Salman Rushdie's attack story set for April release

Parbina Rashid

In an interview to a prestigious daily earlier this year, Salman Rushdie had talked about his plan to write a sequel to his memoir Joseph Anton. But with a twist! While Joseph Anton was written in the third person, he wanted to write the sequel in the first person. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story,” Rushdie had said.

The Indian-born British-American novelist, 76, was referring to the New York incident when he was stabbed around 12 times by 24-year-old Hadi Matar on stage at Chautauqua Institution. The attack left the Booker winner blind in one eye, and with a paralysed arm.

While Matar, charged with second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault, is awaiting trial, Rushdie has announced the release date of his promised memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. It will be out on April 16, 2024. By his own admission, it will be “a relatively short book, a couple of hundred pages”.

“Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art — and finding the strength to stand up again,” reads the description on the Penguin website. Addressing the audience at Hay literary festival in June this year via Zoom appearance, he had said, “It’s not the easiest book in the world to write, but it’s something I need to get past in order to do anything else. I can’t really start writing a novel that’s got nothing to do with this,” he said. “So, I just have to deal with it.”

And it is his way of ‘dealing’ with the unfortunate incident that has excited his fans. Moushumi Kandali, a Penguin Random House-published author, says, “It would be interesting to know how a writer, who had such a close encounter with violence, deals with it. A complex subject like violence in Rushdie’s signature style of writing will surely be an eye-opener for his readers. The cover of the book is so aesthetically done that I am already hooked.”

Rushdie has been facing threats on life since the publication of his controversial book The Satanic Verses in 1988. Iran’s former spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for the execution of the author. Matar, however, admitted that he only “read like two pages” of The Satanic Verses.