Cuchillo is not a circumstantial book, although it is. In it, Salman Rushdie tells of the failed assassination attempt of which he was a victim on August 12, 2022, in Chautauqua (New York). I repeat: it is not circumstantial because it tries to get to the heart of the matter, beyond the bare data.
The good news is that, one-eyed and one-armed and sore in body and mind, after the attack Salman Rushdie continues to write and continues to do so at stylistic and mental levels as astonishing as in the vast majority of his books. Cuchillo is the triumph of principles over barbarism, of articulated language and thought over unmotivated hatred and its unwritten slashes. A book in which compassion and pain, grievance and anger, go hand in hand.
It is exemplary as a whole and in its small details, for example when Rushdie narrates in very brief lines the dreams he had during his convalescence. Or in that emotionally charged scene in which he remembers his friends from the London poker game in the eighties (Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and him) now that Amis has passed away; or some writers who were also the target of stabbings, such as Naguib Mahfuz and Samuel Beckett. And he remembers other colleagues and friends his age (Rushdie was seventy-five at the time of the attack) who have since passed away, such as Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin, Raymond Carver, Christopher Hitchens, members of a generation that changed the course of Anglo-Saxon narrative from the eighties onwards. Why didn't death knock at my door?, he asks himself. He never feels sorry for himself. He never abandons his idea that fighting for freedom of expression, for himself and everyone else, is the best thing he can do. Apart from continuing to write.
When the attack occurred, Rushdie was correcting proofs of his latest and splendid novel, Ciudad Victoria. And he was experiencing the beginning of a love story with Eliza, poet and audiovisual creator. Two joyful circumstances against which A. suddenly bursts in (from Assassin, he is called only that), one of many millions of people who believe in a single book, which turns them into instruments of barbarism.
After recovering from his injuries and their terrible consequences, especially physical ones, Rushdie made some attempt to continue the novel he had in his head before the fateful day, but he made no progress. He told it to Andrew Wylie, his agent (for him, a close person, far from the caricature of the negotiating “shark”), who advised him to write about the attack. The same thing that Carmen Balcells did with Isabel Allende when her daughter was turned into a vegetable, connected to a machine: “I give you this notebook. Tell him his life, your life, Isabel.”
Rushdie is an enormous writer whose work has been partly obscured by the unwanted hypervisibility he acquired when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him. In Cuchillo there is, and in great detail, the story of the moment in which a guy dressed in black and with a gray soul lunged at him and stabbed him with all the stabs he could until someone stopped him. Rushdie still doesn't know why, but he didn't try to stop him. Because when he sees him approaching, Rushdie does not react, he does not counterattack, he only raises one arm, and in that arm he receives the first of the stabs.
In the book are medicine and medicines; nurses and therapists; the slow healing of the multiple and very serious wounds; the first encounter in front of the mirror with his new image, a now one-eyed man whose lips fall to one side, among other consequences... There is the memory of the reasons of solidarity that led him to that small city, a refuge for persecuted writers . And the entire very slow process that has allowed his survival. Everything, but without a milligram of trash for perverse curiosity, without self-pity.
Rushdie is a true writer, and he colors everything with the intelligence of his reflections, and with the strength of his sense of humor that makes the reader laugh amidst the pathos of what he narrates. The questions he asks are important: why someone who barely knew a paragraph of The Satanic Verses, and had once seen it on YouTube, puts on a balaclava, takes a knife and tries to carry out a death sentence handed down thirty years ago. What a strange thing destiny is, why it passed by.
I wholeheartedly recommend reading this book, which even has fragments of fiction (I hate spoilers, I won't say in what sense). Read everything Rushdie, the greatest Anglo-Saxon storyteller of the last fifty years, at the level of his maestro García Márquez. Start at the end, with Ciudad Victoria, continue with Midnight's Children, and you will become addicted. Salman Rushdie says that art is not a luxury but an instrument that helps us think about the incomprehensible things in life. Because, unlike religions, art accepts criticism, debate, even rejection. Everything, except violence.
Salman Rushdie Knife Translation by Luis Murillo Random House 208 pages 20.80 euros
