Knife by Salman Rushdie review — how 27 seconds with the ‘man in black’ changed everything

“It’s rare for anyone to be able to describe a near-death experience,” Salman Rushdie writes in Knife, his account of the “almost murder” of August 12, 2022, when he was stabbed multiple times at a literary festival in Chautauqua, New York.

It is rarer still for a writer of Rushdie’s literary powers to be able to describe a near-death experience. Perhaps it has happened only a handful of times in history, mostly to Russians. Certainly it is hard to think of a contemporary novelist of English prose who has faced such an extreme and public ordeal and has lived to put the tale into language, language that performs that miraculous, triumphant trick of making you feel what it must be like to be someone