The Enduring Resilience of Salman Rushdie

Alex Gibney’s “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie” contains a fun fact about a subject for whom “fun” would not seem an applicable adjective. Before Salman Rushdie fully dedicated himself to writing, he worked in advertising. His signal achievement was coming up with descriptive terminology for Aero candy bars. Mr. Gibney, who separately recently premiered a documentary about Elon Musk at the Venice Film Festival, includes a snippet of a television spot in which an unctuous cafe pianist pitches woo with an attractive brunette. He does so by extolling the “irresistibubble,” “adorabubble,” and “delectabubble” virtues of the chocolate at hand.The passage of time will reveal Mr. Rushdie’s finest achievements as a litterateur, but groan-worthy ad copy will likely not be among them. This bubble-babble did garner the twenty-something Mr. Rushdie a paycheck, which is preferable to the responses or, at least, a particular response he received to his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses” (1988). In 1989, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree condemning the author to death for the book’s presumed blasphemies. Publishers, booksellers and other supporters of “The Satanic Verses” were also targeted and some of them died in this campaign.In 1998, Iran struck a deal with the British government foreswearing any further involvement in attempts on the author’s life. Mr. Rushdie, having been cloistered for nine years, didn’t think twice. He shed a 24/7 Scotland Yard security detail, moved to Manhattan and re-entered the public sphere. He did so in no small way and was often seen in the New York Post’s Page Six column, hobnobbing with models, comedians, actors and rock stars. Mr. Rushdie made cameo appearances in Sharon Maguire’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001) and season nine of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” in which he sang the praises of “fatwa sex.” There was little reason to suspect that a discussion on literary liberty at the Chautauqua Institution in August of 2022 would be anything more than a polite morning event, but freedom can breed complacency. The talk had hardly begun when a young man from Fairview, New Jersey, Hadi Matar, ascended the stage and began repeatedly stabbing Mr. Rushdie with a knife.We watch an actual video of the assault play out at the end of Mr. Gibney’s picture. Hannah Arendt famously spoke of the “banality of evil” and it’s hard not to watch the documentary footage without the phrase coming to mind. The violence perpetrated is resolutely unspectacular and all the more horrifying because of it. Up to this juncture in “Knife,” we’ve watched Mr. Rushdie recover from fifteen wounds, the most catastrophic of which resulted in the loss of his right eye. Much of the footage was supplied by the author’s wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. The narration stems from Mr. Rushdie’s 2024 memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.” Mr. Gibney’s picture is centered on a single event and its aftermath, but it does glance upon enough of Mr. Rushdie’s life to get a sense of the man, foibles and all. Age and circumstance have humbled, if not altogether deprickled, a public figure who has become a point man on behalf of free speech and, by extension, the civilized world. He also seems to have decent taste in movies, among those excerpted for dramatic emphasis are Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” Sidney Lumet’s “Twelve Angry Men,” and Don Chaffey’s “Jason and the Argonauts.” “Knife” is a well-told tale of a man for whom fate has been a test and in an odd, if by no means welcome way, a gift.

The Enduring Resilience of Salman Rushdie

The Enduring Resilience of Salman Rushdie

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