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Knife

Meditations After an Attempted Murder

ebook
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 10 weeks
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 10 weeks
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New Yorker • The Globe and Mail • The Guardian • Winnipeg Free Press • NPR • Slate Kirkus Reviews • TIME • From Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are.
What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.
Knife is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 13, 2024
      Rushdie follows Victory City with a forceful and surprisingly good-humored account of the 2022 knife attack that nearly killed him. At a speaking engagement in Chautaqua, N.Y., a 24-year-old man Rushdie refers to only as “A” rushed the stage where he was speaking and stabbed him multiple times, including in the eye. Authorities swiftly connected the assault to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini after Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988. Rushdie chronicles the year following the attack, during which he recovered from liver damage, the removal of part of his small intestine, and the loss of his right eye. Though he writes of being plagued by nightmares and gory memories of the assault, Rushdie’s wit shines through (“Let me offer this piece of advice to you, gentle reader: if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut... avoid it”). Just as arresting is an imagined conversation with A, which sees Rushdie trying to parse his attacker’s religious convictions. By the time the narrative comes full circle, with Rushdie speaking on the same Chautaqua stage a year later, he’s opened a fascinating window into perhaps the most vulnerable period of his life. It’s a rewarding tale of resilience.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from June 1, 2024
      The noted author recounts the vicious August 2022 assault that nearly ended his life. "To be born again...first you have to die." So speaks the protagonist at the opening of Rushdie's infamous novel The Satanic Verses, which has brought him so much trouble over the years. The alleged perpetrator of the 2022 attack, whom the author calls "the A"--it stands for many things, including Assassin and Assailant--was unfamiliar with the contents of the book, so that "we can deduce that, whatever the attack was about, it wasn't about The Satanic Verses." Ironically, the knife assault, which cost Rushdie the use of an eye and a hand, came at a conference devoted to "the importance of keeping writers safe from harm." Indeed, the audience saved him, restraining the attacker. For Rushdie, that moment speaks to the "worst and best of human nature," the urge to harm and the urge to protect acted out at once. The author's account is seldom harrowing. Instead, he writes with calm assurance about long weeks in the hospital--and, "because you have no alternative," the poking and prodding that come with it. He affectingly evokes the accompanying emotions, including the psychic emptiness that comes in the presence of death, which did not shake him from his atheism: "My godlessness remains intact. That isn't going to change in this second-chance life." What sustained him in recovery, he writes, was a blend of willpower, good medical attention, and, especially, love found late in life after years of living alone. Addressing "the A" in absentia at several points, he comes close to taunting. Art survives the artist even as his alleged attacker, locked in prison, will soon be irrelevant to the world; in this instance, the artist survives, too: "After the angel of death, the angel of life." A graceful meditation on life and death that captures Rushdie at his most observant and lyrical.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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