye that he lost to his would-be assassin’s blade, lolling on his cheek like “a large soft-boiled egg”, I had to close my eyes for a few moments – what has stayed with me since I finished it has relatively little to do with its author’s flesh and bones. On the page, this could not be anyone but Rushdie. In spirit, he really is, yes, unchanged. The writing is as good as it has ever been, and also (sometimes) as bad. If he appears before us as a courageous person, a true hero of free speech, he is still a bit of a snob and a show-off. The amour propre that was often on display in Joseph Anton, his 2012 memoir of the years when he was in hiding, has not gone away, though perhaps I’m more willing to forgive it now.