Salman Rushdie is recovering from the brutal August attack that left him in critical condition, his literary agent told the Spanish newspaper El País.
Andrew Wylie, who has represented Rushdie for decades, revealed the extent of the injuries that Rushdie sustained when he was stabbed multiple times on stage before a lecture in Chautauqua, New York.
“[His wounds] were profound, but he’s [also] lost the sight of one eye,” Wylie said. “He had three serious wounds in his neck. One hand is incapacitated because the nerves in his arm were cut. And he has about 15 more wounds in his chest and torso. So it was a brutal attack.”
The attack on Rushdie came more than 30 years after Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the author’s assassination; the religious leader claimed that Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was a blasphemous attack on Islam.
A New Jersey man named Hadi Matar has been indicted in connection with the stabbing.
Wylie told El País that Rushdie is “going to live.”
“I think the attack was probably something that Salman and I have discussed in the past, which was that the principal danger that he faced so many years after the fatwa was imposed is from a random person coming out of nowhere and attacking [him],” Wylie said. “So you can’t protect against that because it’s totally unexpected and illogical. It was like John Lennon’s murder.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
