Just finished reading Knife, Salman Rushdie's account of the horrific attempt upon his life back in 2022. A colleague generously gave it to me on Teachers' Day back in September, otherwise I don't think I would have put it on my reading list. As it is I'm glad I read it as a very interesting account which slipped down easily.
The thing is though, that I can't bring myself to believe the sincerity of the reviewer for Booklist who is quoted in the extended list of quotations in the blurb who claimed: Every electrifying page elicits tears and awe. This is simply not so. There are a few brilliant pages, especially those dealing with the appalling attack itself; there are many thought-provoking pages; and there are a significant number of pages that made me wonder why an editor hadn't told the writer this is all a bit slack.
I feel bad about expressing this degree of negativity, especially over a gift from someone who thinks this is a wonderful book, and especially because the book is a sincere and deeply vulnerable retelling of an extremely painful episode by a man who survived and battled admirably back to a life. But for all its virtues this is, at moments, a deeply flawed text from a writer who, I suspect, isn't aware of those flaws.
I don't want to go on too much about this; it seems, and quite possibly is, unpleasantly ungenerous to do so. But just one simple point for now. Sir Salman notes, with some insight, that we live in a time when privacy appears to many undesirable, an attention-addicted time. He and his wife, he tells us, made a decision to be private people prior to the attack. Very nice for them. But then why go so considerably public about even fairly mundane features of their lives in this account? Isn't this a tad contradictory? Attention-seeking even?
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