Briefly Noted

“Knife,” “A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages,” “Neighbors and Other Stories,” and “Butter.”

Knife, by Salman Rushdie (Random House). In August, 2022, more than thirty years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the killing of Salman Rushdie, an assassin came running at him. The man stabbed Rushdie as he was addressing an audience in Chautauqua, New York, and kept on doing so for nearly half a minute. Rushdie’s first thought was “So it’s you.” His second thought was “Why now?” Rushdie’s short masterpiece is a memoir about almost dying, the miracle of surviving, and being reconciled to a threat that could not be forgotten or outrun: “Living was my victory. But the meaning the knife had given my life was my defeat.” Ultimately, his account is an inspiration. “After the angel of death, the angel of life.”

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, by Anthony Bale (Norton). The late-medieval traveller, it was said, always needed two bags: one full of money, one of patience. Such wisdom fills the pages of this immensely entertaining history, which is constructed around medieval guidebooks and travelogues, and highlights dazzling destinations like Constantinople and Rhodes under the Knights Hospitaller. Pilgrimage was a common reason people left home; by 1350, travellers could book a tour to Jerusalem that included transportation, meals, and currency exchange. Yet, as Bale shows, their experience of travel was not one we would entirely recognize. As one pilgrim put it, in 1384, “No one should travel who does not desire hardship, trouble, tribulation and the risk of death.”


What We’re Reading

Illustration by Rose Wong

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Neighbors and Other Stories, by Diane Oliver (Grove). In 1966, Oliver, an M.F.A. student at the University of Iowa, was killed in a motorcycle accident. This book, the first collection of her work, exhibits a unique delicacy in chronicling Black life in the nineteen-fifties and sixties—especially in the South amid the civil-rights movement. In the title story, a girl observes her brother on a tense night before he is to become the first to integrate his school; in another story, a young woman joins a lunch-counter sit-in. Oliver delves into subtleties of class, focussing on characters such as a doctor’s second wife and a daydreaming maid. At their best, the stories let ideas take shape gradually, making close observation the cornerstone of their politics.

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton (Ecco). In this thriller inspired by true events, a journalist, Rika, becomes obsessed by the case of Manako Kajii, a sometime sex worker convicted of killing several men. Kajii reportedly seduced the men with her cooking—much to the confusion and chagrin of Japanese society, which tends to view Kajii’s “huge” body as an abomination. Rika interviews the wily Kajii in charged jailhouse meetings, and, as the two engage in an increasingly fraught game of cat and mouse, Rika’s relationships—with her boyfriend, her colleagues, and even her own body—begin to change. The novel cleverly intertwines paeans to the pleasures of eating with indictments of Japan’s standards for women: “Whichever aspect of it you considered, Rika thought, the Kajii case was tinged by misogyny and the excessive self-pity felt by lonely men.”