A Book Must Return You To Life

Notes on reading Salman Rushdie's Knife

Postcards received from the publishers of Rushdie’s Knife.

On the day that Salman Rushdie’s Knife was released, I bought a copy at the City of Asylum bookstore in Pittsburgh where I had gone to read from my new novel. If you look at the first page of Rushdie’s memoir, you will know why I’m mentioning that organization. But I like even more the book’s opening paragraph that introduces the reader simply and directly to the book’s central event and its irony. I’m speaking here partly as someone who began reading Rushdie early in life as an aspiring writer; I was now reading Knife to learn how this writer had approached subject of his attack. In what way had he written of his physical and emotional rehabilitation? Life is brutal; the world is filled with disasters, most of them the work of our fellow creatures, and, in some cases, even ourselves; so much cruelty in our lives. How do we make art out of this bloody mess?

“So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are.” Simple, weighted words. In the next paragraph, we read: “This was my second thought: Why now? Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years?” The descriptions that accompany these thoughts are again simple and direct. Then, Rushdie, using what he calls his “free-associative way” of thinking (and what I prefer to call essayistic writing in its truest essence), engages in a whole set of riffs as he remembers himself standing looking at the moon on the night before the attack. For example, a moment from George Méliès’s silent film Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) which showed a moon landing, with the image of the spaceship wounding the moon’s right eye. Rushdie writes that he had no idea what the next morning had in store for his own right eye. So here was another lesson: an inventive imagination and memory combining, often playfully, to make astonishing discoveries.

Structurally, the thing that Rushdie does is unfold a story where the angel of death faces off with the angel of life. As the writer has said in recent days, including in this interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show during which there is a discussion of how Rushdie’s mind works, the book is really an account of a triangular relationship: the would-be murderer, the writer himself, and his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths. I hadn’t anticipated this structure and one can imagine why serious writers don’t always entertain happiness as a subject. Rushdie understands this too. He quotes the French writer Henry de Montherlant: “Happiness writes in white ink on white pages.” Which is to say, it is a subject that is difficult to depict on the page. That might be the reason why we read about Rushdie falling in love with Eliza before we return in the following pages to the realm of unhappiness: Eliza getting the news of the attack and her frantic rush to UPMC Hamot, the trauma center that was closest to Chautauqua, and where her husband had been brought by a rescue helicopter. The weeks and months of surgery, scares, the ministrations of a whole panel of doctors that Rushdie, retaining his humor, calls names like Dr. Pain, Dr. Eye, Dr. Hand, Dr. Stabbings, Dr. Slash, Dr. Liver, Dr. Tongue… (The names by themselves reveal the extent of Rushdie’s injuries.) In this record of pain and recovery, it becomes possible to see a writer using language, and the writing of a book, rehabilitating himself and returning to life.

In the hands of a good writer, a work of nonfiction can rise above mere reportage and find a new form that is nearly, or even fully, fictional. Rushdie achieves this when he writes down an imaginary account of four meetings or sessions with his would-be murderer. This whole section isn’t about love; it isn’t about hate either. Instead, it is a record of a confrontation: you see at once why conflict makes for good drama. Again, I was attentive to Rushdie’s craft, how he makes this conflict real. He gives his attacker a kind of cutting language that, one might speculate, he would have found unpleasant to write. But that is exactly where a writer must go. The fictional version of the attacker says to Rushdie:

You are hated by two billion people. That is all that it is necessary to know. How must that feel, to be so hated? You must feel like a worm. Beneath all your smart talk, you know you are less than a worm. To be crushed beneath our heel. You talk about travel to other countries, but you can’t set foot in half of the countries of the world because there is so much hatred for you there. Say something about that, why don’t you.

One other thing. I hope that reviewers, especially in one particular part of the world, take notice of the fact that there is a more subtle love triangle narrative in Knife: this triangle is comprised of Rushdie, his writing, and the land of his birth, India. Like all powerful love stories, this one involves a tale of disappointment and bruising. After mentioning the notes sent by world leaders like Biden and Macron after the near-fatal attack on him, Rushdie writes: “India, the country of my birth and my deepest inspiration, on that day found no words.” (He means the people in India in power, of course, not his readers.) I would also want reviewers to pay attention to the fact that after the attack Rushdie found consolation and even inspiration in the Nawab of Pataudi and the game of cricket. As everyone in India who follows cricket will know, “Tiger” lost the sight of one eye in a car accident. But despite that loss he attained greatness on the field as a batsman and a fielder. When he was appointed captain, he was at the time the youngest player ever to become captain of any cricketing nation. Rushdie writes: “I decided that the Tiger would be my role model. If he could face up to the ferocious speed of Hall and Griffith, I should be able to pour water into a glass without spilling it, crossing sidewalks without colliding with other pedestrians, and in general succeed at being functional as a one-eyed man in a two-eyed world.”