“As we all wrestle with our own environments of irrationality and uncertainty, that’s a self-reflection which strikes me as most vital.”

Those who follow Rushdie’s work and life have worried on his recovery from the 2022 knife attack which nearly claimed his life. In Knife, he writes of the murder attempt and the slow recovery process in enormous detail. The physicality of the account is excruciating at times, but with the power of his wife and family, he has found his way back and to writing.

What makes this brief memoir stand out for me, then, is not that I have long respected the sometimes captious Rushdie, or that the telling of his painful bodily journey is so honestly exposed. Along the way, Rushdie has to face again the narrative of The Satanic Verses he had long hoped to have set aside. The great weight of his career has fallen after the fatwa was declared against him in 1988 and compelled him to live under anonymous security for years afterwards. And though our attacker (who Rushdie only called “The A”) does not seem to have been overtly motivated by that declaration, we all of us thought it. And hence it returns.

Rushdie does two things in this book, then, that I was awed by. The first is to underscore again his position on free speech and free thinking, of the responsibility writers have to their own integrity and to the word itself. Passing through such a grave trauma, Rushdie actively and thoughtfully chooses not to capitulate. The second fascinating strategy is in the confrontation with his attacker. Understanding that the resolution he seeks must be one for himself, he chooses not to rely on such an external meeting with an antagonist and would-be assassin to determine that recovery. Instead, Rushdie composes his own dialogue with “The A,” and we discover what is important, after all, in confronting irrationality, terror, ignorance.

As we all wrestle with our own environments of irrationality and uncertainty, that’s a self-reflection which strikes me as most vital. And somehow, I came away from the book with gratitude.