Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Shattered, the novelist’s account of his 2022 accident and new life since, is caustic, contemplative and characteristically unsparing
5/5
Throughout his career, Hanif Kureishi has specialised in the unsparing. His first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), angered his family with its explicit account of the sexual, druggy and clearly autobiographical adventures of a mixed-race teenager desperate to escape his oppressive home. In 1999’s Intimacy, an adulterous narrator prepares to leave his partner and two young sons – just as Kureishi did – having decided that “there are some f—s for which a person would have their partner and children drown in a freezing sea”. Now, in this intense memoir, he applies the same unsparing approach to his new status as a “near vegetable”, after a freak fall in Rome on Boxing Day 2022 left him paralysed, aged 68.
At the heart of Shattered is a question posed by Kureishi’s iPad during an episode of Better Call Saul when “the screen went black and a legend appeared, asking ‘Are you still there?’”. “That is an interesting question,” Kureishi admits – and much of this book is an anxious but ultimately successful attempt to prove the answer is “yes”. Spending a year in various Italian and London hospitals, he realises his entire identity is in danger of being reduced to that of “a patient”, so he resolves to write his way back into selfhood.
Part of the process is to reassemble the memories of his Bromley childhood, in which his father takes on a heroic role as the man who introduced young Hanif to books and jokes. (“My mother was the most boring person I ever met,” he notes unsparingly in passing.) Kureishi is also keen to remind us – and himself – that he was quite a guy in his prime: much in demand in Hollywood, no stranger to threesomes in Amsterdam, and blessed with plenty of famous contacts, including a cheerful drinker with an eye for young women called Samuel Beckett.
Nonetheless, what Kureishi really wants us – and himself – to know is that he is, first and foremost, a writer. Reading Shattered, I often thought of Keith Richards’s autobiography, where the most animated passages are not those about his globe-spanning fame or rollicking hedonism, but the ones in which he discovers a new guitar tuning. Likewise for Kureishi, it’s when discussing writing that he seems most alive. Touchingly, he’s delighted that he can still do it. Unable to use his hands, he has to dictate the words – originally for the online platform Substack – from his hospital bed, to his Italian partner Isabella or one of his three sons. The technique accounts for the overwhelming immediacy, because Kureishi speaks about everything as “it occurred, capturing the raw feeling of the moment, the exact horror experienced, without reflection”.
In recent times, other authors have provided reports of their near-death experiences: see, for instance, Salman Rushdie’s Knife or Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am. But in both of those, enough time had passed for the writers to process their experiences. Kureishi’s pour out unfiltered: “Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.” For this reason, his thoughts can be fairly random, as he free-associates his way from the importance of eyebrows to the evolution of pornography since the 1960s.
Yet all the time, there’s a suitably unsparing acknowledgement that none of this, and especially not the memories of his past glories, makes any difference to his condition – aka “reality” (a word that clangs ominously through the book). Kureishi pines for the pleasures he once took for granted: watching Match of the Day with a glass of wine, going to the toilet unaided. However much a part of him can’t believe he’ll never get them back, another part is bitterly aware they’re gone forever. After the incurable “rupture” between his old and new lives, “in my mind I’m still living in the first, while in my body, unfortunately, I am in the second.”
Perhaps the biggest rupture is sex. In his pomp, as Intimacy suggests, Kureishi’s novels were shot through with a commitment to following the libido wherever it leads and whatever damage it causes. Now, he can’t see what all the fuss was about, wondering why sex “was important, mattering so much to so many”. Meanwhile, there are signs of a new mellowness in his many hymns to the kindness of friends and family – including the partner and sons he abandoned – and in his pledge to be kinder himself.
Not that he has become a complete softie. Unexpectedly for a lifelong anti-Thatcherite, he writes that “in the 1980s selfishness was the character ideal of the age, and f—ing hell was it fun”. Hearing of the rise of “sensitivity readers” to vet new fiction for “sexism racism, cultural appropriation and so on”, he launches a full-throated attack on the “North Korea of the mind” created by “an element of the Left which is bursting with aggressive self-righteousness and self-defeating puritanism”.
By its nature, Shattered is not a coherent book. It contains a fair amount of repetition and some flat-out contradiction. Both, though, feel like an authentic depiction of Kureishi’s whirring mind, particularly in the constant alternation of hope and despair. Indeed, pretty much the only thing about which Kureishi isn’t candid is the fact – surely galling – that, 40 years into his career, he’s still best-known for the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). I have my own not-terribly-sophisticated theory as to why: he hasn’t written anything as good since. Until, that is, Shattered – which, if there’s any justice, should give Kureishi’s interviewers, and even his own Twitter biography, a third work with which to introduce him.
There’s always a suspicion that memoirs of trauma are opportunistic, even slightly shameless, attempts to titillate; but this book is much too heartfelt for that. Kureishi is almost literally writing for his life. At one point, he sternly declares that writing is “not therapy for the writer but entertainment for the reader”. Yet, while the entertainment here is of a complicated kind, Shattered shows, triumphantly, that it’s possible to combine the two
Shattered is published by Hamish Hamilton at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books