Meditation after attempted murder

We were all getting a little complacent. We were led to believe that Salman Rushdie hid in Britain for more than a decade, was somewhat exposed in the United States for a few more decades, and then was forgotten by his persecutors. Khomeini, who declared the fatwa in 1989, died a few months after Rushdie “disappeared from the front pages,” in the evocative words of Martin Amis.

But Rushdie himself was not satisfied. When a young man interrupted a speech and stabbed him multiple times in Chautauqua in August 2022, he said: “When I saw this ferocious figure charging toward me, my first thought was, “This is it!” It was you. I’m here,” he wrote. The Knife: Meditations After Attempted Murder.

Rushdie lost a lot of blood and lost his right eye. It took him eight months of treatment before he could touch his thumb with his index finger.Attacker only read 2 pages devil’s verseHe said he disliked Rushdie for being “dishonest.” “You’re lucky the man who attacked you didn’t know how to kill someone with a knife,” the doctor told Rushdie.

title knife It’s both figurative and literal. This is a book of recovery, suffering and resilience, acceptance and optimism. It’s also a touching love story. A year before the attack, Rushdie married Rachel Eliza Griffith, an American poet and novelist. Much of the story’s tenderness comes from that relationship. On their wedding day, Rushdie read a poem by E.E. Cummings. always with your heart…

It began with Rushdie stepping into a sliding glass door, injuring himself, and being taken to his house by Eliza. The sliding door moment could not have been used by chance. Rushdie is too steeped in popular culture for that.

In previous memoirs, joseph antonRushdie wrote about his years in hiding and his struggle to become normal as a writer and human being under circumstances beyond his control. knife It’s also about a situation he can’t control. However, unlike the previous book, which occasionally tended towards personal heroism, this book is more confessional, revealing human weaknesses. It gives the writing a special charm.

Mr. Rushdie went to Chautauqua because “I had a lot of domestic bills to pay…it was very convenient to have money,” he says. You have to admire such honesty.

Cultural references, from literature to movies to rock music to contemporary celebrities, enrich the story from the hospital bed to recovery at home. The fictional “interview” with his assailant (who is not named in the book) is purely Rushdie’s, and in some ways a personal manifesto of art and literature.

That’s when Rushdie told his attacker (in his mind), “I saw you were my failed murderer…I might have tried to kill you because you didn’t know how to laugh.” It ends by saying.

lots of laughter happening knife, It helps bring into sharper relief the pain and frustration of a great writer. Will the Nobel Committee be able to continue to ignore him?