A couple of nights earlier than he was nearly killed by a stranger with a knife, Salman Rushdie dreamed about being attacked by a Roman gladiator with a spear. He’d had related goals ever since Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa following publication of The Satanic Verses, again in 1989, imagining “my murderer rising up in some public discussion board or different and coming for me”. When on the morning of 12 August 2022, in Chautauqua in upstate New York, on stage to speak about (of all issues) the significance of retaining writers secure from hurt, he noticed a determine in black dashing in direction of him, his first thought was “So it’s you. Right here you might be”, and his second, extra bemused, was “Actually? It’s been so lengthy. Why now, in any case these years?”
In his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton, Rushdie expressed his post-fatwa disorientation by writing of his experiences within the third individual, as if the trauma have been occurring to another person. Right here, as he says, it’s an I-story (and likewise, since he misplaced his proper one, an eye-story): “When someone wounds you 15 instances that undoubtedly feels very first individual.” Joseph Anton (the Christian names of his literary heroes Conrad and Chekhov) was the codename he adopted in hiding to keep away from utilizing his personal title. Right here it’s his attacker’s title he avoids utilizing – he refers to Hadi Matar as “the A”, quick for Assailant or would-be Murderer. Or, for Ass: just like the Islamist terrorists who’ve attacked and even murdered individuals related to Rushdie, Matar’s information of The Satanic Verses was negligible – he stated that he’d learn simply a few pages. After being charged with tried homicide and assault, Matar pled not responsible. Bail was denied, and trial can be held in the end.
When he charged on stage along with his knife, some within the auditorium thought it have to be a stunt about author security, not an actual assault. However over the subsequent 27 seconds, earlier than being overpowered by brave members of the viewers (amongst them the host Henry Reese), he stabbed Rushdie 15 instances, in his eye, neck, hand and chest. As he lay on the ground, watching blood pool round him, Rushdie thought he was dying. Amongst those that saved him (and the e-book is devoted to the women and men who did) was a retired firefighter, who pressed a thumb towards his neck to cease the movement of blood.
Rushdie doesn’t bear in mind feeling offended with “the A”. However the happiness he’d felt the evening earlier than, standing in the summertime moonlight, with a brand new novel completed and proofread, had been destroyed. Worse, he’d been dragged into the previous by a person “in search of to hold out a loss of life order from three many years in the past” – as if his 16 books since The Satanic Verses counted for nothing; as if that “plain previous novel” had reverted to being a theological sizzling potato. He wonders why he froze when the A lunged at him. He might need run away or fought again. However how does a 75-year-old, in shock, battle a 24-year-old with a knife?
To determine his wounds a crowd of helpers, together with two medical doctors, minimize his garments aside (“Oh. I assumed, my good Ralph Lauren go well with”). He was hauled on to a stretcher then airlifted by helicopter to an extreme-trauma ward within the neighbouring state, Pennsylvania. Even earlier than the eight hours of surgical procedure his imaginative and prescient was blurry. And afterwards, on heavy painkillers, he had visions of buildings fabricated from alphabets. When he got here spherical, he was on a ventilator (“like having an armadillo’s tail pushed down your throat”) and elements of his physique have been stapled collectively; mercifully, he couldn’t see the “bulging boiled-egg eye” hanging from his face.
Supportive statements got here from presidents Biden and Macron, “grudging platitudes” from Boris Johnson, and nothing in any respect from India. Most heartening have been the messages of affection from associates: stay, stay he urged himself. His sister and sons flew over from London. Above all, there was his spouse “Eliza”, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he’d met in a goofy, blood-strewn second 5 years earlier than when, dazed by her magnificence and following her out on to a balcony, he smashed his face right into a sliding glass door (“She actually knocked me out”). They’d been collectively ever since, married for the earlier 11 months and residing extra privately than he was used to, till this.
The medical doctors weren’t hopeful. Eliza had been warned he wasn’t going to make it. However by his bedside, she took cost, staying with him 24/7 and recording his restoration on a cellphone and digital camera. Inside 10 days – his hand in a splint, his broken liver regenerating, fluid drained from his lung – he was strolling with a strolling body. Docs have been amazed. It was a type of magic realism, a miraculous return from hades.
Transferred to a rehab centre in Manhattan, he hoped for a gentle restoration. However there have been setbacks: dizziness, low blood stress, a urinary tract an infection, horrible nightmares. The law enforcement officials exterior his door laughed raucously via the evening and there was bandage-changing at 5am. Then got here the shock of seeing himself in a mirror for the primary time – “this wild-haired one-eyed demi stranger”. He felt bed-enslaved and stir-crazy – till a certain galley of his novel Victory Metropolis arrived and lifted his spirits with its closing sentence: “Phrases are the one victors.”
There have been extra challenges to come back: seven months working with a hand therapist; the unstitching of his proper eyelid; a prosthesis fitted in his mouth to make consuming much less uncomfortable. He doesn’t declare to be courageous and offers quick shrift to the concept what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Nonetheless, it was courageous of him to return, a yr on, to the amphitheatre the place he was attacked, and to really feel “lightness. A circle had been closed.” Thanks to like, luck and surgical talent, he’d been given a second probability.
That is “a e-book I’d a lot fairly not have wanted to write down,” he says, composed with “one eye and one and a half fingers”. However he makes use of it to “personal” what occurred, and as a love track to Eliza. In addition to documenting his ordeal, it ranges extensively, from ideas about different writers who have been victims of knife crime (Samuel Beckett, Naguib Mahfouz: “What was this, a membership?”), to recollections of childhood and his abusive, alcoholic father, to reflections on violence and on the deaths and diseases of associates.
There’s additionally a chapter during which he conducts 4 imaginary interviews along with his attacker, who has described Rushdie as “disingenuous”. Does each disingenuous individual need to die, Rushdie asks him. The replies are surly: “You don’t know me, you’ll by no means know me,” the A says. However we study his nocturnal gaming, his offended “Incel” loneliness, and a life-changing journey to Lebanon.
“We’re different,” runs the epigraph from Beckett, “not what we have been earlier than the calamity of yesterday.” However Rushdie’s triumph is to not be different: regardless of his horrible accidents and the menace he nonetheless lives underneath, he stays incorrigibly himself, as passionate as ever about artwork and free speech as “the essence of our humanity”. At one level he quotes Martin Amis: “Whenever you publish a e-book, you both get away with it, otherwise you don’t.” He has greater than received away with this one. It’s scary however heartwarming, a narrative of hatred defeated by love. There’s even room for a couple of jokes. Earlier than the stabbing he was horribly obese; after hospital and rehab, he finds he has misplaced 55 kilos, although it’s “not a food plan plan to be beneficial”.
