‘Shattered’ Is Hanif Kureishi’s Powerful Dispatches From A Hospital Bed

[First published in YouthKiAwaaz]

On Boxing Day in Rome, after taking a comfortable walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, and then back to the apartment, I had a fall.

I believed I was dying, that I had three breaths left. It seems like a miserable and ignoble way to go.

People say when you’re about to die, your life passes before your eyes, but for me, it wasn’t the past but the future that I thought about- everything I was being robbed of, all the things I wanted to do.

Within weeks of this accident, Hanif Kureishi, though he did not have the use of his hands, started doing the one thing he does best- write. He started dictating a series of dispatches from his hospital bed in Italy. His family took down his words and posted them on social media. For a few weeks. His readers waited for anxiously for these dispatches, and we all hoped that someday when he was better, they would be collated into a book. He must have heard our collective desire, because those writings were revised, expanded and edited and put together into a memoir, Shattered.

The early dispatches were practical and dealt with his immediate surroundings- the room he was in, the people he met, the medical procedures conducted on his, his everyday triumphs and setbacks. Reading the book, you get the feeling that thought he wanted to be anywhere but on the hospital bed, he took pleasure in getting to know people and hearing their stories. But over the next few months, the writing took on a different tone- they became more philosophical and meaningful.

It is clear that as he lay awake at night after the effect of the medication wore off, he thought deeply about things that he might otherwise not have found time to think about. There are some fine passages on what it means to be a writer, especially in today’s context. He speaks about the level of policing that goes on today in the name of political correctness, and he worries about how people can write if they are constantly worried about whether their writing might upset the sensibilities of someone else.

There are long passages on dependence and interdependence- on the helplessness a person feels when they cannot do anything on their own and on whether they have the right to demand that things be done for them. He also makes some interesting observations on how you women disproportionately take on the burden of care- while his male friends come and meet him, it is the female friends who offer sustained care.

There are some interesting passages on sex and pornography, and he speaks of how some stories he read in his youth showed him how literature and extreme sexuality could be powerful and effective. “They draw you into a world of filth and depravity reminding you how close sexuality and disgust have to be for sex to retain its edge.” As a person who started off writing stories for a pornographic magazine, he talks about the difficulty of writing porn- how can you describe the same thing in a way that is not cliched?

While reading this memoir, comparisons with the other famous British writer of South Asian decent, Salman Rushdie, are inevitable. Both, for different reasons, landed up in hospital at almost the same time and both eventually published their memoirs based on the experiences. But these comparisons are not entirely fair because the reason why they landed up in hospital were very different, and the nature of recovery is also different. In one case it was random, crazy luck (or lack of it) and in the other it was a deliberate act by a person.

In one case, the author had a specific person to blame, forgive and move on, while it was much more complicated in the other since there was nothing to pin the blame on. What is also different between the level of recovery and the dependence on other people, which ensures that the books trace very different journeys. But what is common to both the books is the utter honesty with which the author describe their reactions to being contained in a prison of their own body.

Hanif Kureishi talks about his writing process, which will certainly be of interest to aspiring writers. Many famous authors say that you should just turn up and write every day no matter whether you have anything to say or not. But Hanif Kureishi argues differently. He asserts that words will only come when they want to come, and you cannot force them out.

He also talks about how he benefited from writing in different formats- novels, screenplays, scripts. Whether this is the “right way” or not is debatable, but by describing his writing process, he does give aspiring writers a different perspective towards writing.

For me, personally, what was most interesting was the way he went about collecting stories. All writers collect stories, but they maintain a distance between the story and the person telling the story. As a patient who was immobile, he could not longer move away when he wanted to, so he was forced to listen to all the details which the person wanted to share. I could sense his discomfort over having to hold onto the secrets that had been entrusted to him, and he certainly wondered if getting the story was worth the responsibility of guarding the confidences.

I read Shattered in a few very short sittings- the prose flows, and the chapters are so small that everytime you come to the end of one, you decide to read just one more before taking a break. However, I found myself thinking about the book even after finishing it. I felt the need to keep coming back to the book, and re-reading certain passages to get more out of them.

Salman Rushdie describes the book as “In this beautiful, moving memori he deals with personal calamity with wit, unflinching honesty and literary grace. It is an extraordinary achievement.” Whether you are a fan of Hanif Kureishi or not, if you like books and reading, this is one that will certainly appeal to you.

[I received a review copy from Penguin India, and the review reflects my personal and unbiased opinions.]