In 2014, reflecting on his career to date, Hanif Kureishi remarked to an interviewer that the great thing about being a writer is that “every ten years you become somebody else”. Between the mid-1970s and early-1980s he served his apprenticeship, writing dirty stories for pornographic magazines and plays for the Royal Court. The mid-1980s marked a new phase, when he wrote the screenplay for the Stephen Frears Oscar-nominated film My Beautiful Launderette (1985), and peaked with the tremendous commercial and critical success of his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, published in 1990. Three years later it was filmed by the BBC with a David Bowie soundtrack. Kureishi was the cool new voice of multicultural Britain.
The birth of twin boys marked the beginning of a third, more difficult period, perhaps best captured by the short, claustrophobic novel Intimacy (1998), which traps the reader in the mind of a man steeling himself to leave his wife and children – echoing Kureishi himself, who had left the mother of his children not long before the book was published. In the subsequent decade he continued to produce a considerable variety and volume of work – novels, stories, essays, screenplays – but somewhat removed from the spotlight; taken, after so long, for granted. In 2013 he was defrauded of his life savings. Later that year he took up a creative writing professorship at Kingston University.
On Boxing Day 2022 another phase began, both in Kureishi’s life and his writing career – which, after all this time and all that ink, might be said to be more or less the same thing. It was as defining a moment as any in his life to date. He was in Rome, watching a football match on his iPad at the apartment of Isabella, his now wife, when he began to feel dizzy. He leant forward and put his head between his legs. When he came to, he was lying in a pool of blood with a “scooped, semicircular object with talons scuttling towards me”. This, he realised, was his own hand, “an uncanny thing over which I had no agency”.
Questions about agency – the acceptance or otherwise of losing it, and possible routes towards its reclamation – are central to Shattered, Kureishi’s memoir of his first year as a tetraplegic, paralysed in all four limbs. “In layman’s terms,” he explains in the book’s first entry, dated just 11 days after the accident, “the vertebrae at the top of my spine suffered a kind of whiplash”. Or, as he puts it a few entries later, “Two weeks ago a bomb went off in my life which has also shattered the lives of those around me.” His daily accounts of his new reality, lived out in five hospitals in Rome and London and then, many months later, his remodelled home, initially appeared on X before migrating to Substack. Now the first year’s worth have been edited into this remarkable book.
Kureishi’s entries were typed up first by Isabella and then his three sons. Carlo became the main collaborator and is thanked by his father in the acknowledgements as “my right hand”. Earlier, displaying his taste for a certain comic brutality, Kureishi introduces Carlo to the reader by declaring that what he likes about him “is that he can type quickly”. There’s plenty of this sort of provocative fun: “Since I became a vegetable I have never been so busy”; “I have to say that becoming paralysed is a great way to meet new people”; “The only good thing to be said for paralysis is that you don’t have to move to shit and piss.” But there is also a frankness to his writing which can be startlingly moving: “I wish what had happened to me had never happened,” he says at one point, with devastating simplicity.
Of being shaved by his son Sachin, Carlo’s twin, he writes, “He looks after me as I once looked after him, but with less complaint.” When a fellow patient comes to see him, Kureishi asks “if we can be friends. I plead with her to not let me go.” His vulnerability is absolute.
As someone who has spent several months in hospital over the past two years, I recognise the desperate feeling Kureishi describes taking hold when the last visitor of the day departs, leaving only the “long fear and desolation of the night” ahead. Visitors become an essential reminder that life continues beyond the all-consuming fact of one’s illness. The best sort, Kureishi judges, stay for at least one hour and are “the self-absorbed ones, people who talk about themselves, bringing in the outside world”.
Kureishi’s book doesn’t follow a familiar arc of triumph over adversity. It isn’t grim then optimistic, despairing then hopeful, embittered then affirming. It is all these things in a churning cycle, which is what makes it so absorbing. It can move, sometimes with shocking speed, from praise of human kindness (“there’s a lot of it about”) to an account of a depressing trip along the River Walk in Hammersmith, Kureishi one in a group of patients in various states of paralysis, reflecting on the “present hell” of his life. Or from a tender moment between him and one of his sons, or Isabella, to fantasies of suicide by drug overdose.
“One of the things about lying in a hospital bed for hours on end,” Kureishi writes, “is that you start to remember in a way you didn’t before, often in elaborate detail… If you have no future, the past comes back to you.” Shattered reflects this state, moving fluidly from an account of goings on at one or other hospital and occasional updates on his recovery (“I can stand for about 20 minutes with physios either side of me… I can move a computer mouse a few inches”) to memories of his youth in Bromley, or of meeting film directors in LA when he was up for an Oscar, or of moving into and out of flats in West Kensington and Hammersmith, which has long been his patch of London.
It is a diary, a memoir and sometimes even a creative writing handbook, thoughts on literature and how to tell a story never being far from Kureishi’s mind. Some entries are elegantly shaped, others closer to a catalogue of scattered thoughts. Occasionally they are banal. The overall effect is that of an ongoing and intimate conversation, one that spans many emotional hues. There is gratitude for the devotion of his family and the kindness of friends, grousing (he wants to clout whoever first appended “creative” to “writing”), misery (“sitting here again in this dreary room for another week, like a Beckettian chattering mouth”) and ribald anecdote (a threesome in Amsterdam, dictated to an apprehensive son).
Reading Shattered I thought about Knife, the account by Kureishi’s friend, Salman Rushdie, of his recovery from a near-fatal stabbing by an Islamic fanatic. Kureishi discusses the impact Midnight’s Children (1981) had on him: blown away, he read it twice in a row. In his second novel, The Black Album (1995), set in 1989, the year Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against Rushdie, a group of Islamic fundamentalist students burn The Satanic Verses. Given the connections between the two men, it is a strange and unfortunate quirk of fate that they should both have reason to publish books about life-threatening physical devastation in the same year.
Their accounts share an impulse towards humour, although their manner of expression differs. “Dear reader,” Rushdie writes, “if you have never had a catheter inserted into your genital organ, do your very best to keep that record intact.” Kureishi’s warning is deadpan, bleaker but also funnier: “I wouldn’t advise having an accident like mine.”
Indeed, one of the funniest lines in the book involves Rushdie. Remembering an earlier spell in hospital Kureishi writes:
The last time a medical digit entered my backside was a few years ago. As the nurse flipped me over she asked, ‘How long did it take you to write Midnight’s Children?’
I replied, ‘If I had indeed written that, don’t you think I would have gone private?’
There is a scene in The Black Album in which the main character, Shahid, settles himself in a pub with a toastie and a novel and, pencil in hand, “tried to see how the author achieved an effect, which he would trace and then transform with his own characters, in his reporter’s notebook”. He finds the sensation “tremendous, more than satisfying; his imagination stirred and took grip”. It is poignant to think of this depiction of the creative act, which feels so personal, in the shadow of the Shattered entry in which Kureishi explains why he can no longer write fiction:
My imagination feels muted. I have lost my spark a bit. My circumstances have become so strange that I can’t locate an idea of myself. I can’t write fiction – stories, movies or novels – because my condition is so urgent that inhabiting other worlds feels impossible.
That Kureishi has written at all throughout this ordeal is both remarkable – despair, which he has clearly often felt in the past two years, is not a spur to productivity – and obvious: it is the way he engages with the world and has been for much of his nearly 70 years on the planet. That Shattered is a book he could not have written without this calamity befalling him must be of scant comfort, yet these dispatches from its front line are extraordinary.
Chris Power is the author of the story collection “Mothers” and the novel “A Lonely Man” (both Faber and Faber)
[See also: Alexei Navalny’s chronicle of a death foretold]
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