The British novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi was on holiday in Rome when he suffered a serious spinal injury after a fall on St Stephen’s Day 2022. Over the next year he underwent treatment in five different hospitals (two in Italy, three in London) before eventually returning, wheelchair-bound, to his west London home. The accident left him paralysed, but he was able to tell the world about his ordeal by dictating social media posts to his partner. These dispatches, by turns distressing and darkly funny, prompted an outpouring of support within the literary community; they are reproduced, in edited and expanded form, alongside fresh material in his new memoir, Shattered.
Kureishi, who is in his late sixties, relates with bracing candour the indignities and psychological anguish associated with the sudden loss of personal autonomy, likening himself at various points to a vegetable, a turtle on its back, and a helpless baby. He invokes Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, who found himself unaccountably transformed into an insect; and Masha in Chekhov’s The Seagull, who, when asked why she always wears black, replies: “I’m in mourning for my life.”
A constant flow of visitors helps keep his spirits up, and he develops a renewed appreciation for the value of conversation. (“It is better, less trouble, more fulfilling and longer-lasting than sex.”) Gallows humour is a coping mechanism: when a fellow patient, similarly afflicted, resolves to end his own life by deliberately catching hypothermia in the hospital garden, Kureishi officiously points out that the plan might not be feasible because the weather is a bit too mild.
Kureishi’s account of his incapacitation and convalescence is interspersed with biographical reminiscences from his youth, including an amusing anecdote from the 1970s, when he was eking out a living by writing pornography for men’s magazines. He and a pal decided to become gigolos, and stationed themselves outside the London luxury department store, Harrods, in their finest attire, hoping to be solicited by wealthy women. There were no takers.
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Now and then, the focus turns outwards. While recuperating in Italy, Kureishi laments the rise of the far right in that country, a phenomenon he considers particularly absurd given that Italy is “one of the great gay civilisations of Europe. The Vatican is gay, as is the fashion industry.” Musing on contemporary literature, Kureishi – who is still best known for two of his earliest works, the Oscar-nominated romcom My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and the novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) – suggests today’s young writers are being hampered by a “self-defeating puritanism” encapsulated by the rise of the sensitivity reader. The authors who shaped his writerly sensibility were “the wild ones, the demented, the rude ones who don’t give a damn. Dostoevsky, Plath, Rhys, Céline, Burroughs, Miller, Baldwin”; he suspects he wouldn’t have fared too well in today’s “atmosphere of self-consciousness and trepidation, this North Korea of the mind”.
The prose has a flinty, telegrammatic terseness that conveys an acute sense of crisis, of a catastrophe being processed in real time. Aside from the obligatory thanking of nurses, friends and family, the predominant mood in these pages is one of raw despondency: “This accident,” Kureishi observes, “has made me aggressive and angrier. I’m in a relentless rage.” Anger, in fairness, is the only natural response to a calamity so apparently haphazard that it initially struck him as some kind of administrative error – as if “someone has made a mistake and got the wrong person”. If human misfortune can be as arbitrary as this, then it might naturally follow that existence itself is meaningless. From there, it’s just a short hop to total despair.
In truth, the platitudinous rhetoric of resilience, with its tiresome imperative to “fight” the ailment, is not much help to someone in Kureishi’s predicament. Resistance would only be a sure path to madness; real survival entails some measure of concession, and acceptance of his severely attenuated condition. The book ends on a note of tentative optimism, with the author whizzing around his old West London haunts on his natty, NHS-funded motorised wheelchair. He is trying to embrace his new identity as a disabled person, and adopting a more phlegmatic attitude towards illness: “I don’t see it so much as an intrusion, but as an inevitable and essential part of life.”
Houman Barekat is a critic
