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chrysemys 's review for:
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
by Salman Rushdie
I really enjoyed reading Rushdie's thoughts about his own place in history and the popular mind--as well as within his own existence--decades after the dramatic turn his life took with the publication of Satanic Verses. (I have my own story about reading that extraordinary novel that, for once, I'll keep to myself.) His nonfiction prose is especially incisive.
However, reading autobiographical material by a person who is, in part, a professional celebrity can be tiresome. So much name dropping--but no, no, those are his friends, those are just the luminous circles he travels in. (In that way, it's like reading Joan Didion's autobiographical work.) Worse is the fact that Rushdie comes off as a real know-it-all. I'm no slouch academically, but having someone pull obscure literary, artistic, and historical references out of his ass like it was nothing can be infuriating. Granted, this is a written document and the author had time to ruminate about what devastatingly apt sonnet or film to refer to, although many of the references come about because something reminded him in a moment he's describing. Our author even claims to have had a dream "...that looked like Géricault's great painting The Raft of the Medusa brought to life, except the people on the raft were all Surrealists--Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, even Leonora Carrington--and they were all fighting savagely, trying to gouge out one another's eyes." What the actual fuck? Even his dreams are insufferably erudite.
However, reading autobiographical material by a person who is, in part, a professional celebrity can be tiresome. So much name dropping--but no, no, those are his friends, those are just the luminous circles he travels in. (In that way, it's like reading Joan Didion's autobiographical work.) Worse is the fact that Rushdie comes off as a real know-it-all. I'm no slouch academically, but having someone pull obscure literary, artistic, and historical references out of his ass like it was nothing can be infuriating. Granted, this is a written document and the author had time to ruminate about what devastatingly apt sonnet or film to refer to, although many of the references come about because something reminded him in a moment he's describing. Our author even claims to have had a dream "...that looked like Géricault's great painting The Raft of the Medusa brought to life, except the people on the raft were all Surrealists--Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, even Leonora Carrington--and they were all fighting savagely, trying to gouge out one another's eyes." What the actual fuck? Even his dreams are insufferably erudite.