#knife: meditations after an attempted murder

[dk-thrive]

An intimacy of strangers. That's a phrase I've sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.

― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House, April 16, 2024)

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

Something strange has happened to the idea of privacy in our surreal time. Instead of being cherished, it appears to have become, for many people in the West, especially young people, a valueless quality—actually undesirable. If a thing is not made public, it doesn't really exist. Your dog, your wedding, your beach, your baby, your dinner, the interesting meme you recently saw—these things need, on a daily basis, to be shared. In India, privacy is a luxury of the rich. The poor, living in small, overcrowded spaces, are never alone. Many impoverished Indians have to perform the most private of acts, their natural bodily functions, out of doors. To have a room of one's own, one must have money. (I don't think Virginia Woolf ever went to India, but her dictum stands, even there, even for men.) Scarcity creates demand, and in the poor majority of the world, a room of one's own—especially for women—is still a thing to be yearned for. But in the greedy West, where attention has become the thing most hungered for, where the quest for followers and likes is the new gluttony, privacy has become unnecessary, unwanted, even absurd. Eliza and I decided to be private people. This did not mean we kept our relationship secret. My family knew, and so did hers. Her friends knew, and so did mine. We dined out together, went to the theater, cheered at Yankees games at the Stadium, walked around art galleries, bopped at rock concerts. We led, in short, the ordinary life of New Yorkers. But we stayed off social media. I didn't "like" her, she didn't "like" me. And as a result, for five years, three months, and eleven days, we flew almost completely under the radar. Then, cutting that life apart, came the knife.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

[thatwritererinoriordan]

The night he met his wife Eliza Griffiths, he was so distracted by her he walked into a glass patio door.

[mariacallous]

Salman Rushdie has just published Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. In August 2022, he was giving a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from New Jersey, rushed the stage and stabbed him 15 times. It was astonishing that Salman survived. He lost the sight in one eye and sustained terrible injuries, but he’s still with us and he’s still writing, and unlike Hadi Matar, he’s still worth hearing.

We think of fanatics as stalkers with an obsessive knowledge of their targets.  Like the antisemites who compile lists of Jews in the media or the homophobes who so focus on the details of gay sex they might almost be closet cases

Most terrorists and bigots are not like that. They are like soldiers in an army who kill and hate for no other reason than tradition or men in authority have told them to kill and hate. If we were less fascinated by the pseudo-glamour of violence, we would see them for what they are: dullards and jerks.

In Knife Salman is almost as angered by the sheer lazy stupidity of his wannabee assassin as his violence.

“I do not want to use his name in this account. My Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation … I have found myself thinking of him, perhaps forgivably, as an Ass.”

The ass “didn’t bother to inform himself about the man he decided to kill. By his own admission he read barely two pages of my writing and watched a couple of YouTube videos”.

That was enough, apparently, along with a little light indoctrination in the Levant.

We know from Matar’s mother that her son changed from a popular young man to a moody religious zealot after visiting her ex-husband in the Hezbollah-controlled town of Yaroun in Lebanon, a mile or so from the Israeli border.

“I was expecting him to come back motivated, to complete school, to get his degree and a job. But instead, he locked himself in the basement. He had changed a lot. He didn't say anything to me or his sisters for months.”

Salman quotes a wonderfully perceptive line from Jodi Picoult

“If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”

Rushdie is openly contemptuous, as he has every right to be.

“I see you now at twenty-four,” he writes, “already disappointed by life, disappointed in your mother, your sisters, your father, your lack of boxing talent, your lack of any talent at all; disappointed in the bleak future you saw stretching ahead of you, for which you refused to blame yourself.”

This has always been the way. Readers old enough to remember 1989 when the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Salman’s execution for writing a blasphemous satire of Islam’s origin story in the Satanic Verses,will know that Khomeini had not read it. Nor had the furious demonstrators in the streets or the regressive leftists and Tory ministers who upbraided him for the non-crime of causing offence.

Those of us who had read the book pointed out that it was a magical realist fiction which contained sympathetic accounts of the racism Muslim immigrants in the UK suffered. Indeed, the Tories of the day loathed Salman, we continued, because of his confrontations with official racism.

But after a while we fell silent. Pleading with his enemies felt demeaning. It gave them undeserved credit, as if they were reasonable people, who could be swayed by evidence rather than just, well, pillocks.

In Knife Salman attempts an imaginary conversation with his persecutor.

OK, he says, Islam, unlike Judaism and Christianity, holds that man is not made in God’s image. God has no human qualities, it says.

But isn’t language a human quality? To have language, God would have to have a mouth, a tongue, vocal cords and a voice, just like a man. The terrorist’s understanding is that God cannot be like a man, however. So, God could not have spoken to Gabriel in Arabic. Gabriel must have translated his message when he came to the prophet.

The angel made it comprehensible to Muhammed by delivering it in human speech which is not the speech of God.

Thus, the version of Islamic instruction Matar received in his basement when he switched from playing video games to listening to Imams was an interpretation of a translation.

“I’m trying to suggest to you that, even according to your own tradition, there is uncertainty. Some of your own early philosophers have suggested this. They say everything can be interpreted, even the Book. It can be interpreted according to the times in which the interpreter lives. Literalism is a mistake.”

For a while, Rushdie says he wants to meet Matar again at the trial, as if he wants to have the argument in the flesh.

He tells a story about Samuel Beckett, which could only have happened to Samuel Beckett.

Beckett was walking through Paris in 1938 when he was confronted by a pimp named Prudent, who wanted money from him. Beckett pushed Prudent away, whereupon the pimp pulled out a knife and stabbed him in the chest, narrowly missing the left lung and the heart.

Beckett was taken to the nearest hospital, bleeding heavily. He only just survived.

You will never guess who paid for his treatment. James Joyce, of course, he did.

Anyway, Beckett went to the pimp’s trial. He met Prudent in the courtroom, and asked him why he had done it. This was the pimp’s reply: “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Je m’excuse.” (I don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.)

But the more he thought about it, the less Rushdie had to say to his enemy. The idea that you can have theological arguments with a man who wants to kill you for writing a book he hasn’t even read felt ridiculous.

Although popular culture is full of stories about murderers, and true crime podcasts top the charts, killers and fanatics are nearly always less interesting than their victims. More often than not they are just thick. Nasty and vicious, but thick first of all.

We are about to see the stupidity of fanatics deployed on a mass scale. Two thirds of Republican voters (and nearly 3 in 10 Americans) continue to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and that Joe Biden was not lawfully elected. They think it because that is what Trump told them to think.

Islamists told Matar that Salman was an apostate, and that was all he needed to know. Trump told Republicans the election was stolen and ditto.

If Republicans were consistent people, they would not vote for Trump in 2024. What would be the point? They would have every reason to fear that the deep state would rig the 2024 presidential election as it rigged the 2020 presidential election.

But they will vote for him because, once again, that is what he tells them to do.

In the end there is a limit to how much attention you can pay the vicious and the stupid.

They are not interesting enough, as Rushdie concluded with marvellous disdain as he contemplated the life sentence Matar will face.

"Here we stand: the man who failed to kill an unarmed seventy-five-year-old writer, and the now 76-year-old writer. Somewhat to my surprise, I find I have very little to say to you. Our lives touched each other for an instant and then separated. Mine has improved since that day, while yours has deteriorated. You made a bad gamble and lost. I was the one with the luck… Perhaps, in the incarcerated decades that stretch out before you, you will learn introspection, and come to understand that you did something wrong. But you know what? I don’t care. This, I think, is what I have come to this courtroom to say to you. I don’t care about you, or the ideology that you claim to represent, and which you represent so poorly. I have my life, and my work, and there are people who love me. I care about those things.”

[memesomething]

Here’s a man alone in the dark, ignorant of the danger that’s already very close. Here’s a man going to bed. In the morning his life will change. He knows nothing, the poor innocent. He’s asleep. The future rushes at him while he sleeps.

knife: meditations after an attempted murder

[musingsofmonica]

April 2024 Diverse Reads

April 2024 Diverse Reads:  

•”All We Were Promised” by Ashton Lattimore, April 2, Ballantine Books, Historical/Saga/African American & Black/Women

•”Real Americans” by Rachel Khong, April 30, Knopf Publishing Group, Contemporary/Family Life/Cultural Heritage/Asian American

•”The Cemetery of Untold Stories” by Julia Alvarez l, April 2, Algonquin Books, Literary/Fantasy/Magical Realism/Cultural Heritage/Hispanic & Latino/World Literature/Caribbean & West Indies

•”The Stone Home” by Crystal Hana Kim, April 2, William Morrow & Company, Literary/Historical/Saga/Psychological/World Literature/Korea/Multiple Timelines

•”Indian Burial Ground” by Nick Medina, April 16, Berkley Books, April 2, Horror/Thriller/Supernatural/Cultural Heritage/Native American & Aboriginal

•”A Magical Girl Retires” by Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur, April 30, Harpervia, Contemporary/Fantasy/Feminist/World Literature/Korea

•”Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees” by��

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, April 30, Ecco Press, Essays/Short Essays/Essay Collection/Memoir in Essay

•”Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire” by Alice Wong, April 30, Vintage, Essays/Short Essays/Essay Collection/People with Disabilities/Love & Romance/Human Sexuality/Social Science

•”The Backyard Bird Chronicles” by Amy Tan, April 23, Knopf Publishing Group, Personal Memoir/Personal Memoir in Journal/Animals - Birds/Motivational & Inspirational/Illustration

•”Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” by Salman Rushdie, April 16, Random House, Personal Memoir/Literary Figure/Survival/Cultural, Ethnic & Regional/Discrimination & Race Relations/Social Justice 

•”Just for the Summer” by Abby Jimenez, April 02, Forever, Contemporary/Romance/Romantic Comedy/Women/Small Town & Rural

•”How to End a Love Story” by Yulin Kuang, April 09, Avon Books, Contemporary/Romance/Romantic Comedy/Multicultural & Interracial/Diversity & Multicultural/Cultural Heritage Asian American/Workplace/Family Life/Siblings/Women

•”When I Think of You” by Myah Arie, April 16, Berkley Books, Contemporary/Romance/Romantic Comedy/Women/Hollywood/Workplace/Diversity & Multicultural

•”Canto Contigo” by Jonny Garza Villa, April 09, Wednesday Books, Contemporary/Romance/Culwtural Heritage/Hispanic & Latino/LGBTQ

•”Table for One: Stories” by Ko-Eun Yun, translated by Lizzie Buehler, April 09, Columbia University Press, Literary/Short Stories/Women/World Literature/Korea

•”One of Us Knows” by Alyssa Cole, April 16, William Morrow & Company, Thriller/Suspense/Psychological/Mystery & Detective/Women Sleuths/Women

•”Ocean's Godori” by Elaine U. Cho, April 23, Zando - Hillman Grad Books, Science Fiction/Space Opera/Romance/Asian American/LGBTQ

•”Kill Her Twice” by Stacey Lee, April 23, G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, YA/Historical/20th Century/Mysteries & Detective/Women Sleuths/Women/Culwtural Heritage/Asian American

•”You Know What You Did” by K. T. Nguyen, April 16, Dutton, Thriller/Psychological/Culwtural Heritage/Asian American

•”The Spoiled Heart” by Sunjeev Sahota, April 16, Viking, Contemporary/Political/Family Life/World Literature/England 

[artnamjooning]

Currently Reading Thoughts

2024 July 21

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On - Franny Choi: I'm enjoying this, though I'm finding the poems to be wildly varying in quality. Some I'll reread over and over and others I can barely get through lol

The Other Olympians: Facism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters: Enjoying this a lot so far! Though as always, traits of trans people pre-transition are sometimes painted in a strange gender-essentialist-lite way that annoys me a bit, but so far everything is both interesting and respectful.

Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power - Timothy W. Ryback: Only really just started this and not sure I'll finish it. It's something I'm deeply fascinated by but it's for some reason difficult for me to read.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder - Salman Rushdie: Listening to the audiobook, and it's really excellent and I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone not too squeamish! Much more honest and coherent than I expected after an event like that, honestly, and beautifully written. Rushdie's still got it for sure.

For those not familiar, it takes me 10000 years to actually finish a book lol

[shakespearenews]

In his candid, plain-spoken and gripping new memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” Rushdie describes what happened next. The black-clad man, stabbing wildly, had 27 seconds alone with him. That is long enough, Rushdie points out, to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, including his favorite, No. 130. He does not print the poem, but I will, to provide a sense of the interminable horror. This is 27 seconds:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

[dk-thrive]

Waiting is thinking, and to think deeply is, very often, to change one’s mind.

― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House, April 16, 2024)

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

Montherlant famously said, “Le bonheur écrit à l'encre blanche sur des pages blanches. "Happiness writes in white ink on white pages." In other words, you can't make it appear on the page. It's invisible. It doesn't show up.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

[mikepowernyc]

Salman Rushdie

I recently finished Salman Rushdie’s new book Knife. As improbable as it seems for a book subtitled Meditations After an Attempted Murder, it is a love story. It is the story of love for his wife Eliza but also the story of love for democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and just fucking freedom – things that were generally accepted American values before the Republican party���

[chazzbot]

The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real. Children going to school, a congregation in a synagogue, shoppers in a supermarket, a man on the stage of an amphitheater are all, so to speak, inhabiting a stable picture of the world. A school is a place of education. A synagogue is a place of worship. A supermarket is a place to shop. A stage is a performance space. That's the frame in which they see themselves. Violence smashes that picture. Suddenly they don't know the rules--what to say, how to behave, what choices to make. They no longer know the shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible. Fear, panic, paralysis take over from rational thought. "Thinking straight" becomes impossible, because in the presence of violence people no longer know what "thinking straight" might be. They--we--become destabilized, even deranged. Our minds no longer know how to work.

Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

[sgokie2024]

Happy Birthday to Salman Rushdie (King's College 1965), who turns 77 today!

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie CH FRSL is a British and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent.

Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India on June 19, 1947. He is the son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a Cambridge-educated lawyer who became a businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher. He was educated at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge, where he received an M.A. degree in history in 1968.

Throughout most of the 1970s he worked in London as an advertising copywriter. His literary career started with his first novel, “Grimus” (1975), which was generally ignored by the public and the critics. Rushdie’s next novel, “Midnight’s Children” (1981), was an unexpected critical and popular success that won him international recognition. It won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.

After his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses” (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. On August 12, 2022, a man stabbed Rushdie after rushing onto the stage where the novelist was scheduled to deliver a lecture at an event in Chautauqua, New York.

Rushdie's fifteenth novel “Victory City”, described as an epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, was published in February 2023. The book is Rushdie's first released work since he was attacked and injured. In April 2024, his autobiographical book “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder”, in which Rushdie writes about the attack and his recovery, was published.