Olivia: Jackson, five words to review Salman Rushdie's Knife. Go. Jackson: Words fight back, win ugly. Olivia: Ooh, I like that. That’s good. Mine is: The pen is mightier… literally. Jackson: That’s also very good. It’s a book that’s almost impossible to distill, but I think we both captured the core tension. It’s brutal, but it’s also profoundly intellectual. Olivia: Exactly. And today we are diving deep into that tension with Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. This isn’t just any memoir; it’s an account of an event that was, in a terrifying way, decades in the making. Jackson: You’re talking about the fatwa. It’s wild to think that the religious decree calling for his death was issued back in 1989 after he published The Satanic Verses. That’s over thirty years ago. Olivia: Thirty-three years, to be exact. He lived with this abstract threat for an entire generation. And then, on a summer day in 2022, at a place dedicated to peaceful dialogue, that abstract threat became a man with a knife. Jackson: That timeline is just staggering. It makes the attack feel both completely random and chillingly inevitable at the same time. It’s like a ghost from the past suddenly materialized. Olivia: And that’s the perfect entry point. Because the first part of this book is all about that collision—the moment a man of ideas is forced into a brutal confrontation with mindless violence.

Jackson: Okay, so let's start there. The attack itself. I have to admit, I was almost afraid to read that part. How does someone even begin to describe that? Olivia: Well, what’s so uniquely Rushdie is that he describes it almost as a literary critic observing a poorly constructed scene. He’s on stage, about to speak about protecting writers, and he sees a man in black running toward him. His first thought isn't just fear; it's a kind of surreal analysis. He notes the man is "thuddingly, fatly, running" and thinks, "So it's you. Here you are." Jackson: Wow. There's a strange sense of acceptance in that. Not panic, but a kind of grim recognition. "Here you are." As if he’d been expecting this character to show up in his life’s story for decades. Olivia: Precisely. He even feels a sense of embarrassment, which is such a strange, human detail. He’s a 75-year-old man, and he knows he can’t fight back. He just curls up and takes the blows. He recounts the fifteen stab wounds—to his neck, his chest, his hand, and most devastatingly, his right eye. The book is unflinching in these details. Jackson: And this is all in the first part of the book, which he titles "The Angel of Death." That’s a heavy, powerful metaphor. Olivia: It is. It frames the entire first half of his experience. He’s plunged into a world of pure survival. He talks about being airlifted to the hospital, the frantic work of the surgeons, and his wife Eliza’s desperate journey to get to him, not knowing if he’s alive or dead. The "Angel of Death" is this force of chaos and annihilation. Jackson: What about the attacker? How does Rushdie talk about him? I’d imagine there’d be so much rage, so much focus on this person. Olivia: This is one of the most fascinating choices he makes. He refuses to name his attacker. Throughout the entire book, he refers to him only as "The A.," which he explains stands for "The Assailant" or, more bluntly, "The Ass." Jackson: Hold on, "The Ass"? That feels… dismissive. Almost like a joke. Is he trying to rob the man of his power by trivializing him? Olivia: That’s the entire point. He says he doesn’t want to give his attacker the satisfaction of literary immortality. "The A." is a nobody, an idiot with a knife who tried to murder him for reasons he barely understood himself. Rushdie’s battle is with the idea of violence, with the ideology of hate. The man himself is just a footnote, a failed assassin. By reducing him to an initial, Rushdie performs a powerful act of narrative control. Jackson: I can see the intellectual argument for that, but on a human level, that must be incredibly difficult. To not obsess over the person who did this to you? To not try and understand his motives? Olivia: Oh, he does engage with him, but on his own terms. Later in the book, he stages an imaginary conversation with "The A." He interrogates him, not to find some deep, hidden truth, but to expose the man's shallow, secondhand fanaticism. He concludes the man is an "unintelligent man of violence." The dialogue isn't for the attacker's sake; it's for Rushdie's. It's a way of processing the absurdity of it all. Jackson: So it’s a form of mental exorcism. He’s not trying to understand evil; he’s trying to confirm its banality and then dismiss it. That’s a power move. But it also leads to the physical consequences. The loss of his eye is permanent. Olivia: Yes, and he is heartbreakingly direct about it. He describes waking up and realizing the vision in his right eye is gone forever. He talks about the decision to have the eyelid stitched shut. He calls his damaged eye a "closed door." It’s a constant, physical reminder of the attack. But what’s remarkable is how quickly his mind, his creative engine, starts fighting back. Jackson: What do you mean? Olivia: Even while he’s in the ICU, barely conscious, he starts having these incredibly vivid architectural visions. He’s designing fantastical buildings in his mind, palaces and grand structures. It's as if his imagination, the very thing the attacker tried to extinguish, was already busy rebuilding his inner world before his body had even started to properly heal. Jackson: That’s incredible. It’s like his core identity as a creator couldn't be shut down. It just found a new medium. And that feels like a perfect bridge to the second half of the book. Olivia: It is. Because if the first part is about the "Angel of Death" trying to deconstruct him, the second part, "The Angel of Life," is all about how he, his loved ones, and his art begin the process of reconstruction. It’s a deliberate, defiant shift from being a victim to being the author of his own recovery.

Jackson: So, "The Angel of Life." This is the comeback story. What does that angel look like for him? Olivia: It has two main faces: love and art. The first is his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. He describes their love story early on, and she becomes the anchor of his recovery. She is the one who holds his hand, who faces the doctors, who transforms their home to accommodate his new reality. He writes that love is the opposite of the knife—it’s the force that connects and heals, while the knife is the force that severs and destroys. Jackson: That’s a beautiful, simple dichotomy. It’s not just about romantic love, though, is it? The book mentions a huge outpouring of support. Olivia: A massive one. He talks about getting a call from President Biden, messages from world leaders, and the literary community rallying around him. There was a major event at the New York Public Library where fellow writers read from his work. It was a global statement: you can attack one of us, but you can’t silence all of us. This sense of solidarity is a huge part of the "Angel of Life." Jackson: And the other face of that angel is art. The writing of this book itself. Why did he feel the need to write it? Couldn't he have just… recovered in private? Olivia: He addresses this directly. He says he felt that if he didn't write about it, he would be letting the attack define him in silence. The narrative would belong to the violence. He says, "When somebody wounds you, you have to answer that wound." For a writer, the only way to answer is with words. Writing Knife was his way of taking control of the story. He’s not just the man who was stabbed; he is the man who wrote the book about being stabbed. He owns the narrative. Jackson: That makes a lot of sense. It’s fighting fire with fire, but his fire is language. Still, some of the reviews have been a bit mixed. A few critics and readers felt the book was, at times, a little self-aggrandizing or that it lacked a deeper self-examination. Did you get that sense at all? Olivia: I can see where that criticism comes from, but I think it misses the point. This isn't a book of detached self-critique. It’s a testament of survival. When a man has lived under a death threat for his art, and is then nearly killed for it, his assertion of his own importance as an artist is not arrogance—it's the core of his defiance. He is defending the value of his life's work against those who wanted to erase it. To be humble in that context would feel like a concession. Jackson: That’s a really strong counter-argument. You’re saying his confidence is part of the weapon. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature of his resistance. Olivia: Exactly. The book is a meditation, as the subtitle says. It’s him thinking on the page about freedom, fate, and what it means to get a "Second Chance," which is another chapter title. He grapples with his atheism in the face of what many called a "miracle" survival. He questions what closure even means. The final chapter is titled "Closure?" with a question mark. Jackson: The question mark is key, isn't it? It implies the story is never really over. There’s no neat bow to tie on this kind of trauma. Olivia: None at all. He acknowledges that. He’s changed forever. He has to learn to live with one eye, with the psychological scars. But the act of writing the book is his form of closure. It’s not about forgetting or forgiving; it’s about processing and defining. He ends the violence by containing it within the pages of a book, on his own terms.

Jackson: So when you step back from it all, what is the ultimate story that Knife is telling? Is it a tragedy about a great artist being maimed, or is it a story of triumph? Olivia: I think its power lies in refusing to be just one of those things. It’s a story about the brutal reality of tragedy and the conscious, difficult choice to create a triumph out of it. The triumph isn't that he survived—though that is miraculous. The triumph is that his response to an act of violent, ignorant hatred was to create a work of intelligent, defiant art. Jackson: It’s the ultimate answer to someone who wants to silence you. You just speak louder, and more eloquently. Olivia: Precisely. The book is a testament that healing isn't about getting back to who you were before. That person is gone. Healing is about integrating the wound, the scar, the loss, into a new self and a new story. Rushdie didn't just survive the knife; he picked up his own tool, the pen, and showed why it will always be more powerful. He answered violence with art, and hate with love. Jackson: That feels like the core message. It’s not just a memoir; it’s a manifesto for the power of the creative spirit. It’s a tough read, but an essential one. It really makes you think about what you would do if the worst thing imaginable happened. How do you choose to tell the story of what comes next? Olivia: A question we all face in our own ways. And Rushdie’s answer is a powerful guide. It’s a reminder that even in the face of the ugliest aspects of humanity, we have the capacity to create something meaningful, something beautiful, something that lasts. Jackson: A powerful thought to end on. We’d love to hear what you, our listeners, think. What does resilience look like to you? How can art and storytelling help us heal? Join the conversation on our social channels and let us know your thoughts. Olivia: We look forward to hearing from you. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.