Rushdie’s book: “Art against violence”

In an America where “censorship from the right and the left threatens freedom of expression”, Salman Rushdie returns to the limelight with a new book – Knife, out today by Mondadori – dedicated to the attack he suffered in the summer of 2022 when he stabbed in front of the astonished eyes of spectators at a conference on free speech in Chautauqua in New York state. “I respond to violence with art,” said the writer of Midnight’s Children in an interview with CBS that preceded the memoir’s arrival in bookstores. The subtitle of the book is Meditations after an attempted assassination: fifteen stab wounds in 27 seconds, “enough to read a Shakespeare sonnet”. The first thought of Rushdie, who never calls the attacker by name, was: “It’s you, then. Here you are.” After many years spent in hiding, Rushdie saw death coming towards him: “It seemed anachronistic to me, something emerging from a distant past and trying to take me back in time”, explained the 76-year-old Anglo-Indian author who in 1989 was sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini for having written a book – The Satanic Verses – judged “blasphemous” inspired by the life of Muhammad.