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Salman Rushdie Did Not Want to Write This Book
In Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, the many incarnations of Rushdie are at war with one another.
There’s also Celebrity Rushdie, the bon vivantwho relishes brushing shoulders with Václav Havel and Bono, who made cameos in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and whose marriage to the model and cooking-show host Padma Lakshmi was litigated across the pair’s respective memoirs. It became a kind of freedom for bigotry.” Rather than try to reconcile these “new ideas of right and wrong,” or consider the political forces that converged around him, Rushdie declares himself tired in the days after the attack: “My voice was weak and faint.” This is understandable, after all he’s been through, but it makes one wonder whether he’s framed the work erroneously—or whether the book needed more time. That in itself is not a bad thing, but the magic of Rushdie’s “I” narrators, from Midnight’s Children ’s Saleem Sinai to The Moor’s Last Sigh ’s Moraes Zogoiby, is that they have often stood in for a larger “we.” Knife might have benefited from more “we.” That ability to make history intimate is his greatest talent as an artist; the gift predates the fatwa.
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