Salman Rushdie Is Not Who You Think He Is
About this episode
Klein interviews Salman Rushdie about his memoir "Knife," written after the 2022 stabbing at Chautauqua. The theme is the gap between Rushdie as symbol — the fatwa, the free-speech martyr, the "party boy" caricature — and Rushdie as a working artist. Rushdie says "The Satanic Verses" began as a novel about migration; the 1989 fatwa was driven more by Iranian internal politics than by the book itself, which his attackers mostly hadn't read. He describes freezing during the attack, the "intimacy" of the knife, and how being a target of violence freezes one's sense of self. On his attacker — a young man radicalized after a Lebanon visit who found Rushdie on Twitter — Rushdie stages an imagined dialogue in the book to assert his real self. They also discuss how social media manufactures false selves, from fake quotes to algorithmic shaming, and how shamelessness has become a political weapon.