Sharp Bookmark: On Salman Rushdie’s ‘Knife’

Is an artist or a symbol? Can he be one but not the other? Or perhaps it’s an all-or-nothing affair and he is both or else neither. Ever since Rushdie, the author of 13 novels, was violently attacked onstage in August 2022 at a literary event, one line of thinking has it that his books should perforce be celebrated. The embodied this view when it made the case, with very little discussion of Rushdie’s work, to award him the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was not an unpersuasive editorial, but in it, what Rushdie’s work represented outweighed what it contained. Yet if that’s the “both” case, the “neither” perspective feels even less satisfactory. Six days after the poured disdain on Rushdie as a free-speech icon and as a novelist, suggesting that anyone who mocks religion deserves a punch at the least and crassly asserting, “the fact that someone tried to kill an author doesn’t make that author’s books any good.”