Theo Logos's Reviews > Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art. Clichés are received ideas and so are ideologies, both those that depend on the sanction of invisible sky gods and those which do not.

I remember the horror I felt on that August day when I heard the news of the brutal attack on Salman Rushdie. Not only was he a favorite author, but he was a living symbol of defiance against the tyranny of controlling orthodoxy. And now, decades after religious fanatics put a price on his head, some wild eyed man-child not yet born when the fatwa was issued against the author had viciously attacked him and left him fighting for life.

As days went by and Rushdie did not die, it occurred to me that if he pulled through, he would almost certainly write a book about his experience. The prospect excited me. Rushdie had already proven his talent at memoir with his book Joseph Anton — should he survive to write a memoir of the attack it would be another triumph over humorless orthodoxy. Knife is that book. It’s a bit raw, it falls short of his best work (which, after all, is a damned high bar) but it still counts as a triumph.

There’s a thing I used to say back in the day when catastrophe rained down upon The Satanic Verses and its author, that one way of understanding the argument over that book was that it was a quarrel between those with a sense of humor and those without one. I see you now, my failed murderer. You could try to kill because you didn’t know how to laugh.

Knife is a first person account of the brutal attack that almost killed the author. Rushdie includes his painful and traumatic recovery, and the way the attack shattered and reshaped his life and the lives of his family. It’s a most human accounting. He includes thoughts and experiences that are in no way shaped for a hero’s narrative, but rather paint an accurate picture of how one might expect a 75 year old man suddenly attacked and stabbed 15 times to react — not pretty, but believably human.