The first thing you notice when picking up Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie’s account of surviving an assassination attempt two years ago, is the photo. The iconic image of the legendary writer — eyebrows cocked gently, lips slightly upturned in that impish smile concealing his razor-sharp wit — has now been augmented by a new feature: a darkened glasses lens over his right eye, which his assailant punctured with his eponymous knife.
Rushdie emerged bloodied, injured, but alive from the attack in August 2022 at New York’s Chautauqua Institution, a writer’s paradise, after an Islamist born in New Jersey to Lebanese parents — to whom the author refers only as “A.” for assailant, or assassin — stormed the lightly protected stage during Rushdie’s remarks and stabbed him more than a dozen times in the stomach, neck, eye, chest, and thigh.
A. and Rushdie were swarmed onstage, and first responders managed to medevac the author by helicopter to a Pennsylvania hospital, where his life hung in the balance for a full day. His account of that mystical time of semiconsciouness is vintage Rushdie: “The reality of my books — oh, call it magic realism if you must — is now the actual reality in which I’m living. Maybe my books had been building that bridge for decades, and now the miraculous could cross it.”
His wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom Rushdie credits for his survival, as well as his children flocked to the hospital to aid
