On Boxing Day 2022, British novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi had a fall in Rome which left him almost entirely paralysed. His mind was as alert as ever but his body felt “divorced” from himself, unable to perform the simplest of functions. It was unclear when he would be able to walk again or hold a pen.
As he faced this appalling new life that had suddenly been thrust upon him, Kureishi started dictating dispatches from his hospital bed in Rome to his partner Isabella and son Carlo, which were posted on Twitter and elsewhere. These short pieces narrated, often in searing detail, what he was going through. Shattered: A Memoir is an expanded collection of those dispatches and it captures both his agony and despair as well as his determination to pick up the pieces of his shattered life and continue to be a writer.
Naturally, much of the book is about Kureishi’s physical tribulations during his stay in multiple hospitals in Rome and London. The subject of his defecation (or the lack of it) comes up again and again, as does his desperate wish to escape a body that he no longer controls. What glimmers in between the grimness, however, is Kureishi’s often dry humour, his thoughts on writing, creativity and sexuality, and his sense of overwhelming gratitude that he is so incredibly loved — by his partner, his three sons, and the multitude of friends who come to visit him in hospital.
Kureishi, who was once the enfant terrible of the British film, theatre and literary world — known for his eviscerating takes on the country’s multi-racial culture in works like My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid or his debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia, all of which were gleefully outrageous in their explorations of sexuality — lets us in on his current thoughts about sex. Poignantly, he wonders what the fever had been all about in his own life, since he now views the act and the desire for it a matter of theory rather than of practice.
But there is none of this sense of disengagement when it comes to writing. Taking a swipe at writing that strives not to offend, Kureishi says, “It is part of the writer’s job to be offensive, to blaspheme, to outrage and even to insult…It is not our job to please but to challenge, to make us think differently about our bodies, our sexuality, politics and normativity.”
Much like Salman Rushdie’s Knife, where he chronicled his experience after being fatally stabbed in August 2022, Shattered must be read as an inspiring expression of the human spirit unbowed in the face of a physical catastrophe. However, the book suffers from Kureishi repeatedly voicing his agonised frustration over the fact that he has been permanently severed from the life that he knew. While this had added to the emotional force of the dispatches which were posted intermittently, its repetition in a book format begins to pall after a while.
Shattered
By Hanif Kureishi
Hamish Hamilton
pp. 323; Rs 999
