Books of the year: Classics of a different kind are all worth looking back on

Sometimes you know, after only a few paragraphs, that the book you are reading is destined to become a classic of its kind.

It is a unique buzz, and I recognised it when I started Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie.

The memoir opens with a forensic account of the moment when Rushdie was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife, just after coming out on stage to address an audience in a venerable New England institution about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.

He writes with urgency and honesty, the detail lightened by moments of black humour.

Here is a list of the damage inflicted in 27 seconds by the knife-wielding would-be assassin: All the tendons and most of the nerves in his left-hand were severed, there were at least three stab wounds in his neck, slashes down the centre of his chest, other cuts on his chest, face, and thigh, and a deep wound in the right eye.

News of the attack travelled fast, and most people hearing it doubted that the 75-year-old novelist, who had survived the fatwa declared on him after the publication of The Satanic Verses some 30 years earlier, would survive this attack. 

That he did so was thanks in the first instance to a retired firefighter in the audience who kept his thumb on the biggest wound as the bloodied writer was stretchered out to a helicopter and, secondly, to his much younger wife of 11 months, writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths (born 1978). 

Her steady support, patience, and sense of humour made a major contribution to his recovery.

He was also buoyed up by the worldwide outpouring of affection and good wishes, unlike the mixed, often critical reaction to his plight at the time of the fatwa.

What starts as a horror story turns into a love story that is both touching and entertaining, as Rushdie travels his long road to recovery. 

The reader is rewarded with a privileged insight into Rushdie’s finely-honed literary sensibility, equally at home in high culture and popular culture, as familiar with Indian mythology as with the literature of the English-speaking world.

His aim in this book was to counteract the “mindless malignancy” of his 24-year-old attacker with art, to demonstrate why freedom of speech is such an important right in our society, and must be treasured. He does so with grace and passion and a fair sprinkling of humour.

• Francis Bacon’s Nanny 
• Maylis Besserie (translated by Clíona Ní Ríordáin) 
• Lilliput, €15.95

This seems to be a bizarre project at first, written partly from the point of view of the great artist’s nanny, who shared his various London homes until her death in 1951, and partly from the artists’ point of view as he struggles to paint.

Before he produced the tortuous, intense paintings of crucifixions, popes (after Velásquez), and mouths, there were many years of gruelling hard work.

Generally referred to as an “Irish-British” artist, Bacon was born in Dublin to a recently arrived English couple and grew up on a stud farm in Co Kildare.

He left home at 16 when he could no longer tolerate the violent abuse of his father and fled to London then Paris. He never went back to Ireland, and eventually settled in a studio in London’s South Kensington.

His nanny, a Cornish woman called Jessie Lightfoot was a young woman when she was employed to look after Francis and his brother.

She tells her story in a familiar chatty style and her affection for the child shines through.

Before he established himself in London as an artist, times were very hard.

He often hosted illegal roulette sessions, with look-outs posted to warn if the police were approaching.

Nanny made sandwiches for both players and look-outs. In one particularly cramped apartment, nanny stoically slept on the kitchen table.

Nanny’s memories alternate with shorter, more intense sections in which Bacon rants about his struggle to paint what he can see in his head: 

“You stick your little faggot head on the canvas, the image of Francis that you see in the speckled mirror.

“That you distort with your eyes, slit with your pupils. Crack, you take out your knife, crush the pigments in the porcelain dish, bind the powder in the glue…”

Bacon’s monologues give new insights into the relation between his struggles to paint and the excesses of alcohol, sex, and gambling in his life.

Nanny’s voice continues to haunt him from beyond the grave.

This slim, elegantly published book is the third volume of a series by Besserie, featuring Irish writers and artists who had significant contact with France — Samuel Beckett and WB Yeats being the other two. 

The first novel (Beckett) won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2020, while this one was awarded the Prix du Roman des Écrivains du sud in 2023. 

It is an entertaining read, but also gives new insights into the life and work of a major artist.

• Until August 
• Gabriel Garcia Márquez (translated by Anne McClean)
• Viking, €18.99

There was some controversy over the publication of Until August 10 years after the author’s death.

He had left explicit instructions about it: “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” It was planned as one of four novels on the theme of love in later life. Only one was published.

Memories of my Melancholy Whores got a frosty reception, being considered old-fashioned and below the standard usually expected of Colombia’s beloved Nobel Prize winner.

Struggling with the onset of Alzheimer’s, Garcia Márquez eventually gave up on Until August — leaving over 769 pages of scribbled-over manuscript. 

It tells the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a beautiful 46-year-old who makes an annual pilgrimage to an island, staying in a modest hotel, and taking a bouquet of gladioli to her mother’s grave on top of a hill. 

She chose to be buried there even though she had no connection with the island. Then she spends the night with a lover, chosen apparently at random from other visitors to the island.

When Garcia Márquez’s sons and heirs reread the story after a long gap, they found it was much better than they remembered — hence the decision to publish, even against their father’s wishes.

They wondered if his disease had affected his judgement. In a preface to the book, they agree that while the short novel is not among his best work, they argue that it contains much to enjoy: 

“…his capacity for invention, his poetic use of language, his captivating story-telling, his understanding of humankind, and his affection for our experiences and misadventures, especially when it comes to love.”

If his readers enjoy it, his sons hope that Gabo will forgive them.

I agree with the sons. By coincidence, I had recently been reading Gabo’s 2002 memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, and I was eager for more of this magnificent writer. 

I found it a lively and provocative read in a deliciously evoked tropical setting. While I squirmed at some sexist attitudes (her breasts “still round and high in spite of two pregnancies”), I also revelled in his descriptions of the unspoilt tropical island. 

Like many good stories, there is a brilliant twist in the tail. Even sub-standard Garcia Márquez is a match for most writers at their best.