Thirty-four years, later a fatwa strikes like a delayed explosion. Presumably the man with the knife had come across Ayatollah Khomeni’s diktat in his growth phrase. Knife is, in a sense, a story of ironies. The irony of a curse that strikes in an asylum for the safety of writers at Chautauqua where Rushdie is scheduled to speak on the importance of keeping writers safe cutting through non-existent safety measures is too strong to ignore. Equally ironic is the fact that it happened in August, the month that Rushdie claimed as his own through Midnight’s Children. Rushdie is aware of the ironies as he puts down the details of the attack and muses over the time before and the time after.

Knife is written in Rushdie’s clear forthright style with at times a strong sense of self consciousness and a throw away line that puts him among the ‘literary immortals’ who had also suffered knife attacks. His original aim was to make a documentary of his experience using his wife’s talents as a photographer but that changed along the way, when he discovered that language was his knife of protection against assailants.

The book, for the most part, is a meditation.  Rushdie writes of his thoughts when gazing at the moon in the lake on the evening of August 11, tell his readers that his collection of unrelated thoughts is how he has always written. As in Greek tragedies the reader is aware that there will be a strike — all he ir she needs to know is how dramatic it will be. And the descriptions are gripping, the run up of the man in black, the blows of the knife, details like a ruined Ralph Lauren suit and then later the ‘armadillo tail’ of a ventilator and the damaged eye lolling on his cheek like ‘ a large soft boiled egg’. Rushdie was lucky — at 75, a Covid survivor, he was off the ventilator the very next evening after the attack, giving him time to meditate within his wounded being on freedom on 15th August.

There is that and there is the fact that he will not do his assailant the honour of a name — best to pin him down as ‘the A’ which could be assassin or ass or anything else that Rushdie chooses to adjectivize him with. This is how one deals with those who claim their fifteen seconds of fame in today’s one — though in this case the encounter is the reading time of a Shakespearean sonnet. The A gives an interview from jail in which he describes Rushdie as ‘disingenuous’ that inspires Rushdie to write the book but he refrains from meeting the A, instead imagining how that meeting would have gone, in a musing that covers 30 pages towards the end of the book. As musings are, and given Rushdie’s imagination, the flow is random and ranges from radicalisation, how a New Jersey loner becomes one when disappointed by the world, to gym memberships, the lies of mothers and the New York Giants.

In between the meditations there are flashes of humour — how he met his fifth wife and walked into a glass door, stunned by her presence, thereby breaking his glasses and shedding blood. Less of course than that the knife shed. There is the fun fact that his surgeon, James Beard has the same name as a great chef - presumably they have common ease with knives.

Eliza comes across as the quintessential black American poet, a superhero of lyricism with numerous talents and a heart filled with love for Rushdie. ‘You treat her right’ one of her poet friends tells him, sounding like one of those expected things from Hallmark.  The fact that there is a love story in the middle of all this murder and mayhem gives the book a lift and fans of T-shirts and roses will be surprised at how every day Rushdie and his wife’s lives seem.

The Satanic Versesis a subject he refuses to discuss, merely pointing out that too much has been said on the subject but admitting that was why he moved to New York. However, for a professed atheist, he admits to feeling protected by some force that kept him alive after fifteen knife strikes — and in his imagined discourse with the A he points out that he has tried to support his religion with instances like defending the building of a mosque at Ground Zero. The book centres on Nietzsche’s theory that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — it is certainly a tribute to Rushdie’s instincts for survival, his ability to fight back with the knife of language and his search for closure.