For acclaimed author Salman Rushdie, the physical and psychological wounds from the attack he endured in 2022 are still raw. Yet, his newest book “Knife” helps him to reclaim his narrative through the mighty instrument he knows best – the written word.
On a fateful day in August at a literary festival in Chautauqua, New York, a 24-year-old assailant stormed the stage, stabbing and slashing the 76-year-old novelist multiple times in the face, neck, abdomen and elsewhere. Rushdie lost sight in one eye and still grapples with the permanent change.
However, in discussing the ordeal with 60 Minutes‘ Anderson Cooper, Salman Rushdie is determined not to dwell on the attacker himself. “He and I had 27 seconds together…I don’t need to give him any more of my time,” Rushdie stoically states, refusing to even use the man’s name.
For the author whose provocative 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” previously prompted an Iranian fatwa calling for his execution, this was an unwelcome revival of old traumas. As Rushdie puts it, “That sense of time warp, of being dragged into a narrative that I thought had concluded.”
The attack, which nearly cost him his life, instead made him want to confront it head-on through his literary talents.
“I need to focus on, you know, to use the cliché, the elephant in the room,” Rushdie realized. “And it then became a book I really very much wanted to write.”
In “Knife,” Salman Rushdie hopes this literary endeavor represents a decisive closing chapter. “I’m hoping this is just a last twitch of that story,” he says, referring to the decades-long controversies sparked by “The Satanic Verses.”
