Salman Rushdie In the book ‘Cuchillo: Meditations after an attempted murder’ he dissects the almost fatal attack he suffered in 2022 and symbolically snatches the weapon from the aggressor to enter his mind. “Maybe you tried to kill me because you didn’t know how to laugh,” he explains.
Salman Rushdie, very serious, may lose an eye and has damaged liver after the attack
The work is published this Tuesday in English and on Thursday in Spanish, published by Random House, with the title ‘Knife: Meditations after an assassination attempt’. In its 208 pages, the author ‘sentenced’ to death 35 years ago by the Iranian regime after the publication of ‘The Satanic Verses’ demonstrates that “art does not accept violence” and “survives those who repress it.”
With depth and emotion, but also with his usual humorous style, always sprinkled with literary and artistic references (to García Márquez, Borges, Lorca, Dalí, Blas Cubas or Buñuel, to name Spanish speakers), Rushdie describes his assassination attempt, on August 12, 2022, when, at the age of 75, he was participating in a conference in upstate New York.
“I still see the moment in slow motion. I follow with my gaze the man who stands out from the audience and runs towards me”, an image that he captures “in the corner of his right eye – the last thing that eye was going to see – “, remember.
“The first thing I thought was: So it’s you. Here you are. And the second thing I thought: Why now? Don’t bother. If that happened a long time ago… Why now, after so many years?” It was 27 seconds that cut his existence in two like a knife. “We are different, no longer what we were before yesterday’s misfortune,” he quotes Samuel Becket.
Salman Rushdie reappears after the attack: “I have many difficulties writing”
The aggressor, Hadi Matar, A 24-year-old Lebanese American, he said he disliked Rushdie for having “attacked Islam,” but denied having read more than a couple of pages of ‘The Satanic Verses.’
That is why the British-American author of Indian origin wrote ‘Knife‘, to try to understand what his attempted murder was due to, since it was not related to the work that has cost him to be persecuted for most of his life.
The book documents with realism, sometimes magical, his experience and focuses on many details of his miraculous and complicated medical recovery – he almost lost his life and has had significant consequences – accompanied above all by his wife, the poet and novelist Eliza Griffiths. , and also for his children and his sister.
But he enters the terrain he knows best, fiction, to imagine a series of interviews with his attacker, whom he nicknames ‘the A.’. “My Aggressor, my potential Killer, the Cork Oak who made certain comments about me and with whom I had an almost mortal altercation of necessity… I have found myself thinking of him (I suppose it is forgivable) as an ass,” he points out.
Who is Salman Rushdie and why was he sentenced to death?
In this chapter he does an exercise to try to understand a young man who decides to destroy his life, but also himself, after four years locked in his mother’s basement (whom he hates) immersed in the unreality of Netflix, video games and the ‘Yutubi magnet’, as the writer baptized the radical speeches he accessed on the Internet.
“You stood in front of me and there I was: reality (…) There was me and there were also your other realities, your loneliness, your failures, your disappointments, your need to blame someone else, your four years of indoctrination, your concept of the Enemy,” he tells her, while also pointing out his probable lack of sex and sense of humor at the origin of his alienation.
