REVIEWING SALMAN Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder in last month’s Literary Review, the Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie struck what to most observers of the modern literary scene will seem a rather familiar note. The quality that distinguished Rushdie’s memoir, he alleged, was “its slight twilight-of-the-gods feel”.
During the months of its composition, a clutch of high-profile contemporaries had been struck down: Bill Buford of Granta and New Yorker fame had suffered a heart attack, Hanif Kureishi was felled by paralysis and Martin Amis was dead. According to Rushdie, “an entire generation was nearing the exits”.
All this was enough for Butler-Gallie to mark Knife down as “a eulogy for the generation of literary figures to which Rushdie belongs”. He was also able elegiacally to conclude that “the world they…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2024