“If it weren’t for Henry and the audience, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing these words,” Rushdie said in the book. “On Chautauqua morning I experienced the worst and the best of human nature, almost simultaneously.”
At first it was not clear if he would survive.
“The severity of his injuries was mind-boggling, like something out of a horror movie,” said Andrew Wylie, who has represented the author for decades. Rushdie stayed in the hospital for almost two months. Even after returning home, he had vivid and horrific dreams — about the Duke of Gloucester’s blindness in “King Lear,” about the opening sequence of the Luis Buñuel film “Un Chien Andalou,” in which a cloud flying over the moon becomes a razor that cuts the eye. He has medical appointments almost every day, different specialists for each affected part of the body. “Everyone has to sign off on different repair jobs,” he said.
Rushdie was toying with an idea for a novel before the attack. But “when, finally, I felt the juice start to flow again, I went and opened the file I had, and it seemed ridiculous,” he said. “It became clear to me that until I talked about it, I couldn’t write anything else.”
“Knife” is a visceral, intimate book, in contrast to an earlier memoir, “Joseph Anton,” a 2012 book written in the third person, so that the main character exists on the same level as the supporting players.
“I wanted it to read like a novel,” Rushdie explained of the earlier book. But “Knife” is different. “It’s not novelistic. I mean, somebody stuck a knife in you, that’s pretty personal. Pretty first person,” he said.
