Salman Rushdie releases ‘Knife,’ a book about his brush with death
Summary
Almost two years after an attack that nearly ended his life and left him blind in one eye, the author tells his story in a new memoir closely guarded up to its publication date.
At a party last Thursday for Salman Rushdie’s new memoir “Knife," there were none of the usual stacks of books for guests. Graydon Carter, who was hosting the party with his digital publication Air Mail, had received his copy only that morning and hadn’t read it yet. Rushdie’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, let a reporter hold the hardcover for a few seconds. No reading or signings took place.
Nearly as closely guarded as the book was the event itself. There were three security guards stationed around the venue, Carter’s West Village restaurant, the Waverly Inn. They had been hired from the same company that kept crashers out of the former Vanity Fair editor’s Oscars party.
The tightly controlled soiree suited the book’s subject: “Knife," out April 16 with Random House, is the Booker-Prize-winning author’s account of the attempt on his life nearly two years ago during a lecture series in Western New York. A then 24-year-old man, Hadi Matar, ran onstage at the August 2022 event and stabbed Rushdie 15 times in 27 seconds.
Decades earlier, on Valentine’s Day 1989, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination following the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses," based on the book’s depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Rushdie, who was living in London at the time, went into hiding for about a decade.
“I used to fly to London once a month to meet with him in various safe houses," Wylie said of that period. “It was very dramatic—exciting for me, but there he was inside the bubble, and that is a different experience." Afterward, Rushdie moved to the United States, where he’s lived since. After the attack in 2022, “he went back inside the bubble," the literary agent said, which was actually much more confined than the prior one."
In a “60 Minutes" interview with Anderson Cooper over the weekend, Rushdie said there had been as many as half a dozen serious assassination attempts while he was living in London with 24/7 police protection provided by the British government. He called the 2022 attack an “extraordinary half-minute of intimacy in which life meets death" and said that even though he hadn’t wanted to write about it, it became clear to him that he couldn’t write anything else.
Through his publisher, Rushdie declined to be interviewed. When he announced the memoir in October, he said that it was his way to answer violence with art. Reviews, which were under embargo until Tuesday, have been largely positive.
Smoking a cigar in the rain outside the party, Wylie said that Penguin Random House had printed 197,000 copies for the book’s initial run. The publisher confirmed that figure but declined to comment further.
Carter said he met Rushdie 25 years ago and was taken with his sense of conviction. “Not many people are prepared to get on a stage at a public forum and speak their mind," he said. “I think people from both the left and right are caught up in appearing intolerant, they hold back what they properly mean, what they want to say."
Among the party’s guests were actor Rupert Friend, artist Laurie Anderson, author Bill Buford, theater producer Jordan Roth, novelist Marlon James, writer and former French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck, journalist Gay Talese and actor Tony Danza (“I’m Tony Danza!" he said when he approached Rushdie). A commotion—and flashbulbs—went off when Rushdie entered the party with his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. The brutal attack left Rushdie blind in his right eye, so he now wears a pair of glasses with that lens blacked out.
The garden room was packed throughout the party’s two hours, with a fire roaring in the fireplace and waiters with pigs in blankets and spring rolls struggling to navigate the crowd.
James, the novelist, said he was looking forward to seeing how Rushdie would retell such a horrific experience. “Writers talk about gaining distance to write, but it’s still such a recent event, and I’m curious about how he writes about himself," he said.
Wylie had long known the book would exist. “I was visiting Salman in the hospital, and I said, ‘So are you going to write a book about this?’ He said, ‘Well, I haven’t decided.’ And I said, ‘You are going to write a book.’"
Write to Lane Florsheim at lane.florsheim@wsj.com
