Salman Rushdie tells us that he wrote Knife, his account of his near-murder at the hands of a 24-year-old Shia Muslim man from New Jersey, for two reasons: because he had to deal with “the elephant-in-the-room” before he could return to writing about anything else, and to understand what the attack was about. The first reason suggests something admirable, even remarkable, in Rushdie’s character, a determination to persist as a novelist and a man in the face of terror. After The Satanic Verses brought down a death sentence from Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, which sent Rushdie into hiding, he kept writing novels and refused to be defined by the fatwa. When, decades later, on August 12, 2022, the sentence was nearly executed on a stage at the Chautauqua Institution, in upstate New York, where Rushdie was about to engage in a discussion of artistic freedom, he had to will himself through an agonizing recovery—pain, depression, disfigurement, physical and mental therapy, the awful recognition that the fatwa was not behind him after all. Then, to write this book, he had to stare hard, with one eye now gone, at the crime—even, in the end, to revisit the scene—because it stood in the way of the fiction writer’s tools, memory, and imagination.
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