After the assault: This is what Salman Rushdie's new e-book “Knife” says | EUROtoday

DWe have suspected for a while that God has a considerably unusual, usually terribly darkish humorousness – however now we have lastly identified it for the reason that dying sentence {that a} dying despot named Khomeini handed on the author Salman Rushdie on February 14, 1989 (Valentine's Day!) imposed. Everything about it’s twisted, nothing is true. Rushdie is a traditional left-wing liberal, a delicate good friend of progress; Since the dying fatwa, many leftists have hated him as a result of they completely wish to see him as an ally of Western imperialism.

Rushdie wrote lovingly, nearly tenderly, about Muslims in lots of novels; The e-book that earned him the fatwa is in no way a polemical common reckoning with Islam, however somewhat a improbable novel that offers with the experiences of Muslim immigrants in Great Britain.

Nevertheless, for a lot of, Rushdie grew to become the consultant of a complete hostility to every little thing Islamic. Then this author is taken into account by a few of his admirers to be a hero of freedom of expression. But because the hero, Salman Rushdie is totally miscast: he’s a lovable one that likes to eat nicely, has a number of humor and has retained a childlike soul. The incontrovertible fact that Rushdie, who combines the best non secular virtues – serenity, philanthropy, surprise at creation, creativeness – is a die-hard atheist, may be seen because the punch line of God's darkish joke.

Two years in the past in August, Salman Rushdie, now a baroque youth of 75, took half in a literary pageant in a city in western New York state whose title is troublesome to pronounce: Chautauqua. The fatwa in opposition to him was nearly forgotten. Rushdie had lived a traditional middle-class author's life in Manhattan for many years. Suddenly a younger man in black garments and a black masks rushed out of the viewers onto the stage the place Rushdie was sitting. He was holding a knife in his hand.

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He stabbed Rushdie about fifteen occasions. He stabbed him within the abdomen, within the neck, he caught the blade deep into his proper eye, and if courageous individuals hadn't pulled him away from Rushdie and held him down, he would definitely have stabbed Rushdie much more occasions. The author survived, however solely barely. He needed to be on a ventilator. Friends and readers anticipated that newspapers would quickly publish obituaries.

But Rushdie recovered; Although he misplaced his proper eye, he was ultimately capable of breathe, stroll and inform jokes on his personal once more. Now Rushdie's first e-book for the reason that homicide try is being printed — in lots of languages ​​directly. It merely means “Knife”. What does it say?

Anyone who was afraid of a political essay during which it’s said for the ixth time that doing good is sweet and doing evil is evil will probably be pleasantly shocked: Rushdie doesn't preach, he tells. He stories how the assault felt for him – how shocked he was, how he was unable to defend himself: Violence, he writes, shatters the picture now we have of actuality. “Suddenly you no longer know the rules… You no longer recognize the external shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by something incomprehensible.”

Rushdie describes how utterly idiotic issues have been on his thoughts in these first few seconds: his stunning Ralph Lauren swimsuit was tousled, his bank cards and his home key have been within the pockets of his swimsuit jacket, hopefully nobody stole them. He later heard that he screamed in ache after the assault, however he doesn't keep in mind the ache, simply mendacity on the bottom with the crimson juice pouring out of him and he’s satisfied that these have been the final seconds of his life.

He spares us nothing

The reader usually feels uncomfortable whereas studying, as a result of Salman Rushdie doesn't spare us something: Having the tube of a respirator down your throat, he writes, feels such as you've swallowed the tail of an armadillo, and when the tube is pulled, you suppose Man, the armadillo pulls again its scaly tail. Rushdie was given a drug he calls “rogue mycin” that briefly made him unable to urinate; a catheter was positioned.

“If you have never had a catheter inserted into your sexual organ,” Rushdie advises fatherly, “leave it at that.” He had by no means heard the noises that got here out of his mouth earlier than: “It sounded like as if my penis was begging for mercy.” Rushdie additionally describes his gouged eye: it had “bulged out of its socket and hung down on my face like a soft-boiled egg.”

When Rushdie is considerably patched up once more and dares to face in entrance of a mirror for the primary time, one thing unusual occurs: he swaps locations with the stranger staring again at him from behind the glass – he turns into one other Salman. However, this has occurred to him just a few occasions in his life: when he got here to the UK from India, after the fatwa, after emigrating to the New World.

In the final a part of the e-book, Salman Rushdie makes an attempt a dialogue along with his would-be assassin, which he fails in an attention-grabbing approach. For comprehensible causes, Rushdie didn't really feel like having a dialogue in actuality, so he tried to have a psychological dialog with the murderer, a younger American of Lebanese descent from New Jersey.

The drawback is that the assassin has nothing to say to his sufferer, even in his creativeness. His argument was his motion: brutal, with out argument, and terribly silly. It doesn't even suffice with the sentence mentioned in 1938 by a pimp who had caught a knife between Samuel Beckett's ribs; When Beckett requested him afterwards why he had executed that, he replied: “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Je m’excuse.” No thought; sorry.

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However, Rushdie's failed fantasy dialogue is instructive: it reveals that there’s hardly a better distinction on this planet than the one between humor and humorlessness. Atheists may be associates with deeply non secular individuals, Nazi youngsters with youngsters of Holocaust survivors, communists with conservatives. But by no means individuals who prefer to snicker with individuals for whom there may be nothing however the tight-lipped, cussed seriousness of life.

Actually, and that is the key of this slim e-book, “Knife” is just not concerning the knife assault in any respect. But about love. On web page 43, Rushdie describes a fantastic slapstick scene: He had simply met the attractive, intelligent, black poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths in a resort bar. He advised that she go exterior to the terrace to admire the town lights from above. In his infatuation, he doesn't understand that the glass door he needs to step via is half closed, he slams into the glass at excessive velocity after which lies on the ground like an fool. The poet is caring and accompanies him residence within the taxi.

This is how a love begins that survives even an tried homicide. Kitschy? Oh what. “Don’t be afraid, my little soldier,” it says on the finish of “A Raven of Fortune” by Vittorio Segne, considered one of my favourite books. “Life is stronger than evil.”

Salman Rushdie: KNIFE. Thoughts after an tried homicide. Translated from English by Bernhard Robben. Penguin Verlag, 255 pages, 25 euros.