Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is Salman Rushdie’s forensic retelling of the 2022 attempt on his life by a knife-slashing young man on a public stage. Straining every memory cell, Rushdie provides a fascinating account of the harrowing event and the even more harrowing painstaking recovery, sans one eye. Wielding plot like the literary master he is, he steps us through the attack while dodging back in time to provide context, while at the same time dissecting the meaning behind the ordeal using all his powers of scholarship and metaphor. The level of detail is nigh cinematic, so that the early and middle sections of Knife are the most kinetic and compelling. The love between the novelist and his recent novelist/poet wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, shines from the pages. In a daring gambit, toward the end Rushdie imagines a series of prison dialogues with his attacker, and although these might interest a fellow writer or a critic, to this reader they miss the mark. Nonetheless, to bring such a level of dispassionate storytelling to a near-death experience less than two years old is a remarkable achievement.
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