Maybe I never felt smart enough to read Salman Rushdie, at length at least.(When the news of the fatwa reached Arizona, I did try to read that, in my teenaged quest for quiet rule breaking…most of the culture behind it escaped my knowledge, but the works-on-multiple-levels sort of wordplay in the literally heavy book did hit on at least some of the levels, sometimes. Rushdie is a witty writer, even when we don’t get the full joke.
But if this blog truly has a job, I wouldn’t feel like I did it if I didn’t read and make notes on “Knife” since there is so much inside it that has also been here, in a halting way: crime, disability/recovery, and writing. I admired when on page 63 Rushdie wrote that he wanted his attacker, known in the book as A, to “look me in my one eye, and tell me the truth.” Because everything the young man did say seemed so painfully inadequate. A. might have been radicalized by Islamic-fundamentalist You-tube videos. Rushdie writes that he might not have been there if his airconditioner hadn’t gone out, if his newly-married life hadn’t hit such a high, and, of course, if he hadn’t written a book in “Satanic Verses” that had become That Book for so many. (His assailant barely knew about that, it should be noted, but that kind of notoriety does appear to leave a trail.) It’s hard to read that and not fall back into that perversely-comforting true-crime trap, that in some ways, might be part of the real draw for some of us: Suddenly, instead of a lonely-and-broke Saturday night(again), it seems suddenly perceptive not to have a date for six years, forcing The Friday’s Killer to look elsewhere for his yummy treats.
Surviving provides Rushdie a different sort of irony in providing the nearly-miraculous to a skeptical atheist.Another surprising thing he writes about is the sense of personal rejection he felt during the years of the fatwa and that he never expected, even as a free-speech crusader, that his reputation might take such a turn. I suppose I thought that maybe he wrote all of Satanic Verses thinking, maybe, “That’ll show ‘em,”(if maybe not so much that a head of state of a “brutal regime” might take notice and turn his full powers against him.) but he says now that he did not. Although he’s been through a lot of things that could be humbling as hell. It might be hard to recapture what composition was really like.
In addition to writing, and a body that’s not regulation—though I don’t remember my initial trauma, the author and I share guilt and loss about surviving so many friends and associates. It’s hard, though Rushdie says it better than I just did.
