Shattered: A Memoir, By Hanif Kureishi. Ecco. 328 pp. $28
On Dec. 26, 2022, the British-Pakistani novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi felt dizzy while sipping a beer and watching a soccer game on his iPad. He lowered his head in hopes of dispelling the sensation. It was the most mundane of motions, yet it proved catastrophic.
When he came to moments later, he was lying “in a pool of blood” with his “neck in a grotesquely twisted position,” as he recalls in his new memoir, “Shattered.” His partner, Isabella, rushed him to a nearby hospital, where he learned that his fall had “resulted in neck hyperextension and immediate tetraplegia.” Although he retained feeling and “some movement” in all of his limbs, more of which might be restored by way of intensive physiotherapy, he was effectively paralyzed from the neck down.
“Shattered” consists of the observations he dictated to Isabella and his three sons as he lay in a series of hospitals and rehabilitation centers. It reads like a collection of diary entries, each of them dated, recorded at intervals of days or weeks. Its tone is freewheeling and informal. Kureishi’s meditations are wide-ranging, but even when his thoughts transport him all the way back to his childhood home in a suburb of London, the reader is never far from his current situation. “Shattered” is peppered with interjections that remind us of his whereabouts. “Excuse me,” he writes at one point, “I’m being injected in my belly with something called Heparina, a blood thinner.”
At the time of his fall, Kureishi was in Rome, visiting Isabella’s family in their native Italy, and his disorientation was compounded by the language barrier. But as he lay immobile in his hospital bed, he was obliged to master a different and even more difficult sort of translation – this time from the physical language of pen against paper to the foreign dialect of dictation. Writing, for him, had always been a tactile affair: He declined, for instance, to write his novels or screenplays on a computer, because “I find that writing by hand, moving my wrist across the page – the feeling of skin on paper – is more like drawing than typing.”
In one fell swoop, he found himself adjusting to both a new set of bodily capacities and a new medium. In both cases, he managed haltingly but admirably.
“Shattered” is free-associative, and some of its chains of association are more compelling than others. Broadly speaking, it contains three sorts of reflections.
First are abstract meditations on writing and politics, many of which are banal and several of which are inconsistent with one another. Kureishi speculates that “all artists are collaborationists,” but later explains that he switched from screenplays to novels, which “suited me because there were no collaborators.” He announces that “when you are writing a book, the main purpose is to delight the reader” – rather too placid a view of the shocks and desolations of art for my tastes – yet fewer than 100 pages later he seems to have come around to my perspective. “Culture should not be safe or complacent, and should frighten, if not alarm,” he observes.
The dullest parts of “Shattered” are the periodic harangues about politics, which might have been lifted from an aggrieved opinion column in any major newspaper. “We have entered a new era of censorship and self-censorship,” he scolds. “Both liberals and conservatives have become insistent on certain things not being said or heard.”
More gripping by far are Kureishi’s reminiscences of his wild escapades in the 1960s and ’70s. These tales are absorbing and exhilarating. They feature drugs, an awkward orgy and Kureishi’s stint as a writer of dime-store pornographic books. Even as an adult, he retains a keen sense of adventure. “I’ve had some great cocaine nights with my children,” he writes. (He goes on to confess that doing MDMA with his sons is a bridge too far, “out of the fear of revealing too much.”)
Most riveting of all, however, are the sections of “Shattered” about the strange life Kureishi leads in the hospital. Isabella interrupts him as he is explaining his elaborate scatological regimen (he gets two enemas a week, and during one especially trying spell he suffered from severe constipation), exclaiming: “Enough already. … Do they really want to hear it?” The answer is yes, very much so. “Shattered” is most jarring and captivating when it takes us into the alternate reality of the hospital, where time slows to nearly a standstill and odd rites replace familiar ones. The institution’s routines and rituals are so unlike those of the outside world, its mode of being so authoritative, that it often seemed to Kureishi to “encompass the entire universe.”
Most of the time, it is a dull and sterile universe indeed. Sometimes, the doctors and nurses put patients in mind of “an authoritarian regime” intent on surveilling every last breath and heartbeat. Kureishi was once “a private man,” he laments, but now he is “a public piece of meat,” continually poked and prodded and measured and examined. And yet incredible tenderness is in evidence in all of these interactions, too. The first time he entered the gym at one of the rehabilitation centers, Kureishi choked up when he saw:
– –
“all the patients with their broken or malformed bodies being manipulated and caressed by the physiotherapists. … I thought, if you only watch the news and TV shows, you would have the impression that the world is a harsh place. … When you see the mutual work done in the gym, it is a place of beauty, collaboration and respect.”
– – –
Only when he is working with a skilled physiotherapist can he overcome a sense of being, in his words, “entombed in my own body.”
A sick or injured person is always, to a greater or lesser extent, a stranger in her flesh. Often, the process of estrangement is gradual and partial; Kureishi’s expulsion from the familiar confines of the self was abrupt, immediate and total.
All at once, his extremities were inert and alien. After his initial collapse, he “experienced what can only be described as a scooped, semicircular object with talons scuttling towards me.” This off-putting object turned out to be one of his hands. Later, in his hospital bed with his arms under the sheets, he reflects: “I could not tell you where they are precisely. They may in fact be in another building altogether, having a drink with friends.”
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that illness is “a complete form of existence.” It alters not only the body but the body’s commerce with the world. Now, Kureishi is confronted with impossibility at every turn. Lost is the old body in all its quietly thrumming dependability. There will be no more scratching his face (“If you look at real people on television or examine others in a cafe, you will notice how often they touch their face”), no more casual gestures of greeting (“When I saw a man waving to his own wife, I couldn’t believe that he didn’t see what a profoundly complicated act this was”). Fidgeting is a thing of the past: “I can’t play with my phone; I can’t blow my nose or rub my eyes.”
There is no compensation for such a loss, but there are, improbably, silver linings. Unable to read for the first time in his adult life, Kureishi becomes vastly more social than ever before, spending hours a day engaged in conversation with friends and family members who visit in overlapping shifts. His sons and Isabella display incredible devotion.
For what it’s worth, I think he was right the first time; he was right, that is, to suppose that artists are necessarily collaborators. Since his accident, Kureishi’s life has become a joint endeavor involving his children, his physiotherapists, his doctors, his nurses and, above all, Isabella. (As his remembrances demonstrate, he was already collaborating with his loved ones long before he began asking them to take dictation.) His dependency is brutal, painful and tedious, but it is also occasionally beautiful.
On this point, he was right the second time: Art should “frighten, if not alarm.” I am glad this book does.
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