Dina Nayeri in The Guardian: All day, all night the body intervenes,” wrote Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill. It “blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body.”
On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome with his Italian partner Isabella, Hanif Kureishi felt dizzy while sitting at the table. He fainted, landing on his neck and becoming tetraplegic as a result. He spent 2023 in Italian and English hospitals, being prodded, rearranged and invaded while sending dispatches to his fans (dictated to Isabella and to his son, Carlo) via his popular Substack. “I will never go home again. I have no home now, no centre. I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am any more. Someone new is emerging.” Now, those dispatches have been collected, edited, and expanded into a memoir.
In print and on screen, Kureishi is the author of many irreverent, funny stories about sex, drugs and coming of age. In The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), which won the Whitbread award for best first novel, he wrote unabashedly about the sexual ambitions and discoveries of a mixed race kid in London at the tail end of the 70s. Given the diet of shame most children of immigrants were fed back then, Buddhawas groundbreaking. Nothing was too shocking for Kureishi, and that was what made his writing so exciting.
Shattered immediately reassures us that his raw, earnest humour is intact. “My head became jammed down the side of the bed,” he writes early on. “It seemed like a good opportunity for some contemplation.” As he tries to reckon with a new reality, he envies the unbroken bodies around him. What parts of himself will he get to keep? “Eventually I could be capable of a little light cunnilingus, and I hope I will be. But right now I am a desperate man attempting to open a bag of cashews using only my teeth and a brick wall for purchase.” Often he gives the impression of trying to make Isabella laugh, to be less of a burden to her. “The worst part of the day is the early evening when Isabella puts on her coat and leaves. When I see her walk out the door, I know I have to survive the night without her, alone.” This subtext to his diligent wit is heartbreaking.
Meanwhile there are the indignities and wonders of life inside a frozen body: being spoon fed dirty cold tea and mushed-up biscuit for breakfast, the toil of getting upright, the luxury of a scratch. Fellow patients, including an actor and director he calls the Maestro, pushing him to the food bar in a “wagon-train” of wheelchairs. Catheters, “an anaesthetic in the penis”. Having to wear a butt plug for hydrotherapy.
He writes of the “guilt and rage” that comes with dependence, and of quietly devastating moments such as when a cleaner knocks over his propped-up iPad before turning off the light behind her, leaving him to watch the rest of his film as merely “silhouettes flickering on the ceiling, like a shadow puppet show”. On another day, Netflix asks are you still there? “I then tried pressing my somewhat bulbous Indian nose against the screen but succeeded only in pushing the iPad further away. The legend remained. Was I still there? Was I anywhere?”
More here.
