Salman Rushdie's 'Knife' is unflinching about his brutal stabbing and uncanny in its vital spirit

In Salman Rushdie's first book since the 2022 stabbing that hospitalized him and left him blind in one eye, the author wastes no time reliving the day he thought might be his last.

“At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm,” Rushdie writes in the opening paragraph of the memoir “Knife,” published Tuesday.

At just over 200 pages, “Knife” is a brief work in the canon of Rushdie, among the most exuberant and expansive of contemporary novelists. “Knife” is also his first memoir since “Joseph Anton,” the 2012 publication in which he looked back on the fatwa, the death decree, issued more than 20 years earlier by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini because of the alleged blasphemy in Rushdie's novel “The Satanic Verses.”

Rushdie was initially driven into hiding, and for years lived under constant protection. But the threat had seemingly receded and he had for some time been enjoying his preferred life of travel, social engagement and a free imagination, out at play in such recent novels as “Quichotte” and “Victory City.”

As Rushdie observes in “Knife,” subtitled “Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” he had sometimes pictured his “public assassin” turning up. But the timing of the 2022 attack seemed not just startling, but “anachronistic,” the rising of a “murderous ghost from the past,” returning to settle a score Rushdie thought long resolved. He refers to August 11, 2022, as his “last innocent evening.”

But in many ways, “Knife” is as notable for the spirit it shares with his other books