There are numerous books in almost any genre that can easily qualify for praiseful remembrance, and as this journal spotlights occasional mentions of such, particularly if we include all literary writing in English. I know of no-one, - writers, editors or readers – who limit themselves to the practitioners of the ‘true north strong and free’. Everybody reads everything, including that long distinguished list of translated classics, Rilke, Rimbaud, Chekov, and the rest of that glorious posse galloping through the canon, forever kicking up dust. Even if you limit yourself to home grown product, there is no lack of under-reviewed titles that deserve repeated mention, Micrographia being but one.
“…as riveting an account of a writer’s existential dilemma as you are liable to come across in your shelf meandering.”
On this occasion, I would like to re-recommend Hanif Kureishi’s Shattered from 2024, an illness journal that sharply redefines the genre. Essentially a memoir, dictated to family members employing a tablet at his bedside as he remained drugged and helplessly prone in his quadriplegic imprisonment, the real-time reports being tweeted, then blogged, then assembled into Shattered. A passionate testament, as ribald and confrontational as any of his output, displaying a frankness about the body and its less pleasant emanations and eruptions when under extreme stress, the journal, as it eventually became, is as riveting an account of a writer’s existential dilemma as you are liable to come across in your shelf meandering.
Perhaps best remembered for his scriptwriting collaborations with director Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Launderette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and the novel The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi seems to be been something of unrepentant bad boy in BritLit. As Hilary Keely noted in a recent Atlantic, a number of his texts reflect, almost obsessively, on the perils, physical and psychological of risky adventuring at home and abroad, and thus Shattered can be seen as some contemplative epilogue on the terminus of such a journey.
Dictated from his bedside with one of the few functioning attributes left to him, a voice box animated by an intelligence still raging to create, the narrative unfolds conversationally, rising and falling through waves of depression and exhilaration. The writer reshapes his destiny with a passion that refuses to be stalled by the appalling rigours of confinement. Totally at the mercy of nurses, therapists and pharmaceutical cocktails he constantly attempts to wriggle free into the paradise he knows so well, the flow of words and the construction of narrative. A builder of character and conflict, he is now the lead in the film of his life.
Diary entry: “Sleepless night. Not a moment’s rest. Racing mind. I wake up with an elevated temperature and fear of an infection. Blood in the urine. A new catheter and massive pain in the genitals. An anaesthetic in the penis. A visit to the laryngologist after the incident with the fish and the Heimlich manoeuvre. Tubes up the nose and down the throat and a sore arse.”
Memories from screenwriting days:
“I’ve already written Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, the next film I will do with Stephen Frears. Here in LA I have an agent and go to meetings. I am offered work. I meet other British writers working as rewrite specialists. Some are employed just to review the endings. Others are better at beginnings. I wonder who writes the middle.”
“I am approached by Costa-Gavras, a distinguished Greek movie director whose films I admire. He takes me for lunch at the Four Seasons, and then for walk along Venice Beach, where we watch the muscle Marys work out. I begin to realize he is interviewing me as a possible writer for his new movie set in apartheid South Africa. But I do not want to be interviewed. I don’t necessarily want to write his new movie – though, from another point of view it would be a privilege as he works with the best actors. I don’t know what I should be doing next and am annoyed at myself. I become frustrated with him, I am not a mercenary, I think I want to become a novelist. I want to write what will become The Buddha of Suburbia but I am not sure how to start.”
His daily regimen of patient and staff friends: “The elegant lady G visits me in bed most mornings with a cappuccino and cheerful gossip. A distinguished research doctor at this clinic she is allowed to see me outside of visiting hours. She tells me a lovely story about a friend who became paralyzed and could only communicate by winking. One mornings she became agitated and Lady G worried that she was having a heart attack. With the use of a fan alphabet board, the woman was able to explain that she had an itch on her nose that needed scratching. This story was particularly poignant for me as I am unable to use my hands, I cannot scratch myself either. Indeed as I write this, I feel a virulent itch developing above my right ear.”
“A pop-in from another new friend, a man of my age who I call the Maestro, an actor and director who rolls into my room wearing a capacious hoodie to feed me a cappuccino through a straw. His experiences have been much worse than mine, almost unendurable: a cancer diagnosis, numerous operations as well as a spinal injury.”
As Hilary Kelly notes “Kureishi never planned to produce a stylized memoir. He simply documented the uncertainty and emotional convulsions” of the moment. She reports that Kureishi, when left alone at might ‘Would write the whole scheme of a piece in my head, one sentence one paragraph, one paragraph and kind of hold it there. I could see it like a picture.’ He would keep it in mind till morning and then dictate in a rush”.
One can rarely resist quoting Virginia Woolf, no stranger to bedbound recoveries. Hilary Kelly certainly can’t, and neither can I. Any feeble excuse will suffice. The essay On Being Ill, for example, where illness is seen as a foreign land where “the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like a shore seen from a ship far out at sea.” Kureishi indulges what she calls “a childish outspokenness in illness where things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals”. Our hero Kanif, which he most definitely emerges as in his boldly and unapologetically blunt appraisal of self, “both a helpless baby and terrible tyrant”. After release from a series of hospitals the text was winnowed down but not overmuch, with the help of his son, and the jagged usurpation of story-above-all remains to shock the casual reader. A sequel and perhaps a movie are in the works, with Kureishi feeling he has “Never felt such a strong desire to be a writer,” and where the relief of knowing “that to be a writer is to be a human being, to be sentient,” remains paramount.
About the Author
Hanif Kureishi is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. He is the author of nine novels, including The Buddha of Suburbia (winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel), The Black Album, Intimacy, and The Nothing. His screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar, and he is the recipient of the PEN Pinter Prize and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He lives in London.
About the Reviewer
Gordon Phinn, a longtime resident of Oakville, Ontario has been active in literary production since 1975, with a number of titles in a variety of genres to his credit: Non-fiction, fiction, poetry, criticism and memoir. His early critical work for Books In Canada and Paragraph are collected in It’s All About Me, and his four year reviewing stint at WordCity will be soon available as Joy In All Genres. Other recent essay collections: Bowering and McFadden, Laughing At The Universe Of Lies and Consciousness: A Primer. A novel, An American In Heaven, a memoir Moving Through Many Dimensions and a poetry collection, Winter, Spring and Eternity’s Seduction. He is currently editing a collection of essays in celebrating the work of Laurence Hutchman, to be published by Guernica in 2026.
Book Details
Publisher : Ecco (An imprint of HarperCollins Canada)
Publication date : Feb. 4 2025
Language : English
Print length : 336 pages
ISBN-10 : 0063360500
ISBN-13 : 978-0063360501