The Rushdie Narrative

On Knife and the crumbling ground beneath free speech's feet

Rushdie, to his credit, didn’t want to write this book. He thought fiction would be the way to put the violent bullshit behind him. But when he started to recover from a knife attack that half-blinded and almost killed him in August, 2022, he returned to some notes for a novel to follow up Victory City, his twenty-first book, which came out during his convalescence. “The notes all just looked stupid,” he told Fresh Air in April. “I just thought, this is all silliness, you know, for me to try and write one of these stories right now… People would think, what’s he doing?”

So he wrote Knife instead. It tells the partial story of how a young New Jersey man called Hadi Matar failed to assassinate him onstage at the Chautauqua Institution’s summer arts festival in upstate New York. It’s partial — and hobbled — for a few interesting reasons. First, Rushdie prefers not to give his would-be killer any rhetorical oxygen. He made a decision not to meet him in jail, so he refers to Matar throughout the book as “A.”: 

My Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation… I have found myself thinking of him, perhaps forgivably, as an Ass.