Salman Rushdie, a Booker and Pulitzer Prize-winning Indian-British author, had to live through a horrific scene that he thought would only exist in the highly dramatized novels he writes when a crazed attacker plunged a knife deep into his right eye socket.
In an interview with the BBC, the writer even recalls his eyeball looking like a "soft-boiled egg" soon after the attack and that its loss upsets him "every day."
Now, in a bizarre full circle, this jolting incident is the main subject of Rushdie's new memoir that was aptly named "Knife." It entails the difficulties he experienced after being subject to the cruel assault and the retrospection that was unlocked by the sheer shock of fearing for his life.
"I remember thinking I was dying," the author said. "Fortunately, I was wrong." He added that, through writing about his harrowing experience and creating the memoir, he is fighting back against it in his own way.
(Photo : Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for The Center for Fiction)
About Salman Rushdie's 'Knife'
The book is not at all a lengthy read nor is it a short one, with its middle-of-the-pack 200 pages. That said, compared to other works by one of the most exuberant and expansive of today's contemporary novelists, it is a brief work.
"Knife" also marks Rushdie's first memoir in over a decade since he published his 2012 work: "Joseph Anton," which is about the "fatwa," or the death decree, that was issued against him more than two decades earlier by Iran's former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The decree was mainly because of allegations of blasphemy against the writer, specifically because of content from his novel "The Satanic Verses."
Soon after the decree, Rushdie was forced into hiding and was under the protection of constant security until the threat eventually died down.
Because of this seemingly improving situation, the writer once again returned to the life of travel he enjoyed the most and eventually dished out his recent works: "Quichotte" and "Victory City."
As Rushdie delved into in his new memoir, he already had an embedded fear for his life and had imagined the appearance of his "public assassin" long before the now-infamous attack.
However, once the 2022 incident played out he was still brought back to that initial feeling of utter horror, describing it as the return of a "murderous ghost from the past" trying to settle a life debt.
Despite all that, Rushdie himself said he has grown "stronger in body and mind" after recovering from the attack and will return to partaking in annual events he religiously attended beforehand like the PEN America Gala.
As per the author, the brush by death's hand may impart a great deal of loneliness, but the words of others can pull you out of that hole and "make you feel that you're not alone."
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