Hello.

This is Inside the Cover, and this is exactly where you should be right now.

I recently finished a book that was loaned to me by our son, Jackson.

The book is Knife by Salman Rushdie.

It has a 2024 copyright, and I finished it on July 13th, 2024.

Subtitled Meditations after an Attempted Murder, it is Rushdie' commentary on the August 12th, 2022 attempt on his life in Chautauqua, New York.

Ironically, he had been invited to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

Rushdie is certainly a famous or infamous person.

He is an Indian bor British American, born on June 19th, 1947, about a month before yours truly.

He has written 15 novels, a collection of stories, a memoir, a work of reportage, and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth.

His books have been translated into 40 languages.

His novels include The Satanic Verses, The Moors Last Sigh and Midnight's Children, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981.

In April of 2023, time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

After the publicatio of The Satanic Verses in 1988, Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini.

In total, 20 countries banned the book.

Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremist who cite the book as motivation, which in turn has sparked debate and conversation about censorship and religiously motivated violence.

In this book, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of the assassination attempt at the Chautauqua Institution on August 12th of 2022 and its aftermath, as well as his journey to recovery.

I think this language from the back cover is symbolically significant and a key to understanding his purpose and state of mind in writing knife.

‘Durin those empty, sleepless nights, I thought a lot about the knife as an idea.

A knife was a tool and an acquired meaning from the use we made of it.

Language, too, was a knife.

If I had unexpectedl been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back.

In chilling and brutal detail, Rushdie describes his multiple injuries from the sudden and brutal attack.

It is quite clear that his life was in jeopardy for several hours, and that his mental and physical recovery were in extreme doubt for several days, if not weeks and months.

I loved and appreciate the fact that Rushdie dedicated the book to ‘the men and women who saved my life.

I was impressed with Rushdie's intelligence and his skill with the written word, and it is clea that he is very well connected and respected by writers an intellectuals around the world.

I was also impressed, as his writing demonstrated, with equal force his brilliant mind and his skill as a writer, as well as his vulnerability, humanity determination, wit and courage.

My book is filled with underlining.

Let me close with this one.

‘An intimacy of strangers.

That's a phrase I sometimes use to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.

In knife, Rushdie certainl provides us with a fascinating and illuminating view of his interior life.

That's our show.

Tonight's book has been Knife by Sir Ahmad Salman Rushdie.

I recommend it highly.

Good night, and I look forward to our next visit.