NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly two years after the knife attack that nearly killed him, Salman Rushdie appears both changed and very much the same.
Interviewed this week at the Manhattan offices of his longtime publisher, Random House, he is thinner, paler, scarred and blind in his right eye. He speaks of “iron” in his soul and the struggle to write his next full-length work of fiction as he concentrates on promoting “Knife,” a memoir about his stabbing that he took on if only because he had no choice.
But he remains the engaging, articulate and uncensored champion of artistic freedom and the ingenious deviser of “Midnight’s Children” and other lauded works of fiction. He has been, and still is an optimist, helplessly so, he acknowledges. He also has the rare sense of confidence one can only attain through surviving one’s worst nightmare.
“In ‘Midnight’s Children’ I wrote about optimism as a disease. People get infected by it and I think I got a lifetime infection,” he says.
Chronologically, he is nearly 77, the age his father was when he died, an age he sees as a kind of milestone in his own quest to beat expectations.
Internally, he feels about 25.
A self-described nice child, one who did not see himself as destined to get in trouble, Rushdie has had a life well beyond even his own boundless dreams. The 1981 Booker Prize win for “Midnight’s Children” established him as a dynamic voice of post-colonial literature. Nearly a decade later, he would reach a terrifying level of fame with “The Satanic Verses,” and the call for his death issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Rushdie was driven into hiding. But by August 2022, he had thought himself safe enough to address a conference in western New York with minimal security: No one was on hand to stop a young assailant, Hadi Matar, from rushing the stage and stabbing him repeatedly. Matar, then 24, has been charged with attempted murder and assault.
Rushdie spoke to The Associated Press about why he wrote the explicit account of his attack, what he has learned about himself and what he might do next. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
AP: When you started working on “Knife,” were you frightened at all?
RUSHDIE: I was worried about retraumatization, that was the worry. And the first chapter, in which the actual attack is described in great detail — that was very goddamn hard to write.
AP: You just got right to the point.
RUSHDIE: Yeah. You know, don’t beat about the bush. Because the reason this book exists is because that happened.
AP: Writers talk a lot about they don’t know how they really felt about something ...
RUSHDIE: ... Until you write it down.
AP: And is that how it was for you?
RUSHDIE: Yeah. Also, I have a very good therapist and actually this is a book written also with the help of a therapist. I was talking to him every week, and discussing what I was doing. And he was helpful, actually. Very clear thinking and helped me clear my thinking. So that was something I had not done before.
AP: You’ve discovered that you’re tougher than you thought you were.
RUSHDIE: If you had told me that this was going to happen and how would I deal with it, I would not have been very optimistic about my chances.
AP: Was there that fear in the back of your mind? You might not be able to handle this?