Salman Rushdie recalls the savage knife attack he suffered in 2022, and chats to Brendan O'Connor about Knife, his book about the event and its aftermath. Listen back above.
'A love letter to his wife' is just one of the ways Salman Rushdie describes his latest book Knife. It’s also a study in happiness; the kind of ‘wounded happiness’ the writer says he has achieved following his brutal stabbing in 2022. The celebrated author spoke to Brendan O’Connor about the assassination attempt, how he survived the long rehabilitation from his injuries with the support of his wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths; and how writing this book helped his recovery.
Moments before he was about to be interviewed on the topic of safe havens for writers at an event in Chautauqua, New York in August 2022, Salman Rushdie was approached by an audience member and savagely attacked. He was stabbed multiple times and the blade missed his brain by millimetres. It all happened so fast, he says:
"He was on top of me, stabbing away. I think he got in 15 blows in 27 seconds."
At first he thought he had been punched, but as he fell, Rushdie says he saw a growing pool of blood on the floor and realised he had been gravely injured. He remembers thinking that he would die alone, far from his loved ones:
"I thought, yes, this is probably it. And the sadness was to feel that I was dying in the company of strangers that nobody I loved or who loved me was anywhere within hundreds of miles."
Salman Rushdie has carefully pieced together the events of that day in minute detail for his book Knife, using his own recollections and the reports of eye-witnesses. The speaking engagement was at 11 am and his wife Eliza had stayed at home in New York, seven hours drive away. She chartered a private plane to get to the hospital, as there was a chance he would not survive the attack:
"She never left my side. She wouldn’t leave the hospital room to go to a hotel. She slept on what looked like an incredibly uncomfortable banquette to one side of the hospital room. She was just there ever minute of day giving me strength and love and support."
Salman Rushdie lost an eye in the knife attack and the tendons were severed in his left hand, which has only partially recovered. The loss of his eye has affects him every day; in reading, writing and moving about - but he says he is glad to be alive.
Rushdie says he feels "nothing" for his attacker, not even anger:
"I feel that if I surrender to anger, which must be down there somewhere, It’s a way of dragging me past into that past of 20 months ago, and at a point at which I am very strongly focussed on moving into the rest of my life. Anger doesn’t help - it weighs you down."
Writing Knife has helped enormously, Rushdie says. It has liberated him from dwelling on the attack or on his assailant:
"He’s in jail and that’s good - that’s the right place for him. I feel that by writing this book, I’ve kind of written him out of my system, you know, and I don’t need to deal with him any more."
Until the attack in 2022, Rushdie says he had been living "the ordinary life of a writer" for about 25 years since he moved to New York. The controversy over his 1988 book The Satanic Verses and the assassination threats that followed it had effectively been resolved. The knife attack in Chautauqua was unexpected, he says:
"When this man came running at me, it actually felt like a sort of time warp. It actually felt like he was emerging from the past, to attack me in the present and it was really quite a surprise."
Both the local police in New York and the FBI have told Salman Rushdie that they believe the knife attack was an isolated "lone wolf" event and they've found no evidence that it's part of a larger enterprise.
Almost two years after the brutal attack, life is more or less back to normal for Salman Rushdie. Nothing is quite the same as before, but he doesn't live in fear and he continues to write and live happily with his wife in New York City.
Rushdie says he has been toying with the subject of happiness for a long time, because it presents the writer with a problem. Everyone wants to be happy, he says, but it doesn't always make for the most exciting stories:
"If two people are happy and that's their story - there's kind of no story. A lot of fiction arises out of conflict and drama. And if there's no conflict and no drama, because everybody's holding hands and walking into the sunset, then there's kind of no story. And yet happiness is such an important part of human life."
In a strange way, having his happiness so cruelly interrupted has partly resolved the contradiction between the pursuit of happiness and the qualities of a gripping story. As he describes in his book, Rushdie says that he is happy, but in a different way:
"We’ve tried very hard to reconstruct our happiness, but it’s not exactly what it was before. There’s a kind of shadow in it. I describe it as being a ‘wounded happiness.’ Maybe a wounded happiness is more interesting than a simple happiness. Maybe there’s more of a story there."
Salman Rushdie’s new book Knife is published by Jonathan Cape.
More interviews, reports and discussions from Brendan O’Connor here.