A couple of nights earlier than he was virtually killed by a stranger with a knife, Salman Rushdie dreamed about being attacked by a Roman gladiator with a spear. He’d had related desires 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 protecting writers secure from hurt, he noticed a determine in black speeding in the 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 spite of everything 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 in addition, 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”, brief for Assailant or would-be Murderer. Or, for Ass: just like the Islamist terrorists who’ve attacked and even murdered folks 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 will likely be held in the end.
When he charged on stage together with his knife, some within the auditorium thought it should 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 ebook is devoted to the women and men who did) was a retired firefighter, who pressed a thumb towards his neck to cease the circulation of blood.
Rushdie doesn’t bear in mind feeling indignant 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 “searching for to hold out a demise order from three a long time in the past” – as if his 16 books since The Satanic Verses counted for nothing; as if that “plain outdated novel” had reverted to being a theological scorching 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, combat a 24-year-old with a knife?
To establish his wounds a crowd of helpers, together with two docs, reduce his garments aside (“Oh. I assumed, my good Ralph Lauren swimsuit”). 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 made 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 buddies: reside, reside 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 dwelling extra privately than he was used to, till this.
The docs 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 telephone 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 sort 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 cops outdoors 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 sure 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 return: 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 provides brief shrift to the concept what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Nonetheless, it was courageous of him to return, a 12 months 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 ebook I’d a lot somewhat not have wanted to write down,” he says, composed with “one eye and one and a half arms”. However he makes use of it to “personal” what occurred, and as a love music 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 reminiscences of childhood and his abusive, alcoholic father, to reflections on violence and on the deaths and sicknesses of buddies.
There’s additionally a chapter during which he conducts 4 imaginary interviews together with his attacker, who has described Rushdie as “disingenuous”. Does each disingenuous individual should 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 indignant “Incel” loneliness, and a life-changing journey to Lebanon.
“We’re different,” runs the epigraph from Beckett, “now 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: “Once you publish a ebook, you both get away with it, otherwise you don’t.” He has greater than acquired 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 chubby; after hospital and rehab, he finds he has misplaced 55 kilos, although it’s “not a weight loss plan plan to be really useful”.
