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Wylie repeats, Youll write about it.
So it is fair to ask: Which Rushdie wroteKnife?
Is this new, buzzy memoir the work of a man securing his legacy?
He also had notes for a 16th, to draw on Franz KafkasThe Castleand Thomas MannsThe Magic Mountain.
Until I dealt with the attack, I wouldnt be able to write anything else.
Rushdies resentment at losing precious months with his fiction is understandable.
What writer worth their salt would let someone else narrate their own story?
UnlikeJoseph Anton,Knifeis taut, readable, and, thankfully, not petty.
Remembering the sight of the black-clad figure making for the stage, Rushdie recalls thinking, So its you.
Here you are, and then, Why now, after all these years?
His would-be assassin is a sort of time traveler, a murderous ghost from the past.
Indeed,Knifeis at its strongest when Rushdie-the-novelist narrates the material of his own life.
Rushdie revels in stuff that would be funny if it hadnt almost killed him.
The fictional A. says Imam Yutubi radicalized him.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Here, not for the first time, Rushdie sketches such a believer.
When you point the magnet, all the iron filings fall in line …
The magnet is God.
If youre made of iron, youll point in the right direction.
And the iron is faith.
At this point inKnife, Great Writer Rushdie works in the service of Free Expression Rushdie.
How tragic, how absurd; how very Rushdie-ish.
The rest ofKnifeis less precise than the material about the A.
But the lack of clarity inKnifes mission can feel distracting.
I will attempt to understand what it was about in this book.
A compelling premise, but its not actually whatKnifedoes.
Here, the Great Writer puts down his pen too soon.
It became a kind of freedom for bigotry.
I am not arguing that Free Expression Rushdie ought to have penned some sort of political pamphlet.
That ability to make history intimate is his greatest talent as an artist; the gift predates the fatwa.
(Of course, he was far younger then and not recovering from a murder attempt.)
The final chapter, entitled Closure?
He feels himself making my peace with what had happened, making my peace with my life.
His wife tells him, I could see that this was good for you.
InKnife, Rushdie twice mentions Philip Roths retirement.
Before entering his 80s, Roth stuck a Post-it note on his computer declaring the struggle over.
Roths struggle was purely artistic, taken up of his own volition.
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