NEW YORK (AP) — I By Salman Rushdie The first book after 2022 stabbing which hospitalized him and left him blind in one eye, the author wasted no time in reliving what he thought would be his last day.
“At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and nearly killed by a young man with a knife as I entered the Chautauqua Amphitheater to speak. I came on stage. The importance of protecting writers from harm,” Rushdie writes in the opening paragraph. The memoir “Knife” was published on Tuesday.
At just 200 pages, “Knife” is a short work in Rushdie’s canon, one of the most ambitious and expansive of contemporary novelists. “Knife” is also his first memoir. Since “Joseph Anton”. A 2012 publication in which he looked back Fatwa, death warrant, Released 20 years ago by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran. Because of the alleged blasphemy in Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses.”
Salman Rushdie’s new memoir “Knife” is out now.
Rushdie was initially put into hiding, and remained under constant protection for years. But the danger had apparently averted and he had been enjoying for some time his preferred life of travel, social engagements, and liberalism, in such recent novels as As “Quixote” And “City of Victory.”
As Rushdie observes in “Knife”, subtitled “Meditation after the Attempt to Die”, he sometimes portrayed himself as a “public murderer”. But the timing of the 2022 attack It seemed not only shocking, but the emergence of a “murderous ghost of the past,” which Rushdie thought had long been resolved. He refers to August 11, 2022 as his “last innocent evening”.
But in many ways, “Knife” is as remarkable for the passion it shares with her other books as it is for its blunt and terrifying descriptions of the attack that took her life. Changed and didn’t.
In the first chapter of the book, Rushdie defines “pure bravery”. Chautauqua Institute Event moderator Henry Reese, who captured the assailant. But if another kind of heroism is hope and determination (and humor) in the face of trauma, then “The Knife” is a brave book, tracing Rushdie’s journey from lying in his own blood to returning to the same stage 13 months later. has been documented. A state of “wounded happiness”.
Love and marriage
Part of the story of “Knife” is that Rushdie’s life, even in these last two years, is more than a murderous violence. He devotes a chapter to meeting and marrying the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who greeted him during a ceremony. PEN America The incident in 2017 and the revelation of a “wonderful smile” Rushdie found himself unable to forget. When she was in New York City. Knew how to kill, and said that he hurried on a private ship to be with her. He was unlikely to survive.
“I was not dead,” Rushdie wrote. “I was in surgery.”
A departed friend
As Rushdie recovered, he learned that his dear friend and Co-author Martin Ames He was seriously ill with cancer. Rushdie and Amy were part of it. A circle of gifted friends from the UK which also included Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan. In what turned out to be a farewell email, Rushdie praised the “generosity and kindness” Amy had encouraged after the knife attack and celebrated Amy’s novels such as “London Fields” and “Money.”
Amis Died in May 2023.
‘Oh.’
Accused of attacking Rushdie Hadi is Matar But the author calls it “The A.” Said, “The Ass” (or “Asinine man”) for short. He lets his imagination run wild in an unexpected dialogue with a partner he only knows through a critical 27-second interval. Why pretend to talk to your killer? “I’m not looking for an apology. I wonder how he feels, now that he’s had time to think things over,” Rushdie writes.
Matar’s trial was adjourned from January. After a judge ruled, he was allowed to obtain the manuscript of the memoir and related materials.
Healing
He would leave the hospital, “strengthened in body and mind,” returning to the events he had previously frequented, e.g. Annual PEN America Gala. He will be buoyed by messages of support, a “worldwide avalanche” — not just from friends, but from heads of state like President Joe Biden, who will issue a statement that “shares Rushdie’s ideas without fear.” Reference will be made to the determination of
Rushdie writes that the nearness of death can leave you with a sense of “tremendous loneliness.” Words of others “Make you realize you’re not alone, maybe you’ve lived and done nothing.”
Credit : apnews.com
